When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.
If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.
But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.
Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.
Is “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.
“I want all people in rom-coms,” said Megan Stalter, the star of “Too Much,” who had gathered with Dunham and their co-stars Janicza Bravo and Emily Ratajkowski to talk about the show. “Because that’s real life.”
“Too Much” joins recent comedies like “Fleabag,” “Catastrophe,” “Insecure,” “Jane the Virgin” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” in widening the aperture of the rom-com. For the girls who grew up on “Girls” — which includes Dunham, who was only 23 when she sold the series — the new series is an opportunity to rejigger the genre, which despite recent efforts remains oddly regressive.
Is straight marriage still the goal? And do characters, particularly women, have to become the best versions of themselves to deserve love? The girls who don’t have their dream jobs, who are appetitive and brash and occasionally the authors of some terrible choices — maybe they should get a happy ending, too. One that even a quartet of cynical millennials can believe in.
IN A LIGHT-FILLED, snack-filled conference room at Netflix’s Manhattan offices, Dunham, Bravo, Ratajkowski and Stalter chatted brightly as they collected water bottles and settled onto sofas and chairs. Bravo suggested new seating arrangements. Ratajkowski discussed astrology. Stalter joked about the flirty front desk workers at their hotel.
“The guys at the hotel are all trying to sleep with us,” she insisted.
The relationships among the women’s characters aren’t as casual or cozy, at least at first. Stalter, an actress and comedian best known for “Hacks,” stars as Jessica, a line producer who moves from New York to London in the wake of romantic diaster. Dunham plays Nora, Jessica’s sister, who has recently separated from her newly polyamorous husband (Andrew Rannells). Bravo plays Kim, a brusque colleague of Jessica’s who has a crush on another workmate. And Ratajkowski plays Wendy, a knitting influencer and the girlfriend of Jessica’s ex.
Stalter and Ratajkowski are in their mid 30s, Bravo in her 40s, Dunham in between. As kids, all of them enjoyed romantic comedies — “Splash,” “Love, Actually,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the Nora Ephron canon. They watched enthusiastically, without demur. But as adults, they began to have questions.
Like, is the villain of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” actually the groom? Was Bridget Jones really considered fat? Is a “coma comedy” like “While You Were Sleeping” even ethical? Was Hugh Grant in “Notting Hill” kind of a stalker? Why were women constantly made to compete? Are any straight men OK?
“Now I’m like, He’s straight? I don’t know,” Dunham joked.
“It takes up a lot of time if you engage with it,” Ratajkowski added.
“The whole male gender,” Bravo said.
“If you are being generous, it takes a lot of time,” Ratajkowski said.
Even if a viewer were to put these concerns aside, these comedies were often limited and limiting. (It’s like the old Jewish joke about resort food: It’s so bad and there’s so little of it.) With only a few exceptions, the heroines of these movies were white, they were straight and straight size (even Bridget Jones). And if they were often frizzy around the edges (neurotic, insecure), that frizz would be blow-dried into something sleeker before the credits rolled.
But life isn’t always like that. Or it isn’t only like that. Love can come when you aren’t expecting it. It doesn’t always have to be earned.
That was Dunham’s experience. A Hollywood wunderkind who made her first movie, “Tiny Furniture,” just out of college, and sold “Girls” right after, she faced health challenges and a painful breakup before moving to London. (She had fallen for Britain while filming her medieval coming-of-age comedy from 2022, “Catherine Called Birdy.”) She wasn’t looking for love.
It found her anyway. And she wanted to make a rom-com that reflected that reality — the story of a woman who, as Dunham put it, “is living in that confusion of: I know who I am, and I’m all right on my own, but also wouldn’t it be nice to have somebody to eat soup with at night?”
While “Too Much” is in dialogue with classic romantic comedies — episode titles include “Pity Woman,” “To Doubt a Boy,” “Enough, Actually”— there are differences both major and minor. The casting is somewhat more diverse, the body types more varied. While Jessica initially feels competitive with Wendy, the women ultimately find common cause. (Stalter kept petitioning for the characters to make out. “They’re two amazing women!” she said.)
And “Too Much” allows Jessica to live in her imperfections, not necessarily fix them. She doesn’t have to be an angel, a dream girl or a saint to be loved — her new boyfriend, Felix, a musician played by the English actor Will Sharpe (Season 2 of “The White Lotus”), says she is “too much” in a good way — “like just the right amount and then a little bit more.” Who wants to be — or be with — an angel anyway?
“The turn-on is to be acknowledged as being complex,” Bravo said approvingly.
Dunham has been called too much. That too muchness never bothered her, but as she noted, it often bothered others. Which makes “Too Much,” the show and the title, a kind of reclamation.
“I just have an inability not to continue to be myself,” she said. “And the common denominator of every woman that I love is that she is, in her own way, too much.”
Bravo agreed. What does it mean to be too much? “It’s just to wake up and move through the world,” she said. “I did it this morning. I’m doing it now. We are all in this room because we’re exactly too much. If we hadn’t been a lot, then we wouldn’t be here.”
“Too Much” is admittedly a lot. Because it is a series and not a movie, Dunham was able to write arcs for most of the characters, older and younger, straight and queer. Rita Wilson, a veteran of romantic comedies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” had sworn off playing what she described in a phone call as “the warm, kind, nurturing mother.” But having worked with Dunham on “Girls,” she knew that her character, the mother of Jessica and Nora, wouldn’t be just a typical mother. Sure enough, Lois enjoys a romance of her own.
“I feel liberated working with Lena,” Wilson said. “I felt that way on ‘Girls,’ and I felt that way on ‘Too Much.’”
Rhea Perlman, a “Girls” fan (and a “Cheers” legend) who plays Jessica and Nora’s grandmother, echoed this. “Lena has a way of creating and directing that makes people feel free,” she said.
“Maybe some people would be turned off by that much sex and that much talk of sex,” Perlman continued. “But she made it so funny and so real.”
IN SIGNIFICANT WAYS, “Too Much” is not “Girls.”
“Girls,” Dunham argued, was about sex. “Too Much” is about falling in love. (Did any of the “Girls” girls find love? Maybe Zosia Mamet’s Shosh, but at the cost of her longstanding friendships. Not exactly a win.) And although it has its share of uncomfortable moments, this new series trades the hyperrealism of “Girls” for a more forgiving gaze.
“There’s elements from the world of romantic comedy and dreaming,” Dunham explained.
Jessica is not merely an aged up version of Hannah Horvath, the character Dunham played on “Girls.” Dunham, a fan of Stalter’s beautifully unhinged standup, said she had always envisioned her in the role. (Dunham recognizes her limitations as an actor. “I love actors; I’m obsessed with them,” she said. “And I can tell the difference between what I do and what they’re able to do.”)
“Meg is so sweet and so present and so tender that even when Jessica does cheeky things, it’s endearing,” Dunham said over a chips and guacamole lunch with Stalter later that June day.
Stalter, who said that “Girls” was her “favorite show of all time,” insisted that Hannah is also endearing. “I’m a Hannah apologist,” she said.
On “Girls,” Dunham deliberately showed herself and her castmates looking, Dunham said, “messy or rough or hungover,” often in questionable rompers. “Now I’m in my phase where I just want interesting people who look all different ways to look beautiful,” she said. During a scene in which Jessica is in the hospital, Dunham instructed the on-set stylist to floof Stalter’s hair.
“I was like, ‘Give her a little volume,’” Dunham recalled. “Let’s have a good time here. This isn’t ‘Requiem for a Dream.’”
Stalter is cutely dressed and beautifully groomed throughout: Jessica is hot and she knows it. As she says in an early episode, “I am [expletive] irresistible.” (As played by Stalter, this is true.)
The show’s emphasis on beauty extended to the sex scenes, which Dunham wanted to feel loving. “That was a new thing for me to do,” she said. After filming a scene between Bravo’s Kim and her work crush, played by Daisy Bevan, she found that the footage looked too awkward and spare.
“I was like, No, this is beautiful and tender and new,” Dunham remembered thinking. “So let’s move closer to these faces and actually lean into what it’s meant to do.” She reshot it.
It would be indecorous to say how “Too Much” concludes, although anyone who has seen a handful of rom-coms can hazard a decent guess. That ending might seem conventional. Or maybe it is simply generous, suggesting that complicated women — like Jessica, like Dunham, like anyone in that conference room — deserve fairy tales, too.
The show may have started with Dunham’s story, but she has tried to make it expansive enough that almost anyone can imagine themselves into Jessica’s happy ending. That’s what Stalter wanted as a girl watching rom-coms. It’s what she wants now.
“You want to live the fantasy,” she said. “You want to see yourself.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
The post How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made the Rom-Com Just Right appeared first on New York Times.
