Exclusive Interview
‘Girls’: Allison Williams Looks Back at Iconic ‘Panic in Central Park’ Episode, 10 Years Later (VIDEO)
What To Know
- The “Panic in Central Park” episode of Girls, which aired in 2016, is widely regarded as one of the show’s best episodes.
- The episode featured a brief reunion between Allison Williams’ Marnie and Christopher Abbott’s Charlie.
- Williams spoke with Swooon about the episode’s impact on fans a decade later.
If you were a devoted Girls fan during the show’s initial run (hi, millennials!), then you remember when time actually stood still on March 27, 2016. The sixth episode of Season 5, “The Panic in Central Park,” instantly became one of the best episodes of Girls — if not the best.
In the episode, a chance encounter on the street brings Charlie (Christopher Abbott), Marnie’s ex-boyfriend, back into her life for a day, an homage to The Panic in Needle Park. Gone is the strait-laced, gentle Charlie we knew in earlier seasons. The new Charlie is practically unrecognizable, from his new tattoos to his bushy beard, and his newfound heroin addiction. As her marriage to Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is falling apart, Marnie (Allison Williams) dips her toe back into life with Charlie, a romantic and dreamy adventure that takes them all across New York City for one night.
The illusion is shattered the next morning when Marnie discovers that Charlie is an addict. The man she once knew and loved no longer existed. This crushing reality check allows Marnie to realize her marriage to Desi is truly over.
With 2026 marking the 10th anniversary of “The Panic in Central Park,” Swooon had to ask Allison Williams about the episode’s impact on fans a decade later.
Mark Schafer / HBO / Everett Collection
“I’m so honored,” she began. “I feel like that also is a kind of an exercise of wish fulfillment and nostalgia, where we all have that one person where, if we walked past them on the street, there’s so much unfinished business that we kind of fantasize about a whirlwind 12-hour adventure with them, maybe longer than 12 hours, 18 hours. And what would that look like? And what would life have looked like if we had not lost each other? And so I think that’s the part that’s relatable.”
She continued, “It’s weird to use the word aspirational with regards to Girls in any context… What Marnie and Charlie embark on in that episode is not aspirational in any way, really, but I think there is something about that adventure, about the what-if, that is irresistibly nostalgic.”
For most of her night with Charlie, Marnie is wearing a glittering red gown he buys for her. When Swooon mentioned that the dress should be in a New York museum (specifically The Museum of Moving Image), Williams noted, “I have one of them. We made a few of them because I’d had to get wet and then had to get mud on it. All these things. I have one of them in my own collection. I love it. If the museum asks for it, they can have it.”
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