Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner Go ‘Camping’

LOS ANGELES — The outdoors, even the fake outdoors, may not seem like the place you’d expect to find Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, otherwise known as the duo behind the Brooklyn-chic millennial comedy “Girls.”

Yet one morning in June, here they were, offering a tour of the Hollywood soundstage where the cast and crew of “Camping,” their new HBO limited series that begins airing Sunday, had retreated after a stint filming in the heat and dust of a nearby movie ranch. They stepped past a white canvas tent and into a recreated barn, where Konner pulled out her phone to show off a cache of photos of the on-location snake wrangler’s daily haul of would-be invaders.

“We called it Snake of the Day,” she said. “We would try to get him to send them to the other show shooting nearby.”

Dunham, while admitting to a long-ago stint at sleepaway camp (yes, underwear was run up the flagpole), leaned into her uber-indoorsy credentials, recalling Konner’s reaction when she suggested that they go camping as research. “She was like, ‘Um, have you met yourself?’ ”

OK, so they may not be the campingest kind. But the show, which will unfold over eight half-hour episodes, is less about camping than about what happens when camping goes wrong.

Jennifer Garner stars as a hypercontrolling L.A. mom giving her husband a backwoods birthday weekend that spirals into a chaos of BB-gun mishaps, accidental drug trips, an outhouse-related crisis and old grudges among female friends with challenging personalities (sound familiar?) that blossom into what the two creators call full-blown “women-on-women crime.”

“It’s like one giant bottle episode,” Dunham said of the series, using the term of art for a self-contained episode that falls outside a series’ main story arc. “Being cut off from your specific context really brings out the primal side in everyone.”

“Camping,” which is based on a 2016 British miniseries of the same name, is the duo’s first project since “Girls” ended last year, leaving six seasons of think-pieces and impassioned for-and-against polemics in its wake. Which might seem fraught enough.

But it also comes after a difficult year in which Dunham broke up with her longtime boyfriend; had a hysterectomy after suffering years of painful endometriosis; and, in the middle of all that, had accumulated enough public gaffes that Vanity Fair was moved to ask in February if she was “flirting with radioactivity.”

Then in July, a few weeks after shooting wrapped, came the surprise announcement that she and Konner were ending their eight-year creative partnership.

If anyone is looking for an off-screen analogue to the show’s catfights, the women, speaking separately by telephone last month, described more of a conscious uncoupling.

“It was sort of a slow burn,” Konner said, when asked what had precipitated the split. “We just wanted to go in different directions. I think we’re not sure what they are, but we want to find our independence.”

“Camping” shares some obvious DNA with “Girls,” starting with its core of four complicated women navigating the crosscurrents of friendship and hateship. In conversation, Konner and Dunham seemed eager to both embrace the parallels and shake them off a bit.

Dunham, 32, recalled how, early in the shoot, she went around asking everyone on set whether they were a Kathryn, a Jandice, a Nina-Joy or a Carleen (the names of the four main women) — a riff on a line in the first episode of “Girls” comparing each of its central characters to the four archetypes from “Sex and the City.”

Asked about the tone they were going for, Konner, 47, reached for a different generational reference point. “In our dreams, it’s ‘The Big Chill,'” she said.

Dunham said she first heard about the British series from the novelist Zadie Smith. She was already a fan of the creator Julia Davis’ “Nighty Night” and “Human Remains,” which have made her a star in Britain but earned only a cult following here.

She passed the word on “Camping” to Konner, who was similarly smitten. “First of all, I just thought it was hilarious,” said Konner, who directed the first two episodes. “It also just seemed like such a natural limited series. You have the whole wide world of camping, but it’s also so claustrophobic.”

The show — while warmer, sunnier and L.A.-glammier — largely follows the narrative beats of the original, and keeps versions of the central characters, including Kathryn’s beleaguered husband (David Tennant), her spacey sister (Ione Skye) and a free-spirited (and very horny) reiki healer-slash-DJ-slash-accountant (Juliette Lewis).

Dunham and Konner also added a sulky teen (who happens to be biracial) and an extra couple, played by the real-life husband-and-wife Brett Gelman (“Stranger Things,” “Fleabag”) and Janicza Bravo (“Lemon”), who, among other things, have a subplot about racial microaggressions that might seem like a nod to criticisms leveled at the whiteness of “Girls.” Asked about that controversy, Konner said, “We like to think we heard people the first season and got better and better.”

Early on, there were conversations about a role for Dunham, who hadn’t acted on-screen since a cameo on “American Horror Story” last October. It was ultimately decided that she was too young, but she wrote her own experience into it, in the form of Garner’s character’s gynecological problems, which are recited in operatic detail.

“If anyone has said ‘uterus’ more on television, I would be shocked,” Dunham said. “I kept saying to Jennifer, ‘If there’s anything you need to know about your uterus, just ask.’ She was like, ‘I’m good, I can Google!'”

Dunham and Konner’s creative split may have lent an elegiac overtone to the show. But on set in June, during a joint interview in their sparsely decorated shared office, Konner talked about trying to find projects that would allow Dunham (who directed 19 episodes of “Girls,” in addition to starring in it) to delegate more.

Dunham, wrapped in a bulky sweater coat (“I stole it from Jenni,” she said), talked about the desire to have “a more sustainable life,” and figuring out “how to be Ryan Murphy.”

Asked what they fought about, they suggested, after a pause, food.

“We also disagree about tattoos,” Dunham added, pulling up her sleeve to show off a recently acquired constellation of good luck symbols — a crystal, the No. 13 (her birth date) — sprinkled across her wrist.

Speaking by telephone last month, Dunham — who was a few days away from starting filming on Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (she described her role, as a Manson Family member, as “supporting-light”) — echoed Konner’s description of an amicable separation, and noted that their eight-year partnership was “quadruple the length of most Hollywood marriages.”

“This doesn’t sound great when I say it,” she said, “but after everything I’ve dealt with — in the public eye, with my body, personally — I’m about to embark on period of creative selfishness, and that’s something that’s important for me to do.”

As for on-screen conflict, “Camping” certainly delivers. Lewis, speaking by telephone, recalled the crazed “Don Knotts scream” she lets loose in an early campfire scene, like the opening bell of her escalating assault on Kathryn’s overly well-laid plans.

“Jenni and Lena were so confident about what they were looking for that they gave you freedom to play,” she said.

Garner, who is playing her first television role since “Alias” ended 12 years ago, described a friendly, collaborative set, if one where she was perhaps the only gung-ho natural-born camper: She led the cast in calisthenics and brought gifts of home-baked blueberry buckle and honey from her own beehives. When the prospect of the role surfaced, she watched the original show, which she called “searingly funny and uncompromisingly, unapologetically British,” and hesitated.

“I thought, I can’t,” she said. She said she was “in awe of the courage” of Davis and of Vicky Pepperdine, who played a far more grim-faced version of her character. “But I thought if I was going to play someone that unlikable, I would need to justify it to myself,” she said.

Dunham and Konner’s initial scripts provided the back story drawn from Dunham’s own health problems, but Garner still struggled with the character’s harder edges.

“There were lots of moments where I naturally softened Kathryn, and they were saying, ‘No, you’re not allowed to tear up — you’re not allowed to even think about it, that’s not where she is,'” she said.

For Dunham, the show’s appeal, for all its darker undercurrents, is in its lunatic energy, and its opportunity, as she put it, “for women to act their butts off.”

“This is a good time in history to do something with a lot of joy in it,” she said. “I think we all could use that.”