Lena Dunham is back with a new comedy. It's a shame it's so irritating
Lena Dunham's much-anticipated comedy rocks up with a suitably starry supporting cast. Stephen Fry, Richard E Grant, Naomi Watts, Andrew 'Hot Priest' Scott - everyone wants a piece of Too Much, just as they did Girls, the writer-actor-director's series about twentysomething New Yorkers.
Dunham has worked since Girls ended eight years ago, but nothing has had the same impact. So no pressure then as she sends this ten-parter out into the world.
Good news: it is a triumph. Bad news: but only in part. The brilliant section is bookended by material so unfunny and irritating I had to scream into a cushion for fear of alarming the dog.
Megan Stalter stars as Jessica, a TV producer from Brooklyn who has hit brick walls in her career and love life. Offered a temporary transfer to the firm's London office, Anglophile Jessica cannot resist. She's expecting to find Austenesque estates and Notting Hill chic, but the reality is a rented flat on a council estate and chilly workmates who think the loud American is too much.
Felix (Will Sharpe), a grungy but posh indie singer Jessica meets in a pub, likes her lust for life and prefers not to look beyond the bravado.
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While Salter (Hacks) and Sharpe (The White Lotus) are good individually, they take a long time to convince as a couple. She tries too hard while he goes the opposite way. The rest of the cast turn the kookiness up to 11 and act like they are in a remake of Love Actually. Grim old London gets a cutesy makeover, complete with cheery ambulance staff, and there's even a comedy dog, gawd help us. The whole thing might have been bearable with a laugh or two, but four episodes went by at a glacial pace and nothing.
Then a miracle happened. The action moved from London to Brooklyn eight years ago. The first scene was a family dinner, with Dunham as Jessica's sister, Rita Wilson as her mother and Rhea Perlman (Taxi, Cheers) as her grandmother. It was like a switch had flipped and what had been black and white was now a riot of colour. There was a story too, and what a tale it turned out to be - every scene beautifully written, brimming with insight, sad, funny and only too horribly believable. This was a five-star interlude in an otherwise three-star series.
Far too soon we were back in London. It wasn't as bad as before, but it had no hope of matching what we had just seen. What went wrong? Was it the curse of streaming, trying to squeeze as many episodes as possible out of the material? Or Dunham straying too far from the world she knew, and captured so well, in Girls?
It is no coincidence that everything perked up when she was on screen. That Lena Dunham, older, wiser, vulnerable, was far more interesting than the girls and boys back in London. That Lena Dunham is welcome any day. Just don't leave it so long between laughs next time.
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