Lena Dunham, the voice of a generation that no one listens to anymore

Lena Dunham was dubbed the "voice of a generation" thanks to Girls , which she wrote, directed, starred in, and produced after having made her theatrical debut with an independent film called Tiny Furniture , which had piqued the interest of HBO executives. She was the star of the cultural conversation thanks to the impact of her series, which was watched, analyzed, and discussed among the specialized press and the millennial generation who were just leaving college at the time.

Since Girls aired between 2012 and 2017, her presence in the public sphere had been nonexistent, with brief stints as a director on Industry and a producer on Generation . Her arrival on Netflix with a romantic comedy was supposed to bring the cultural conversation to a platform usually more interested in the passive, automatic viewing of its subscribers, with shows like Adolescence and My Stuffed Reindeer being the exception rather than the norm. Beyond Measure is also inspired by her own life: how she fell in love with an English musician when she moved to London (and Luis Feber, her partner, is listed as the series' co-creator).

With an actress on a roll like Megan Stalter ( Hacks ) playing a fictionalized version of herself, Beyond Measure had to find an audience. She had shifted her focus to a more mainstream production, with a more conventional direction and based on the codes of classic romantic comedy. Even viewers uninterested in her as a writer had reason to watch her series. However, as Dunham has just discovered, no one was expecting her. One could almost argue that Netflix subscribers have consciously tried to avoid her offering.

The numbers are what they are. In its first week on the platform, Beyond Measure didn't even appear among the most-watched non-English language series, according to data provided by the platform itself. It wasn't a good week for those that did make it in, with the second season of Sandman leading the way with 5.9 million views and educational content like Ms. Rachel closing the list with 2 million. Dunham, therefore, had recorded a lower audience. In the second week, she settled for last place, tenth, with 2 million views.

This figure doesn't even need any comparison: it's terrible, downright terrible, for a Netflix original. It doesn't matter what genre it belongs to, whether it features well-known actors or not, whether it has a big budget or not: there's no metric or excuse to view these ratings positively. For starters, it should have entered the charts in its first week, even if only the series' first four days in the catalog were counted (it premiered on a Thursday), and then it should have been stronger in the second week.

Furthermore, while there are Netflix series that are largely hidden from the media until the day of their premiere, as the platform simply trusts that subscribers will check them out when they find them in the catalog, Beyond Measure received promotion and visibility. It had a media preview in London. The media started talking about Lena Dunham again, awaiting her work with open arms, with curiosity. There have been interesting dissections of how Megan Stalter's physique contributes to normalizing non-normative physiques. But the public has passed her by.

'Without Measure' has had visibility but it neither made it into the most watched shows in the week of its premiere nor did it have good audience figures in the second week.

For Netflix, it's a disappointment. You can't sugarcoat the numbers. But for Dunham, it's even worse: she was the voice of a generation, and now no one is interested in hearing what she has to say. And the question remains: would she have had better luck if she had remained with HBO instead of moving to the more mainstream platform?