Season two of Girls is close to wrapping up and, alongside the season finale, so goes the several of the successful show’s staff writers. As it turns out, many of the series’ scribes were quietly let go last fall which is around the same time that they would have been expected to start planning Season 3. As of now, no plans have been made to replace them.
In a statement, an HBO spokesperson announced:
“The approach to the third season is identical to our two previous seasons. Our writers this year include Judd Apatow, Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Murray Miller, Paul Simms, Sarah Heyward and, occasionally, Lena’s parents. We are very excited to get started on Season 3.”
Absent from that list includes Season 2 writers Deborah Schoeneman, Steve Rubinshteyn and the oft times controversial Duchess of Ironic Racism Lesley Arfin (who, as Dunham admitted at the 2012 New Yorker Festival, was actually let go last Spring).
As Joe Pompeo over at Capital points out, shaking up the writers’ room at the end of the season is a rather common practice in television. Aaron Sorkin fired almost all of his writers at the end of the first season of The Newsroom and Mad Men showrunner and TV titan Matthew Weiner has also been known to let his screenwriters go to make room for fresher voices.
While there is nothing wrong with hitting refresh on the writers’ room per se, it is worth noting that, on Girls, male writers now outnumber female writers. This, too, is unfortunately common in television, but considering that this is a show called Girls, about girls and created by a girl, you gotta hope that the voices behind it will be mostly coming from — you know — other girls.
Lena Dunham Quietly Shakes Up the Writing Operation on ‘Girls’ [Capital]