HBO’s Girls is renewed for Season 4. Adam Driver thinks he’s coming back. But would the show be better if Hannah and Adam were broken up?

Connect these dots for a second:

1. HBO has ordered a Season 4 of Girls.

2. Adam Driver believes he’s coming back:

I don’t know. I leave that in the hands of people smarter than me, and definitely more articulate. [Laughs] But yeah, I hope I’m coming back… unless they know something that I don’t!

3. Some have argued he might not, as his acting career is hitting a new speed now.

4. At the end of the most recent episode, Hannah and Adam get into a fight. He notes he’ll stay with Ray (odd that Adam seems to have no male friends) while he focuses on his play.

OK, so …

Let’s say Adam Driver does return for Season 4 of Girls, and let’s say he returns in a predominant role (as opposed to 2-3 appearances throughout 10-12 episodes). Would it be better for the show if Hannah and Adam are together, or better if they’re apart? Ah, fan girl stuff…

Here’s my brief take: most of the best characters on TV are essentially sociopaths in some way. Hannah Horvath is basically no different. This season she got her friend out of rehab — and worried that she wasn’t getting enough fodder to write about. She went to her book editor’s funeral — and asked his widow about her e-book deal. She’s a fucking train wreck. The situation with Adam at the end of the last episode basically showed her arc from Season 1: she’s too deep in herself and can’t understand how she relates to others (her boyfriend, her friends) and why they’re not bending more towards her. In other words, she’s a 25 year-old girl, so the part is written very adroitly in that respect. She basically doesn’t understand her boyfriend and his present context, so it might be time for a bow to be placed on that relationship.

The challenge is this: we’ve already seen Hannah and Adam as “in love” and we’ve already seen them as “one gets a new person and the other reacts.” So whichever way the storyline goes, if Driver comes back, we’re getting on one of those roads again; the only notable difference in Season 4 could be more about Adam vs. Hannah’s world (her friends, her parents) as they move towards the altar (hell of a wedding episode that would be). Clearly something is about to happen with Marnie and this Desi guy, so Adam needs to be contextually linked to that. Could we enter into the couples friends phase of Girls now? They’d be 26-27 or so next season, and that’s about the early water mark in NYC for having dynamics like that, so perhaps.

This has essentially become a Girls recap, which I didn’t ever anticipate writing, so I’ll start to wrap it up here. (1) Hannah is a good-to-great character because that self-obsession and inability to relate is extremely common to NYC-based 24/25 year-old girls. (2) Adam Driver is absolutely the best thing on that show and should return for Season 4, regardless of his connection to Darth Vader. (3) The Hannah-Adam relationship has been one of the better relationships to witness on TV the past 2-3 years, so they need to keep it going but make it more about his conflict with her world as she tries to reconcile the worlds. (4) Please don’t do the “they breakup, she pines from afar and maybe has sex with Donald Glover” thing again. We’ve been there. (5) I probably should have written this post about True Detective.