Girls was a generation-defining comedy, detailing the highs and lows of twentysomething millennials in New York City with an incisive wit that rightly made Lena Dunham a hot Hollywood commodity.
Living up to such an early triumph, however, has proven a difficult task for the writer/director/producer/actress, whose post-HBO output—2018’s remake of the British series Camping, 2022’s feature films Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy—exhibited only scant flickers of her breakthrough’s inspiration. More notable recently for her personal life and public controversies, Dunham has become a creator whose creativity appears to have faltered.
The multihyphenate attempts to dispel such notions with Too Much, a semi-autobiographical Netflix series, premiering July 10, created with her husband Luis Felber that returns her to the familiar stomping ground of early-adulthood adventure, discovery, misery, and dysfunction.
Blending comedy, romance, and heartfelt drama, Dunham’s latest feels, in many respects, like a cousin of her signature small-screen triumph, even as it distinguishes itself by focusing on one female protagonist and setting its action across the Atlantic, where culture-clash issues amplify its air of stress, fury, hope, and excitement. With Dunham co-starring as its main character’s sister, it could have just as easily been called Overseas Girl.
Revisiting a familiar well, however, doesn’t produce the results Dunham seeks, as Too Much gets off to a rocky start and never fully settles on a tone that might complement its sillier and more serious instincts.
In New York City, Jessica (Hacks’ Megan Stalter) drunkenly bursts into the home she previously shared with Zev (Michael Zegen) to accost him and his new influencer girlfriend Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski) as they sleep.
This outburst gets her nowhere and she subsequently retreats to the Great Neck, Long Island house populated by her overbearing mother Lois (Rita Wilson), dirty-talking grandmother Dottie (Rhea Pearlman), and morose sister Nora (Dunham). Nora has moved into her childhood home with her 11-year-old son Dash (Oliver Nirinberg) after her husband Jameson (Andrew Rannells) left her to explore his sexual horizons with a man and woman who are both named Cody. Together, they watch 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, since Jessica pines for a Jane Austen-style romance with an Alan Rickman-esque suitor.
Lovelorn Jessica, who works in TV production, gets the opportunity to live out her British fairy-tale dreams when she’s sent to London to work on a Christmas ad campaign. Her illusions about UK life are quickly dashed, though, when she discovers that her new residence is a grandmotherly apartment in a dingy all-brick complex. That’s not as depressing as a clip posted to Wendy’s social media account in which she accepts Zev’s marriage proposal—a brutal blow for Jessica considering that Zev never committed to her (or their plans for children).
In response, she visits a local pub, and it’s there that her life forever changes courtesy of Felix (Will Sharpe), a singer-songwriter with floppy bangs and a soulful voice who immediately catches her eye and with whom she has a meet-cute in a filthy bathroom where he asks her for a “bog roll” (i.e., toilet paper).
Their initial night together culminates with Jessica setting herself on fire with a candle and realizing that Felix is her very own Mr. Darcy, thereby laying the groundwork for Too Much’s humorous portrait of the duo’s topsy-turvy amour.
Dunham embellishes her scenario by giving Jessica a hairless dog named Astrid and a collection of colorful LGBTQ+ co-workers in gay Boss (Leo Reich), lesbian Josie (Daisy Bevan), wannabe-lesbian Kim (Janicza Bravo), and potentially closeted bigwig Jonno (Richard E. Grant), whose wife Ann (Naomi Watts) takes to Jessica during a dinner party marked by copious cocaine.
These figures have plenty of personality but, unfortunately, it’s largely of a strident variety; the next time they say something funny will be the first. They’re also cursorily sketched, which becomes painfully apparent in the series’ back half as Dunham vainly tries to elicit interest in their one-note (and often out-of-left-field) plights.
Still, Too Much is mostly about Jessica, who falls hard for Felix while simultaneously expressing her anger at Zev in private social-media videos that provide the show with its faux-Austen narration (“Dear Wendy…”). It’s additionally about Felix, a sensitive balladeer with a weird family, traumatic childhood, and a past littered with beautiful exes who keep crossing Jessica’s path.
Stalter and Sharpe have a touch of unconventional chemistry but it’s sabotaged by Dunham’s inconsistent characterizations. Jessica is a flailing mess whose too-much-ness is supposedly both her greatest strength and weakness, yet her crass inappropriateness is neither amusing nor believable, making her come across as an impulse control-challenged irritant with a misguided sense of her own funniness. Felix, on the other hand, isn’t meant to be witty; instead, he’s just an implausible bundle of contradictions, veering wildly between doting and aloof, committed and promiscuous, coolly confident and unstable.
Too Much is about the struggle to craft happy tomorrow by facing unhappy yesterdays, and when it’s not failing at comedy, it’s indulging in grave matters (child abuse, abortion) which it isn’t capable of effectively handling. Dunham strives to expand her story’s scope via subplots involving Nora’s stay-in-bed depression (and strained relationship with Jameson), Kim’s longing for Josie, and Felix’s friendship with bandmate Auggie (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and bond with former flame Polly (Adèle Exarchopoulos).
Yet these are all so thinly and haphazardly developed that it’s impossible to care. In many respects, the show’s asides resemble first-draft ideas that were never fleshed out, causing the proceedings’ climactic bids for heartwarming pathos to fall flat.
Dunham peppers Too Much with sexual material that strains for raunchiness (and hotness), and her scripting—typified by a prolonged flashback about Jessica and Zev’s affair that’s inserted into an unrelated present-day incident, thereby distending the episode to nearly an hour—is frustratingly patchy. Most of all, though, the series doesn’t work because Stalter’s Jessica is a grating heroine whose disarray is exhausting and off-putting, no matter how many times it’s positioned as charming and relatable.
Caught between being authentically empathetic and wildly cartoonish, she and her saga fall into that familiar middle ground where nothing coheres. It’s a case study in a lot of disparate, disorganized stuff amounting to too little.
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