Too Much: Lena Dunham’s love letter to rom-coms is pure perfection
If the co-stars and cameos don’t do it for you (hello Andrew Scott, Emily Ratajkowski, Richard E. Grant, Jennifer Saunders and Stephen Fry) the soundtrack, pitch perfect repartee and genuine chemistry will.
The mind of Lena Dunham is a place I would love to hop inside and roam around for days. The script of Girls is like a sacred text to me, not one single word is wasted or misplaced, and that’s a hill I will die on. If not the out-and-out voice of a generation, Lena Dunham is most definitely a voice of a generation, and her foray into rom-com territory solidifies exactly that.
Too Much is a ten-episode series that lands on Netflix today, starring Megan Stalter as Jessica, a 30-something, newly-single workaholic who trades New York for London in a bid to change her life, and in turn change herself. On her first night in her new local, she meets Felix, played by Will Sharpe, an indie musician who wears his red flags on his sleeve and is immediately disarmingly charming.
Over the past few years, rom-com discourse has started to leave me feeling utterly jaded. Long read think pieces, Instagram infographics and shrill TikTok parables espousing who’s saving the genre, analysing why beloved classics should now be cancelled, and theorising on what all this says about our own psychology — please, leave me alone, I just don’t care any more.
But this show, from the creator of Girls and the producers of Love Actually, with a boatload of incredible acting talent attached to it? Well, it’s taking the rom-com biscuit.
Lena Dunham writes impeccably easy repartee and banter so well, the kind of quick quipping you wish you were capable of in the moment. She has described her leading lady—who was loosely based on herself when she first moved to England and met her husband and co-creator, Luis Felber—as an emotional klutz. She’s loud and hilarious and Megan Stalter is utterly glorious in the role.
If you’re familiar with the LDCU (the Lena Dunham cinematic universe, patent pending), you’ll be glad to see Andrew Rannells, Richard E. Grant and Rita Wilson in recurring roles, and there are some pretty wild cameos throughout. Firstly, Fontaines DC’s very own Carlos O’Connell is one of Felix’s bandmates, Rita Ora plays herself in a Bill Nighy-esque, inexplicably Christmas-themed advert, and TikTok viral creators Alix Earle and Jake Shane pop up unexpectedly.
A line that distils the show and is something that will likely resonate with many is: “I can leave my country, but apparently I cannot leave my own chaos.” On this point, Lena Dunham has said that she’s all too familiar with the feeling of: wherever you go, there you are. “Moving house or moving country don’t completely transform your reality,” she says. “So suddenly I was like, wow, how did I end up in this place that feels so totally different? How did I end up in this place and this reality that feels so totally different, and yet here I am, totally the same person?”
No person or place is the issue or solution; everything is richly layered and can be at once delicious and indigestion-inducing, and that’s a very real thing that this show gets to grips with. It presents Jessica and Felix as two people with lots of baggage, and it lets us watch as they decide whether they’re willing to help one another carry it.
Something done so deftly is the way in which the peripheral characters’ lives are fleshed out, without pulling focus from the focal point of the story. We see people healing from trauma and heartbreak and loneliness and self-acceptance. We see people partying and laughing and revelling in the excitement of being alive. We see the ups and downs of dating and marriage and loving and fighting and it’s all just so gorgeously messy and complex while being simple and relatable and wholesome.
Watch it, watch it now. And then watch it again.
Photography by Netflix.
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