19-07-2025
Lena Dunham's show ‘Too Much' spirals into overcompensation
Remember when Lena Dunham was the most important voice in television? Girls, her chaotic, semi-autobiographical HBO series, smashed its way into the prestige TV landscape like a giggling wrecking-ball, all elbows and ambition. It was bold and brash and unshaved. It was 'cinema" for the small screen, with characters that were abrasively specific and men who were off-puttingly real. In 2012, when Girls premiered, we bought into its first season—its rawness, its honesty, its audacity—and we went in a little harder on a man named Adam Driver, breaking through with such magnetism that you could practically see future Oscar nominations floating above his head.
Then Girls kept going. And going. And it turned out, maybe that flavour of raw, like cookie-dough, was best in small doses. The series devolved into a self-indulgent mess, incoherent in tone, inconsistent in character, so uncomfortable that not even schadenfreude could keep you glued. Driver, a messy-haired escape artist, soared into stardom. The rest faded into podcast territory.
Over a decade later, Dunham returns with Too Much, a Netflix confection that, at first glance, appears to be the anti-Girls. Where Girls was grubby and narcissistic, Too Much is breezy and big-hearted. There is structure. There is romance. There is—dare I say—wholesomeness?
At the centre of the series is Megan Stalter, that loud and luminous scene-stealer from Hacks, playing Jessica, a hyper-American heroine obsessed with a vague and tourist-brochure version of the UK. Jessica doesn't know Bridget Jones by name, but she's certain that England is where her Mr Darcy resides—if not Colin Firth himself, at least someone with a floppy haircut and an accent like clotted cream. Her Alan Rickman. She arrives in London, laughing at its red phonebooths, questioning whether she's being treated like spaghetti by the National Health Service ('You're putting me under cold water? Like I'm pasta?"), and launches into a series of romcom scenarios that are skewered, lovingly and laceratingly, with Dunham's sharpened pen.
The episode titles are parodies of romantic film landmarks—Pity Woman, Ignore Sunrise, Notting Kill—and each installment functions as a funhouse mirror, reflecting the genre back at us with googly eyes and lipstick smears. The cast is brilliant. The wondrous Will Sharpe (Flowers, A Real Pain) plays a sheepish musician caught in Jessica's romantic crosshairs; the ineffable Richard E. Grant is her manic-depressive boss; Emily Ratajkowski is a social media siren who's stolen Jessica's boyfriend (played by Mrs Maisel's Michael Zegen); and cameos from Rhea Perlman, Naomi Watts, Stephen Fry, and Dunham herself.
Yet I find myself unable to sit through a full episode without hitting pause. More than once. Too Much is named far too accurately. The series barrels forward like a caffeinated Mean Girls, endlessly witty and desperate to prove it. There are too many zingers, too many clever lines competing for space. It's like Diablo Cody on a bad day. Every conversation is peppered with punchlines, some brilliant, some baffling. Even during dramatic moments, the dialogue won't shut up.
Dunham doesn't trust the silences. She doesn't trust the story to tell itself. Thus the show, like its heroine, spirals into overcompensation. An impassioned argument on the street is disrupted by a line so jarringly self-aware that it belongs on a tote bag. This is the curse of smart people writing smart characters who know they're in a smart show.
Still, there's a lot to like. Megan Stalter's Jessica is fluttery, fiercely insecure, and deeply watchable. Sharpe, with his wet-sponge eyes and mumbly charm, is great as a reluctant romantic lead who doesn't know the difference between polyamory and monogamy. He calls too much eye-contact 'a bit of a third-date thing in this country," while she is annoyed by the fact that the boardgame Clue is called Cluedo in the UK (as it is in India), complaining about the British need to add a 'little teacup of charm" on to everything. The episode Ignore Sunrise, where they stay up talking and making love (and watching Paddington) through the night, is particularly smart.
Dunham, unfortunately, seems unwilling to settle for smart. She wants also to be important, and that self-seriousness drags down this series. Too Much desperately wants to be a show with a lot to say about modern life and relationships—like Master of None or even I May Destroy You—anything but the romcom (or anti-romcom) it could so perfectly have been. This show is not content being a cracked valentine to romantic comedy tropes. It wants to say something about trauma, about girlhood, about heartbreak, about everything. This desire to be substantial makes it a show where a dominatrix turns out to be a sad little girl who goes to sleep sucking her thumb.
Would we have been better off just watching Sharpe cry while he watched the Paddington movies? Yes, yes we would.
Too Much is, miraculously, a show that is as tedious as it is fun. The worst aspect of Dunham's artistic work is that it eventually feels sadistic: as if she is inflicting her art on her audience and daring us to sit through it. Too Much goes down easier than the latter seasons of Girls, but like the world of romance and relationships it attempts to navigate, it's full of red flags.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.
