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The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Girls gone bad: Lena Dunham's Too Much is just not good enough
There is one TV show that has been enjoyed most often, and most reliably, among my cohort in New York: Girls, the seminal HBO dramedy about Brooklyn's downwardly mobile and highly self-important creative class of the 2010s. Though a cultural lightning rod when it aired from 2012 until 2017 – its whiteness, convincing narcissism, frank sexuality and frequent nudity all catnip for the cresting blogosphere and cyclical moral panic – Girls has rightfully settled into its status as one of the best television series of the 21st century, a foundational text for millennials as well as a biting satire of solipsistic, Obama-era striving. (Although viewers too young to remember it as anything other than canon now see the girls' flailing – their freedom to wear terrible prints, listen to Vampire Weekend and be earnest – as something to be envied rather than derided, a core tenet of the millennial redemption arc.) The show was always sharper than tendentious criticism acknowledged, a knowing send-up not to be taken too seriously, though it did seriously shape the TV that followed – the idea of an 'unlikable' female protagonist was always ahistorical, but messy, compelling women on television proliferated in Hannah Horvath's wake, from the girls of Broad City to Insecure's Issa, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag to Pamela Adlon's Better Things. It is unfortunately still radical to see someone who looks like creator, writer and star Lena Dunham be naked on screen without judgment; though television has explored sex much more successfully than movies in the years since, no show has fully succeeded Girls' unvarnished vision of sex as something both banal and essential. No wonder so many people are rewatching it. All of which is to say: expectations were high for Too Much, Dunham's new TV series for Netflix. Though not her first project since Girls – she helmed HBO's ill-fated series Camping, made two feature films (one much better than the other) and directed the (excellent) pilot of Industry – Too Much is the first true follow-up to the show that made her a cultural flashpoint at the age of 26. From the jump, Jessica, played by the comedian Megan Stalter, appears as a natural successor to Dunham's annoying but subtly endearing Horvath. Once again in Brooklyn, Jessica does something headstrong and inadvisable: she breaks into her ex-boyfriend Zev's (Michael Zegen) apartment and screams him and his new girlfriend Wendy (longtime Dunham friend Emily Ratajkowski) awake, hysterically demanding that he declare leaving her to be the worst thing anyone has ever done. The amateur and ultimately futile home invasion is the first sign that Too Much will, like Girls before it, concern at least one prickly and off-putting character who is refreshingly and unashamedly not skinny. It is also the first sign that something is off. Whereas Hannah annoyed with a recognizable, skewering self-obsession, Jessica's Too Much-ness – shocking volume, machine-gun delivery, inherent awkwardness – is a gag. Stalter comes from the world of front-facing camera internet comedy, where heightened bits and jarring phrases reign supreme (her best work – 'hi, gay!' – will get stuck in your head for hours). The translation to television works in small parts, as in Hacks, but flounders as a lead, particularly one supposed to attract a handsome musician (Will Sharpe) at a pub and succeed as an advertising director while showing up to work in bunny ears. Dunham is now in her late 30s and married (her husband, the indie musician Luis Felber, co-created the show with her); no one will begrudge her avoiding a repeat of the Girls formula, which no show has been able to crack (Adults tried this spring, and failed). With Too Much, she steers far from any specific scene, instead focusing on the relationship between Jessica and Sharpe's Felix, loosely based on her own. The 10-part romcom features the welcome presence of Dunham's underrated acting, a buzzy lead in Stalter, a refreshingly grey vision of London, a murderers' row of cameos – among them, Andrew Scott, Naomi Watts, Stephen Fry and Kit Harington – and sensitive scenes between two weirdo lovers. But without a scene or a trope to satirize – Dunham, through Jessica, is thoroughly enamored by English romcoms from Pride & Prejudice to Notting Hill – its comedy falters. Long on grating gags and short on zingers, Too Much is, and I say this begrudgingly, an overlong and underbaked disappointment. It is, however, very much of its era in television, when the downsides of the streaming boom have come into clearer focus. Episode lengths for Too Much vary from 31 minutes to a baggy 50+, less evidence of creative flexibility than a resistance to editing. Like Jessica's favored nightgowns, the chapters are oversized and diaphanous, standard Netflix second-screen fare; some, such as the standout third episode depicting an accidental all-nighter punctuated by repeated, insistent sex as Jessica and Felix fall in love, believably advance their relationship with Dunham's distinctive sense of erotic realism. Others, such as a Jessica meeting Felix's friends and, true to form, doing too much ketamine, trap the characters in a cyclical loop of dysfunction. Dunham is, as the critic Lili Loofbourow put it, an excellent miniaturist – Too Much shines when the world falls away from Jessica and Felix, as they build the couple's secret language of bits, vulnerabilities and callbacks. But as soon as the show meanders – to some egregiously overdrawn co-workers, to Jessica's mother (Rita Wilson) on FaceTime across the pond, Dunham loses her grip. One scene, Jessica is getting a dressing-down from her boss (Richard E Grant) for her performance; the next, they're bingeing coke at a work party at his house. But perhaps most disappointing to me, as a fan of Girls, is the show's tenuous grip on the reality of the body. It is refreshing to see Stalter, a plus-size actor, play an unabashed character who generally gets what she wants, and whose romantic rivals are played by Ratajkowski, the epitome of conventional hot on Instagram, and the French movie star Adèle Exarchopoulos. It also feels a bit disingenuous to not acknowledge appearances at all, particularly when the culture is regressing back to the eating disorder-riddled 'thin is in' of the 2000s. During one early sex scene, Felix lays a hand on Jessica's bandaged stomach – always hapless, she burned herself – but does not grab her, as if he respects her curves, but does not crave her, as if they are beside the point of attraction. Such is the muted energy of Too Much, a show at once too broad and not enough. Dunham, once the tongue-in-cheek 'voice of a generation', has succeeded again – unfortunately this time, it's in making Netflix background TV.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Too Much review – Lena Dunham's cliche-ridden new romcom is a total disappointment
It takes a lot of talent to make something as singular as Girls. Then 26-year-old Lena Dunham created, starred in and executive-produced the show. She frequently directed, and she wrote or co-wrote 41 of the extraordinarily raw, realistic (Girls' sex scenes reduced most screen and polite conventions to rubble), brutally funny and occasionally simply brutal 62 episodes that comprised its six seasons between 2012 and 2017. Girls' impeccably witty script and sublime characterisations meant it pulled off a near-impossible feat. It made the story of four solipsistic, privileged twentysomethings navigating their lives one sexual/professional/ youthful/contraceptive mistake at a time in New York City compelling, funny and meaningful. As Dunham's character and semi-alter ego Hannah Horvath said of herself – she may not have been the voice of a generation, but she was definitely a voice of her generation. Since then, the output of a woman for whom the word 'wunderkind' seemed woefully underpowered has itself been underwhelming. Dunham's much-hyped first book did not deliver a fraction of the humour or insight Girls proved she was capable of – although certain passages did garner much publicity and controversy, a tradition she then continued with various ill-advised (or wilfully misinterpreted) comments on the #MeToo movement, writing out of imagination rather than lived experience and other hot button issues of the past decade or so. Her US remake of Julia Davis's Camping was widely considered to have lost its originator's bleak genius in translation, and Dunham's adaptation of the beloved and brilliant children's book Catherine Called Birdy, was an inoffensive bagatelle that did not detain critics or commerce long. But now, at last, we have a new, original project from Dunham (with contribution from her now husband, indie musician Luis Felber). A television series, no less. Too Much follows the adventures of early-thirtysomething Jessica (Hacks' formidable Megan Stalter) who flees to London from Brooklyn after a bad break-up. She remains obsessed with her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen), and with the woman he left her for, Instagram star and influencer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski). She records emotional addresses to Wendy on her phone, privately, as self-therapy but of course this is the modern equivalent of Chekhov's gun on the mantelpiece, and duly goes off in act three. Before then, however, she has embarked on a relationship with – oh, the eternal mysteries of creation – indie musician Felix (White Lotus's Will Sharpe, in another good-guy part that gives him nothing to get his teeth into and leaves him looking very flat indeed beside Stalter's full-blooded role and performance). He is the antithesis of Zev – patient, laid-back, appreciative of her and never finding her 'too much' as her ex, from very early in their relationship which somehow staggered on for eight years, contemptuously and contemptibly did. There is a laboured joke in the first episode, about the difference between the English estate of Jessica's period drama-informed imagination and the council flat she ends up in. This should serve as a warning to us all to lower our expectations drastically and save ourselves from as much of the quickly deepening disappointment as possible. After Jessica's inaugural encounter with a British pub loo (you can, in fact, feel a very lived experience of Dunham here), the narrative landscape becomes an increasingly desolate place. Jessica sets fire to her nightdress and goes to hospital. Felix shows up with flowers and takes her home. Flashbacks to her life with Zev and an abortive date with a lying footballer show us how much better a bet the new guy is. They have a lot of sex and Dunham aims for her trademark realism – but without Girls' inherent bleakness it just makes things tonally jarring for the viewer. It abandons any thoughts of innovation and hits cliche after cliche (how 'the ick' can suddenly arrive and put you off your beloved for ever, for example – a well worn trope of the kind that would never have passed muster in Dunham's earlier work). At one point, Felix even tells Jessica admiringly, 'You're so alive!' Not too much, you see! Alive! This guy is great. There are a few good lines ('I want to make the world a better place for the children I don't want and may never be ready for') and insightful moments (Jessica using television programmes about people with lives even messier than hers to soothe herself to sleep) but the irreducible fact remains that Too Much would not be enough from anyone. From Dunham, it is way, way too little. Too Much is on Netflix now
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Too Much review – Lena Dunham's cliche-ridden new romcom is a total disappointment
It takes a lot of talent to make something as singular as Girls. Then 26-year-old Lena Dunham created, starred in and executive-produced the show. She frequently directed, and she wrote or co-wrote 41 of the extraordinarily raw, realistic (Girls' sex scenes reduced most screen and polite conventions to rubble), brutally funny and occasionally simply brutal 62 episodes that comprised its six seasons between 2012 and 2017. Girls' impeccably witty script and sublime characterisations meant it pulled off a near-impossible feat. It made the story of four solipsistic, privileged twentysomethings navigating their lives one sexual/professional/ youthful/contraceptive mistake at a time in New York City compelling, funny and meaningful. As Dunham's character and semi-alter ego Hannah Horvath said of herself – she may not have been the voice of a generation, but she was definitely a voice of her generation. Since then, the output of a woman for whom the word 'wunderkind' seemed woefully underpowered has itself been underwhelming. Dunham's much-hyped first book did not deliver a fraction of the humour or insight Girls proved she was capable of – although certain passages did garner much publicity and controversy, a tradition she then continued with various ill-advised (or wilfully misinterpreted) comments on the #MeToo movement, writing out of imagination rather than lived experience and other hot button issues of the past decade or so. Her US remake of Julia Davis's Camping was widely considered to have lost its originator's bleak genius in translation, and Dunham's adaptation of the beloved and brilliant children's book Catherine Called Birdy, was an inoffensive bagatelle that did not detain critics or commerce long. Not incidentally, she has had to confront various health issues too. But now, at last, we have a new, original project from Dunham (with contribution from her now husband, indie musician Luis Felber). A television series, no less. Too Much follows the adventures of early-thirtysomething Jessica (Hacks' formidable Megan Stalter) who flees to London from Brooklyn after a bad break-up. She remains obsessed with her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen), and with the woman he left her for, Instagram star and influencer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski). She records emotional addresses to Wendy on her phone, privately, as self-therapy but of course this is the modern equivalent of Chekhov's gun on the mantelpiece, and duly goes off in act three. Before then, however, she has embarked on a relationship with – oh, the eternal mysteries of creation – indie musician Felix (White Lotus's Will Sharpe, in another good-guy part that gives him nothing to get his teeth into and leaves him looking very flat indeed beside Stalter's full-blooded role and performance). He is the antithesis of Zev – patient, laid-back, appreciative of her and never finding her 'too much' as her ex, from very early in their relationship which somehow staggered on for eight years, contemptuously and contemptibly did. There is a laboured joke in the first episode, about the difference between the English estate of Jessica's period drama-informed imagination and the council flat she ends up in. This should serve as a warning to us all to lower our expectations drastically and save ourselves from as much of the quickly deepening disappointment as possible. After Jessica's inaugural encounter with a British pub loo (you can, in fact, feel a very lived experience of Dunham here), the narrative landscape becomes an increasingly desolate place. Jessica sets fire to her nightdress and goes to hospital. Felix shows up with flowers and takes her home. Flashbacks to her life with Zev and an abortive date with a lying footballer show us how much better a bet the new guy is. They have a lot of sex and Dunham aims for her trademark realism – but without Girls' inherent bleakness it just makes things tonally jarring for the viewer. It abandons any thoughts of innovation and hits cliche after cliche (how 'the ick' can suddenly arrive and put you off your beloved for ever, for example – a well worn trope of the kind that would never have passed muster in Dunham's earlier work). At one point, Felix even tells Jessica admiringly, 'You're so alive!' Not too much, you see! Alive! This guy is great. There are a few good lines ('I want to make the world a better place for the children I don't want and may never be ready for') and insightful moments (Jessica using television programmes about people with lives even messier than hers to soothe herself to sleep) but the irreducible fact remains that Too Much would not be enough from anyone. From Dunham, it is way, way too little. Too Much is on Netflix now
Time Magazine
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
In Adults and Overcompensating, a New Generation Reinvents the Hangout Comedy
The creators of FX's Adults must have known that comparisons between their show and Girls were inevitable, because they leaned way into them. Beyond the similar titles, both comedies follow 20-something friend groups in New York City. There's even an explicit callback in Adults ' May 28 premiere—one begging to be cited in reviews like this—to the indelible scene in the Girls pilot where Lena Dunham 's narcissistic aspiring-writer protagonist, Hannah Horvath, informs her parents that she might be ' a voice of a generation.' The new series abbreviates this cliché as 'V of our G,' and applies it to a media-savvy young man who becomes the envy of his peers by going public with workplace sexual harassment allegations and scoring a six-figure payout. Equal parts tribute and sendup, the moment cleverly heralds the arrival of a new generation anointing its own voices, skewering its own pieties, and distinguishing itself from the wave of millennials that swept pop culture in the early 2010s. Adults is the creation of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, a couple and comedy team who first tasted fame when their Yale graduation speech went viral in 2018. (They've since written for Jimmy Fallon and co-authored a collection of short stories titled Naked in the Rideshare.) Along with comedian Benito Skinner's college-set Amazon romp Overcompensating, it's the second hangout comedy set to debut in May from creators born in the mid-'90s. Neither as internet-addled nor as pandemic-damaged as you might expect, these distinctly current yet familiar shows update the genre with all the absurdism and self-awareness of a generation that distracts itself from a world in crisis by bingeing Girls, Friends, Sex and the City, and the rest of the friends-as-chosen-family canon. While previous zeitgeisty series about young adults in New York were set in aspirational environs (the north Brooklyn hipster corridor for Girls, the post-bohemian Village for Friends), Adults gestures toward Gen Z's limited horizons by packing its five characters into one guy's childhood home in an unfashionable part of Queens. Timid sweetheart Samir (Malik Elassal) is the man of the house, fumbling through challenges like paying by check for water-heater repairs. Issa (Amita Rao) is a loud, dramatic, sexually liberated heir to Broad City 's Ilana; her chill, pansexual boyfriend, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), is, inexplicably, always addressed by his full name. Anton (Owen Thiele, who also appears in Overcompensating) makes friends everywhere he goes—including, in one episode, with a violent criminal who's terrorizing the neighborhood. A striver afflicted with anxiety-induced anal bleeding, Lucy Freyer's Billie is the only housemate who thinks much about her future. The Gen X Friends had the luxury of slacking on a coffee-shop couch for years before ascending to the kind of high-powered careers the SATC women already had when we first met them in their 30s. As much as they flailed in pursuit of them, the millennial Girls, who graduated amid the grand-scale rug pull that was the Great Recession, had dreams and ambitions. But for the Adults, just being able to confidently claim the titular identity seems a sufficient life goal. Adulthood is, unsurprisingly, even more elusive for the two freshmen at the center of Overcompensating. Surrounded by homosocial groups of new acquaintances egging them on to prove their hetero horniness, Skinner's innocent ex-jock character, Benny, and Carmen (Wally Baram), a girl whose high tolerance for alcohol and love of video games reflect the influence of a late older brother she's still mourning, attempt a first-night hookup. When he can't go through with it—because, as he's struggling to admit to himself, Benny is gay—they become best friends. That relationship is, in turn, tested by an undergrad social scene where everyone is desperate to look like they're having more fun, sex, and success than they actually are. Though Skinner situates this competition mostly within the physical world of parties, a ridiculous secret society, and an on-campus performance by Overcompensating executive producer Charli XCX, it's also clearly a reflection of the peer-pressure panopticon that is growing up on social media. Critics too often do a disservice to the art of younger generations, overstating the similarities between works that have little in common besides the age of their makers or failing to account for the aesthetic prejudices of their own cohort. So I want to be clear: Overcompensating and Adults take divergent approaches to the Gen Z sitcom. Both play on coming-of-age tropes, but Overcompensating feels more old-fashioned in its coming-out storyline and earnestness about being true to oneself. And if I was put off by Skinner's over-the-top ingenuousness—Benny's eyes are so wide they almost pop out of his head—that is likely in part because I wasn't raised on the kind of shouty, exaggerated, rapidly edited character work favored by the wave of social video creators among whom he got his start. (It could also have something to do withsome widely discussed confusion over whether Overcompensating is meant to take place in the present or during the years when the real, 31-year-old Skinner, who doesn't exactly pass as a freshman, actually attended college. Either way, there's nothing more Gen Z than 2010s nostalgia.) Still, there are elements the shows share that differentiate them from TV for and about Gen Z conceived by 40-somethings like Mindy Kaling (Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls) and Sam Levinson (Euphoria). The young creators seem less concerned with authenticity or empowerment or grand political statement-making than generations past; in their place is a ' LOL Nothing Matters ' sense of whimsical absurdity. 'We are in a post- De Blasio, pre- Avatar 3 moment. We have to live!' Adults ' Issa declares, in a nonsensical rewrite of the kind of utterance you often hear from Vs of Gs. Benny tells his problems to the Megan Fox poster hanging in his dorm room like a talisman of straightness—and the miniature Fox replies. The shows have a certain irreverence, too. Their casts are as effortlessly diverse, from race to sexual orientation, as the New York of Friends, Girls, et al. was unrealistically white. Yet their humor telegraphs exhaustion with a decade's worth of millennial social-justice discourse that performatively polices language and identity in the face of ongoing global catastrophe. In the Adults premiere, multiple characters make cynical attempts to capitalize on the workplace misconduct scandal, and Anton crows that the victim ' looks like he was molested.' Paul Baker recoils, in another episode, at a stereotypical gun-shop clerk who uses the R-word and asks if Paul is 'fruity,' only to find out the man has a beloved sister with an intellectual disability and is, himself, gay. Overcompensating has a gentler tone, but a scene where Benny calls a girl the C-word (no, he's not reclaiming the slur) would've sent Twitter ca. 2015 into convulsions. What keeps these series from coming off as crass is the genuine camaraderie that connects their characters and shelters them, to some extent, from the precariousness of their lives. The Friends idly bantered, arranged themselves into couples, and got married. The Girls were so self-centered, it doomed their friendships. But even when the young people in Adults and Overcompensating do betray one another, out of callowness or insecurity, the love they share remains pure. The kids probably aren't alright, but at least they have each other's backs.
