Too Much: A Charmingly Old-School Romance from Lena Dunham

Now streaming on Netflix, Too Much is Lena Dunham at her loosest and, appropriately, her most over-the-top

How do we judge Too Much, Lena Dunham’s grand return to the small screen, without thinking about Girls? The HBO series is a perennial character on all social media; you can barely move without Hannah dancing to Dancing On My Own auto-playing. It’s a series that has aged like fine wine, accruing legions of new fans every year. For as long as people flounder in their mid-twenties, Girls will be there. But it makes Dunham’s job very hard – how do you follow something as decade- and generation-defining as Girls?

Immediately, Too Much pitches itself as a different beast: broader, looser, and strikingly uncynical. It is Dunham’s most straightforward story yet – Megan Stalter’s Jess, a brash TV producer from New York, up sticks after a nasty break-up and relocates to London. She meets Felix (Will Sharpe), a patient softboi musician who immediately understands Jess. Stalter is perfectly cast in the role, if rather one-note; Jess is the kind of abrasive and verbally incontinent millennial Dunham made her name playing. With ten episodes, there’s a lot of room to find light and shade in Jess, and while Stalter has her moments, Jess often feels frustratingly surface-level and never as lived-in or real as Dunham’s previous protagonists. 

Too Much was co-created with Dunham’s husband, the musician Luis Felber, whom she met shortly after relocating to London. The similarities between Too Much and Dunham’s own life are pronounced (far more so than Girls, when she was often stupidly and incorrectly accused of shallow autofiction), and the collaboration by the couple lends the series a sense of intimacy unseen in Dunham’s work before. Too Much zooms in hard on Jess and Felix’s blossoming romance – quite literally; Dunham’s camera often nestles between the pair for long stretches, capturing every kiss, every look, every smile. Sharpe, easily one of the most exciting up-and-coming actors, has fantastic chemistry with Stalter and their characters’ romance is soft and silly and uncomplicated. Jess and Felix both have plenty of personal baggage but Dunham uncharacteristically keeps their romance plain sailing. This is a charmingly old-school romance through and through.

It feels increasingly clear that Girls’ wide scope – its rich ensemble of self-centred Brooklyn creatives navigating a spider’s web of fucked-up friendships – is an outlier in Dunham’s work. In everything else she’s done, from Tiny Furniture and Sharp Stick to Catherine Called Birdy, Dunham has chosen to exclusively focus on intimate stories of young women during transformative periods of their lives; Too Much is no different. They are gentle, sympathetic stories laced with Dunham’s dry humour, whereas Girls was a kind of open wound, ruthlessly committed to unearthing its characters’ flaws with award-winning results. 

But Girls and its stratospheric success evidently took its toll on Dunham. Too Much feels like her reckoning with that time of her life, writing from a place of distance and greater maturity. She clearly has no desire to revisit it or reinvent it; the only thing she’s carrying forward from Girls is its semi-autobiographical nature. And with Too Much, Dunham has crafted a story that is even more personal than her HBO series. The title is two words that have obviously been rattling around Dunham’s head for the past decade, as she was often embroiled in controversy in the 2010s. Jess grates on a lot of people she encounters – Too Much could have done with about 25 fewer American-in-London culture clash jokes – but her awkwardness is rooted in something familiar and true. At one point, her candid video diaries go viral and she gets mocked online (“People were commenting like, ‘What a fat idiot’”), and you realise this is how Dunham is making peace with that stage of her life and transitioning into another. Dunham is even around to bear witness to it all, playing Jess’ older sister Nora. There’s something heartbreaking and so very Dunham-ian about the scenes in which Nora holds and comforts Jess in her darkest hour. It feels like a brilliant, moving moment of catharsis for Dunham herself.  

As lovely as Too Much is, it’s unfortunately too undisciplined. Dunham could have made magic by refining this into a one-hour 50 minute movie, but ten episodes stretch the premise to exhaustion. Yes, Too Much is too much. With a couple of episodes circling the one-hour mark, it’s a major commitment for a series as sweet and ultimately low-stakes as this. It allows Dunham’s focus to wander, for Stalter to waffle and for the narrative to needlessly slalom around. Then there’s the revolving door of inessential cameos by Girls stars and guest appearances from Dunham’s friends; by the time Rita Ora, playing herself playing Santa, sings a rendition of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, you begin to wonder if perhaps some of this could have been left out. 

Too Much is Lena Dunham at her loosest and, appropriately, her most over-the-top. She has clearly found great peace and happiness in her marriage to Felber, and their romance bleeds through the screen, making for a tender and charming, if sloppy, series. Fans of Girls’ cynical wit may find it a significant gear change but this was undoubtedly a story Lena Dunham needed to tell.

Too Much is streaming on Netflix now.