‘Too Much’: Lena Dunham’s new comedy explores love beyond rom-com clichés

Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter star in Too Much, a new show by Lena Dunham for Netflix. Photo / Netflix

There’s a moment in Too Much, Lena Dunham’s new Netflix comedy starring Megan Stalter, in which Stalter’s character, Jessica – a brash American Anglophile navigating life in England, which isn’t what she expected – goes on a metafictional rom-com rant. “I wanted to be in bed with Hugh Grant from the British Jones’s Diaries,” she yells at Felix (Will Sharpe), the charming, floppy-haired but feckless indie musician she falls in with shortly after arriving in London. “Did you say ‘British Jones?’” he says. (“She’s British!” Jessica retorts.)

It is, in context, a weirdly great joke; that slip from Bridget to British is one of the show’s many silly-smart acknowledgments of its predecessors, and one of many send-ups of how powerfully rom-coms have shaped expectations about life and love – and trained people to classify each other as “the mistake” or the “happy ending”. (Here, Jessica and Felix are fighting about a party but also over her fear that whatever they have doesn’t quite fit the rom-com definition of what love is supposed to be.)

Jessica is in many respects a Bridget Jones figure: unpolished but hopeful, hardworking, lustful and sad, she’s recovering from a bad relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, who seems doomed to play bad first loves). She even has a diary of sorts. Here, that takes the form of a series of videos haranguing Zev’s new girlfriend, Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), an influencer whose posts Jessica obsessively monitors even as she tries to start a new life.

In genre terms, Jessica isn’t just our hero. She’s also the crazy ex obsessing over Wendy’s perfect, filtered representation of her camera-perfect life. Her own adventures as an expat are, by contrast, amusingly anti-cinematic. The camera revels in London’s degraded cosmopolitan charm, and the result sometimes feels like a pointed retort to Lily Collins’ perky Emily in Netflix’s Emily in Paris, to whom everything flows too easily in a magical city that lives up to its dreamy promises. Nothing about Too Much is idealised. Jessica’s flat is depressing and not in a bohemian, artistic way. (Though it’s interesting, as a viewer, to notice oneself warming to it over the course of the series.) Jessica does, like Emily, have a gorgeous French rival (played by the inimitable Adèle Exarchopoulos), but even she is filmed in a way that makes her look, for lack of a better word, real. That she has visible pores and stray hairs makes her that much more threatening.

Dunham has described Too Much as an homage to the rom-coms she grew up watching; episode titles include Nonsense and Sensibility, Pity Woman and Notting Kill. But Dunham – whose extraordinary HBO show Girls became a lightning rod for a variety of cultural arguments when it aired back in 2012 – has always been an innovator, and her intervention here is to begin approximately where the conventional rom-com ends.

“You have to try – you don’t just fall into each other’s arms,” she told Variety. “Once you’ve gotten together, the biggest challenge to get past is yourself. And I had certainly found that in my case.”

Dunham acknowledges a few autobiographical elements in Too Much (she herself moved to London for work in 2021, where she met her husband) but wrote the series with Stalter in mind. She cast herself as Jessica’s older sister Nora, who has moved back in with their mother (Rita Wilson) and grandmother (Rhea Perlman) after her ex-husband (Andrew Rannells, who played Elijah in Girls) left her and their son to explore his sexuality. It’s a wonderfully gothic little setup that could easily justify its own spin-off. Dunham has always been a gifted miniaturist. She builds enormously persuasive social worlds, and I found myself wondering, more often than the show perhaps intended, what was happening in Nora’s.

Jessica’s work world remains thin by contrast (though Richard Grant crackles every time he turns up on-screen as her temperamental boss). There’s a paint-by-numbers quality to her colleagues that clashes with the intense, well-drawn, Dunhamesque specificity of scenes featuring her family and Felix’s – and a very bizarre dinner party, and a marvellously uncomfortable wedding. The series benefits from a murderer’s row of cameos, from Naomi Watts to Stephen Fry to Andrew Scott and several I’m not at liberty to reveal.

Stalter is terrific – and vulnerable – as Jessica. Insightful, impulsive and odd, her strength as a protagonist derives from a kind of reactive, unpredictable intelligence that reminds me very much of Dunham’s Hannah from Girls, and makes her almost as surprising to watch. Sharpe (who played an emotionally shutdown tech bro in the second season of White Lotus) brings a lot of grounded, relatable sweetness to a role that drifts dangerously close to caddishness – and requires him to navigate two extremely different social worlds like a code-switching chameleon without seeming repulsively insincere. Rom-coms are the fables of our time; it isn’t easy for a character trapped in one to recover from the sorts of mistakes he makes.

I’ve called Dunham a miniaturist. It might be more correct to say that she excels at short-form storytelling. The smaller the unit, the sparklier her writing gets. Her episodes are plays. Taken scene by scene, her writing is even better: rangy and unexpected, and filled with the surprise pleasures her creative anarchy – the more detached it is from the pressures of plot – makes possible. That remains true here, even when her longer arcs deliver more predictable (or conventional, or simply less satisfying) fare.

“Too Much” doesn’t dig its way out of the rom-com into something else. It isn’t trying to judge or to correct. That might, ironically enough, be the one way it departs from the formula it so lovingly replicates and deconstructs and honours. Rom-coms are bossy and epiphanic. They’re social manuals about how people need to change in order for lasting love to find them. Maybe the woman is too neurotic or career-focused (or feminist or fantasy-poisoned or famous). The men might be cynical or promiscuous or lackadaisical Peter Pans. The point is, the story structure forces them to confront their flaws and change. The price of love is growth and comeuppance.

There’s some welcome humility in how gently Too Much opts out of most of that – for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.

Too Much (10 episodes) is streaming on Netflix.