In Netflix’s Too Much, an American woman named Jessica (Meg Stalter) moves to London for work and falls in love with a local musician, Felix (Will Sharpe). Well, a lot more than that happens, too — but that’s the distillation in rom-com speak. The new series simultaneously leans into and subverts the genre, with cheeky episode titles like “Notting Kill” and “Enough, Actually.”
The series (which premiered on July 10) was co-created by Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber. While Dunham doesn’t play the heroine — she appears in a smaller role as Jessica’s sister — you may notice similarities between Jessica’s love life and her own. So, is Too Much based on a true story? Not quite, but it does take some inspiration from Dunham’s life.
The Inspiration Behind Too Much
Dunham — whose five-year relationship with Jack Antonoff ended in 2017 — met Felber on a blind date in early 2021. As she told Variety, she had just moved to London to make her film, Catherine Called Birdy. Felber (who had never seen Girls) told the magazine, “The moment we met, it was that sort of cheesy, beautiful thing of automatic connection. Neither of us were expecting that.” The pair married later that year, and Dunham counted close friend Taylor Swift as one of her bridesmaids. NBD!
While there are similarities to Jessica and Felix in Too Much, “It’s certainly not quote-unquote based on a true story,” Dunham said. “But like everything I do, there is an element of my own life that I can’t help but inject.”
Across The Pond
The specifics of Jessica and Felix’s relationship may be fictional, but there’s one element of Too Much that Dunham knows very well — the culture shock that accompanied her IRL move to London. When she first started traveling there for work, she told Netflix, “I thought to myself, ‘I want to write something about the experience of being a foreigner here, and the fantasies we have of [London] versus the realities.’”
But if Dunham’s experience is any indication, Jessica may decide to stick around. As the writer recalled in a recent essay for The New Yorker called “Why I Broke Up with New York,” she’s better suited to the pace of London, despite being brought up (and making her iconic TV show) in the Big Apple.
“In New York — the fastest city in the world — days had felt like years,” she wrote. “In London, years passed like days, which is how I ended up, five years on, realizing that London is my home now, so much so that I call seltzer ‘sparkling water’ and settle for bagels that taste like caulk.”
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