Lena Dunham is 25 years old and last April, she starred in and created the show “Girls.” Jan. 13, “Girls” returned for a second season.

“If you loved what we were doing last season, we’re going to push it further. And if you hated what we were doing last season, you’re going to hate it even more,” said Dunham in an interview with the Today Show.

The show follows Hannah Horvath, Jessa Johansson, Marnie Michaels and Shoshanna Shapiro, who are four 20-somethings navigating a post-graduate life in New York City.

“It’s a very adult show. It’s about the mistakes you make along the way to happiness,” said Judd Apatow, executive producer of the show and director of movies such as “Bridesmaids,” “This is 40” and the upcoming “Anchorman 2.” “These are the disasters you go through before you find the right person to settle down with and the right job that you like. It’s the ‘lost years.'”

Booker T. Washington once said that success is to be measured not by the position one has reached in life, but by the obstacles that one has overcome – Dunham is no stranger to the obstacles of criticism.

Within hours of its premier, the show received noteworthy amounts of criticism from bloggers, news sources such as Fox News and, most notably, from writer Jon Caramanica of the New York Times. Caramanica called the show out on their lack of racial diversity, its narcissistic characters and their state as privileged millennials.

Caramanica gives the example of character Jessa, who is “nervously facing down an abortion [and insists], ‘to have children with many different men, of different races,’ as if they were trinkets to be collected, like key chains or snow globes.”

Julia Poukatch, a psychology major at DePaul University, agrees.

“[The show] is great, but only represents the ‘white’ perspective,” said Poukatch. “Lena Dunham has said before that she doesn’t feel comfortable writing for other races because she doesn’t think she’ll be able to do it justice since she’s writing from experience.”

It is true: it is almost impossible to find that many Caucasians in Brooklyn. About the only encounter we get in “Girls” is a homeless African-American, and some Haitian and Jamaican nannies that make minute-long appearances in a 10-episode series, but Dunham says that for season two, things are about to change.

“I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me…only later did I realize that it was four white girls,” said Dunham. “As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.'”

Although many of us might have brushed past the criticism, it has now become something of an irritation. Like one of those pimples that, until shamelessly pointed out, went unnoticed, and is now all we can keep our eyes on.

Will there be a fifth “Girl” added to the line up (Maria Lopez, perhaps)? Who will start dating the black guy? Will we finally find out that Marnie was actually adopted by two Asian parents?

Whatever the surprise ingredient will be that will remedy the concerns of well-meaning critics, it has opened up a dialogue that has been far too silent in the past. A dialogue on misrepresented realities, perhaps, because “Girls” is not the disease, but the symptom of an ignored culture that cares about issues of race, gender and sexual representations in our media.

Meaning that this season comes with an added element of excitement and curiosity, because this show really is something fresh that many people are excited about.

“‘Girls’ is super relevant to both sexes and one of the most realistic interpretations of American 20-somethings I’ve seen on TV,” said Alex Thibodeau, 22, a political science major at DePaul.

Perhaps we do not have to like everything we watch; perhaps we can just laugh and love the fact that after months of waiting, we can love that “Girls” will give us something to talk about.