In ‘Too Much,’ Lena Dunham Makes a Bold, Subversive Return to TV

It began, as things often do these days, with a DM. Megan Stalter opened her Instagram inbox and saw a message from Lena Dunham asking to discuss a project. A mega-fan of Girls, Stalter couldn’t initially believe that one of her TV idols had made direct contact. But Dunham had. And in a follow-up Zoom, Dunham offered Stalter a lead role in her new series, Too Much, on the spot. “That’s why the internet is so great,” Stalter tells me. “TikTok is so amazing to let us post our videos and have people see our stuff. I’m not a good auditioner.”

viral comedy she posted on social media before emerging as the most reliable scene-stealer on Hacks. But that only scratches the surface of what Dunham saw in her new leading lady. “When she does naughty things or she makes mistakes, you believe in her in this way that I certainly never was able to pull off,” Dunham tells me. “It was really important to me that the character be somebody that people could root for—that she had that really beautiful openness.”

Dunham sold Girls to HBO when she was only 23 years old. She wrote, directed, and starred in that series for six seasons, receiving eight Emmy nominations. But since then, she’s hardly worked in TV; she co-created the short-lived Jennifer Garner vehicle Camping, which aired in 2018, but otherwise contributed to other writers’ shows, like directing the pilot of Industry. Dunham kept busy, though. She a few films, including the teen-comedy gem Catherine Called Birdy starring Bella Ramsey and Andrew Scott, and wrote some books. She moved to London and got married to the musician Luis Felber.

Now 38—she turns 39 tomorrow—Dunham is finally returning to the medium where she made her name, more assured and in control. Except, unlike in Girls, she is not playing the lead. “It was always written for Meg, and it wasn’t me,” Dunham says. “I don’t have a strong desire to be in front of the camera these days.”

Too Much (premiering July 10 on Netflix) is very loosely inspired by Dunham’s life of late—highlighted by the fact that Felber serves as a cocreator. The 10-episode first season follows Jessica (Stalter), a New Yorker in her 30s reeling from an ugly breakup. Her job, assisting filmmakers working on commercials, moves her to London and away from her family. She dreams about falling into a romantic British fantasy, only for reality to set in. She’s told that her new flat is located in an “estate,” which she takes to mean Jane Austen splendor—not British public housing. But Jessica also manages to step into her own rom-com when she sees a musician, Felix (Will Sharpe), performing at a nearby pub. It’s messy, complicated love at first sight.

Too Much is a swoony love story that refuses to take the sorts of short cuts we usually see in rom-coms. It’s dreamy but tough, equally funny and sad. “When I met my husband, I was dazzled by just how much baggage two people could bring to the table. It was almost like we had Mary Poppins bags. It was like, It’s still coming out, it’s still coming out!” says Dunham, a die-hard rom-com fan. “I thought, ‘What would it look like to try to situate something in that rom-com space and then be honest about all of the stuff that’s trailing behind them?’”

Dunham stresses that the show’s broad autobiographical strokes should not be read as anything beyond jumping-off points. “My least favorite thing would be if people were to try to Baby Reindeer it, because it would be impossible. It’s so many influences, so many stories from friends,” she says. “I would like 34-year-old women anywhere to be able to look at Jessica and—while of course they won’t all connect to every aspect—see something of themselves in her.”

What should be attributed to Dunham is her level of authorship over Too Much. She only directed a minority of Girls episodes any given season, and shared creative oversight with her then creative partner Jenni Konner and executive producer Judd Apatow. “We were still subscribing a little bit more to the model of television in which one person cannot have all the jobs,” Dunham says. “I had a strong feeling about what this show was supposed to look and feel like. Hopefully this is going to be a tone that only I could hit.” With Felber by her side, her voice comes crisply through in every script, and she directs eight of the show’s 10 episodes.

“One time she was pitching to cut a page out of a scene, and someone else was like, ‘Oh, but then you lose this joke,’ and she was like, ‘Well, I’ll write something else funny tomorrow,’” says Sharpe, taking on his first TV role since The White Lotus. “I was immediately aware of how fast her brain works—how quickly she can make connections and have ideas.”

Though the strokes may be broad, art did sometimes imitate life on the set of Too Much. Sharpe was taken slightly aback when he saw that his character was wearing a jacket similar to one Felber had in real life. “Felix is a grunge musician like Lu is, and is mixed-race British,” Sharpe continues. “But I definitely felt in the writing of it, he necessarily becomes his own character.”

Once, Stalter and Dunham showed up to set wearing the literal same shirt. (“It said ‘I love soup’ or whatever,” Dunham recalls.) People would call Stalter “Lena” when they saw her from behind, even though the two women don’t look particularly alike. “We just became so close,” Stalter says. “Lena makes me feel like a teenager, just laughing and gossiping and telling secrets. When you’re little, girls aren’t always told that you can be weird and wild—and I think we both have remained that way as adults.”

Dunham felt the same way. Though she didn’t intend to appear on the show at all, she eventually cast herself as Jessica’s sister. “It felt like we could be okay lying in each other’s lap for an afternoon,” she says. “There was just a spiritual thing, a melding that was happening.”

Before Jessica leaves for London, we get a vivid glimpse of her life at home, with her sister, her mother (Rita Wilson), and her grandmother (Rhea Perlman) Dottie—named after Dunham’s own. “I brought in pictures of my grandmother, of her outfits, of her house,” Dunham says. “It was like the alternative version of reality, if my mom and grandma and I had just fully Grey Gardensed-in instead of expanding into the world—which could have happened, don’t get me wrong.”

Stalter felt empowered by Dunham as both a director and a friend. Too Much is the most dramatically intense role of her career: “I wanted to make Lena proud, and wanted to do a good job. But I also was really ready to take it on,” she says. Keeping with the Girls tradition, the show has several rigorously, authentically staged sex scenes. “It was the most supportive, warm-hearted set I’ve been on,” says Sharpe, himself a director of films including 2021’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. “Almost every sex scene, if not all of them, was storyboarded.”

Stalter concurs: “You are, all of a sudden, asking things you didn’t know that you’d have to ask. Like, ‘Oh, what kind of sounds are we supposed to make?’ But Lena is so good at directing that she lets you know exactly what’s going to happen for how long.” One other element helped too: “I was obsessed with the intimacy coordinator, Miriam. I’d be like, ‘Miriam’s here!’ She was also my acting coach.”

As Too Much rolls on, it takes a fascinating shape. The show is as much about the blossoming beauty of a new romance as the lingering pain of an old one. “They keep doubting, they keep finding reasons to doubt this new relationship and maybe even sabotage it a little bit,” Sharpe says. For Jessica, the trouble is rooted in the wounds of her previous relationship with an aspiring writer, portrayed by Michael Zegen (who played Dunham’s GQ colleague in Girls). Much will be read into the portrait of this often unkind ex-boyfriend, given Dunham’s high-profile breakup with songwriter and music producer Jack Antonoff in 2017. But before I even get the chance to ask, Dunham waves off any such interpretation.

“That ex-boyfriend is very much an amalgamation of every ex that I’ve had, or that a friend’s had,” Dunham says. “It’s this quotidian acceptance of unkindness that eats away at a person over a long period of time and degrades their sense of self. If someone were to say, ‘Who inspired that character?’ I’d be like, ‘Do you have time for me to give you the 42 examples?’”

“She’s in a love triangle with her past—with someone who probably has her blocked on his phone and with her new boyfriend,” Dunham continues. “It’s about how hard it is to accept the joyful thing that’s in front of you as you’re seductively brought back to the painful thing that’s behind you.”

While Too Much certainly showcases Dunham’s experience as a filmmaker and showrunner, it’s also a reminder of what made her work feel so fresh in the first place. For all the discourse it stirred, Girls preceded the streaming revolution, and ended just before the bubble burst. Too Much lands on the other side of that industry arc, amid cost-cutting measures and a renewed focus on how to make durable television. Yet it feels remarkably unaffected by all that noise. The series is simply what you’d expect from—or perhaps hope to see in—a Dunham show nearly a decade out from Girls.

“TV is returning to the idea that everything needs to, in some way, have a procedural engine to be allowed to live, or a larger meta wrapping,” Dunham says. “Medical dramas and romantic comedies are what I play when I need comfort. I’m talking to you, The Pitt.” She points to The White Lotus as another example of meeting the moment. “I’m so amazed that Mike White has, through his love of reality TV and his passion for these contained environments, found this way for us to just watch people talk and be,” she says. “Maybe it helps some people knowing that there’s going to be a murder at the other end. That’s not why I tune in. I tune in because I want to watch Carrie Coon.”

Too Much reveals its structural ambitions gradually. There’s an episode set entirely in Jessica’s flat, over a long night spent with Felix, and later, an agonizing flashback that plays like scenes from a breakup. The eighth episode is directed by Zola’s Janicza Bravo, who also appears in the series as Jessica’s coworker; her mandate was to “make your own Merchant Ivory movie inside of this TV show,” and Bravo ran with it. “Netflix never asked any questions,” Dunham says. “They never said, ‘Are they leaving the apartment?’ There was total, pure support.”

Girls was known for these stylistic departures too. “I didn’t even appreciate the luxury I was given on Girls to do things like bottle episodes, where I stayed with two characters for a night, or let three characters circle around each other. It was just what made sense to me because I’d always written for low budgets,” Dunham says. “I always felt that I had to give people the traditional A, B, and C storylines until episode five. Now I’m much more living under the motto of, ‘If you feel it, go for it.’ We never know how many we’re going to get. You don’t get six seasons of everything.”

Dunham references her hopes for a second season during our conversation, but for now, she’s still in the anxious waiting phase. Even by the time of our interview, feedback is a long way away. “The only people who’ve seen it are literally my mother, who says, ‘It’s the best thing you’ve ever made,’ and then my father, who says, ‘I can’t understand what anybody’s saying,’” Dunham says. “Then one friend just said, ‘Will Sharpe is hot’ over and over.” This being a Lena Dunham show, she’ll be hearing all sorts of reactions before long.

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