Brow Beat

Lena Dunham’s New HBO Show Is a Comedy About 1960s Feminism

Lena Dunham at the 2012 SXSW Festival.

Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW

Lena Dunham, who for three years has dissected the millennial mien in Girls, is now set to fix her lens on another generation: the baby boomers. The writer, actress, and director has sold a 1960s-era comedy pilot, Max, to HBO.

The show will star Boardwalk Empire’s Lisa Joyce as Maxine Woodruff, a low-level but ambitious writer who inadvertently stumbles into the heart of the second-wave feminism movement. Obviously, that logline—young, up-and-coming woman as symbol of a generation—strongly echoes Dunham’s work on Girls, so it makes sense that she’ll be joined as Max’s executive producer by three other Girls alums: Jenni Konner, Ilene Landress, and Murray Miller, the last of whom also wrote Max’s pilot.

The news deepens Dunham’s burgeoning, incredibly successful relationship with HBO. Since Girls premiered in 2012, when Dunham was a mere 25 years old, the actress has made four critically acclaimed seasons of television and two documentaries for the network.