Lena Dunham’s Netflix Series Too Much Is Almost Enough

On a recent episode of the ‘Girls’ Rewatch Podcast, Lena Dunham revealed (a bit winkingly) that she was nervous she’d gone soft with her new Netflix limited series, Too Much, a semi-autobiographical account of her international courtship with co-creator Luis Felber filtered through the confines of a romantic comedy. “It freaks me out, too, that I made it,” she said. “Why isn’t anyone, like, fighting each other and saying something nasty to each other?” The answer is that, of course, Too Much is a very different show from Girls, the series that thrust the rabblerouser into the spotlight and forced her to spend much of her twenties fending off sexist MAGA trolls and Jezebel writers alike on the mornings after a new episode dropped.

Or is Too Much that different? The cast, led by Megan Stalter of Hacks and “Hi, gay!” fame—-who gives a performance that should squarely thrust her into the spotlight if there is any justic—is stacked with both Dunham regulars (Rita Wilson! Andrew Rannells! Richard E. Grant!) and welcome newcomers (Naomi Watts! Andrew Scott! Rhea Perlman!). The wit is there, as are the colorful swear words. But many other trademark Dunhamisms do seem tamped down. The characters are altogether likable, the irony is ironed out, and even the sex scenes don’t go for the full monty. Has she gone soft, or has she, possibly, grown up?

Dunham’s avatar Jess (Stalter), a guileless thirty-something-year-old woman, is in a rough patch at the outset. Aside from some drunken breaking and entering at the Brooklyn home of her ex Zev (Michael Zegen) and his new girlfriend Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), she copes with the particularly brutal breakup by doomscrolling and rewatching her favorite British romance films, because, as she puts it, “Nobody’s fucking an influencer in the works of Jane Austen.” A job opportunity in cheery ole Londontown comes her way, so Jess makes the classic rom-com decision to pack her bags (and her emotional baggage) and uproot her sorry suburban circumstances for a new life in the big city across the pond. Her first night there, she cutely meets and goes home with Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie rocker whose ambivalence toward his career and living situation tends to spill into his relationships. Jess and Felix swiftly fall for one another despite—and maybe because of—some initial red flags.

Clever writing and a palpable, studied affinity for the tried-and-true conventions of the rom-com genre make this easily one of the streaming network’s best offerings of the year so far. But if any of the series’ premise sounds a bit twee, a bit safe for the inadvertent voice of her generation (or at least a voice, of a generation), it’s not an unreasonable judgment. Indeed, Dunham drops her poison-tipped pen here in favor of something softer, less cynical and more measured, and occasionally more mature than anything she’s done on TV before.

This is particularly apparent when it comes to the show’s belief that everything in life—even love—has a cost. Romantic evenings of talking and sex that stretch long into the morning lead to professional reprimands the next day; Jess’s boundless affection for Felix entices him but also threatens his sobriety. While Too Much inevitably trades in observations about the cultural differences between America and its European forefather—which are thankfully far from being as trite as its Netflix cousin Emily in Paris, a show designed strictly for patients in a lobotomy recovery room—Dunham’s heart isn’t really in the fish-out-of-water mischief. Each episode may be named after a punny homage to a British romcom (“To Doubt a Boy,” “Enough, Actually,” etc.), and the unpacking of certain foreign colloquialisms makes for some amusing misunderstandings (the term “bollocking” does sound bluer than I realized before). But the emotional weight of Too Much stems from its affection for these specific characters in their specific situation, illuminating something about modern dating dynamics that’s both insightful and as sweet as a Chelsea bun.

Jess, for all her joie de vivre, can be, well, a bit much. “Am I the Meghan Markle of fat white bitches?” she wonders at one point. She records diaristic, somewhat unhinged video messages addressed to Wendy, which she never posts publicly (surely nothing could go wrong there…), and her “anxious attachment style” and loud, sunny personality can grate, especially on citizens of a subdued culture where it rains 200 days a year. Jess is messy, but no more so than many other women and, pointedly, many other men, who escape the label by default, as a supporting character bitterly acknowledges. The show is slyly peppered with some of these digs at how certain men use language rather than physical violence to tear women down. Are women really too much, or are men simply not enough?