Six great TV shows to watch now that Girls is over

It’s offi­cial­ly the end of an era. Now that Girls is offi­cial­ly over, here are six oth­er great shows to get stuck into, all of which just so hap­pen to have been writ­ten by fun­ny mil­len­ni­als. They might not fill the Girls-shaped void in our lives, but they are damn good and were arguably made pos­si­ble, at least part­ly, thanks to Lena Dunham’s show. And that in itself is rea­son to celebrate.

Broad City is often com­pared with Girls, but the shows aren’t all that sim­i­lar. Yes, both are set in Brook­lyn, and yes, they con­cern the quirky sex­u­al prac­tices of pre­dom­i­nant­ly white women, but where Girls is iron­ic, Ilana Glaz­er and Abbi Jacobson’s com­e­dy goes all in on sub­vert­ing sit­com tropes. For instance, the Girls sub­plot in which Ray and Shoshan­na make it their mis­sion to com­pete against the hip­ster café run by ​“neo­hip­py, gen­der-neu­tral mon­sters” which is steal­ing his clients has an obvi­ous par­al­lel in Abbi’s trip­py vis­it to a food co-oper­a­tive in Brook­lyn, dressed as Ilana, which ends with a sur­re­al Good­fel­las-style moment.

In Issa Rae’s com­e­dy, two friends, Issa and Mol­ly, nav­i­gate their late twen­ties in Los Ange­les with a lot of awk­ward­ness. The show is about friend­ship, sex, love, work and, above all, the real­i­ties of being black women in Amer­i­ca in 2017. Rae rose to promi­nence with her hilar­i­ous web series The Mis­ad­ven­tures of Awk­ward Black Girl, which we also rec­om­mend check­ing out (it’s all on Youtube).

Girls meets detec­tive mur­der mys­tery. Search Par­ty fol­lows a group of four friends who live in (you guessed it) Brook­lyn and have point­less jobs, improv­able love lives, and too much time on their hands. Pro­tag­o­nist Dory (Alia Shawkat) becomes unhealth­ily obsessed with the mur­der of an old col­lege acquain­tance – but the show is real­ly all about her. The char­ac­ters here are so self­ish they could all be in Marnie’s fam­i­ly, and yet Search Par­ty is care­ful­ly craft­ed and deep­er than it ini­tial­ly seems.

Michaela Coel’s Baf­ta-win­ning sit­com revolves around Tracey (Coel), a slight­ly sex obsessed 24-year-old vir­gin try­ing to make sense of adult­hood in a Lon­don coun­cil estate. Slap­stick and absur­dist humour merges with body pos­i­tiv­i­ty, as Coel shat­ters stereo­types relat­ing to sex, class, race and tele­vi­sion in one fell swoop. Chew­ing Gum us now mak­ing the rounds in Amer­i­ca – Coel is going to be huge.

Mum­blecore from British-Jamaican film­mak­ers? Yes please. Despite the excel­lent array of web series we could rec­om­mend here (hell, let’s casu­al­ly throw Brown Girls and High Main­te­nance into the mix), our favourite by far is Ack­ee & Salt­fish, a moody series of sketch­es cre­at­ed by Cecile Emeke, star­ring Michelle Tiwo and Vanes­sa Babirye and set in east Lon­don. There are cats, there are house­plants, there are episodes that con­sist sole­ly of argu­ments about toast. If you are an urban cre­ative – or are in touch with this tribe, in any city real­ly – you’ll recog­nise quite a lot here.

Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s show is not here as the male-cre­at­ed token. Mas­ter of None is an hon­est, can­did but crude­ly real depic­tion of sex and love in the city, star­ring char­ac­ters that nev­er real­ly get to be the pro­tag­o­nists of their own sto­ries. It fea­tures Asian-Amer­i­can men as sex­u­al, com­plex, mul­ti­fac­eted char­ac­ters (it was about time), and there’s a good chance you will cry and roll with laugh­ter at Dev’s mis­ad­ven­tures. Mas­ter of None is also not afraid to address such mil­len­ni­al anx­i­eties as rest­less­ness, the fear of set­tling, and feel­ing of not belonging.