On paper, Lena Dunham and Megan Stalter seem like an ideal creative match for their new Netflix comedy Too Much. Dunham is the co-creator and star of Girls, the acclaimed (if polarizing) HBO comedy about Hannah, a young woman with a knack for making situations uncomfortable in a hurry. Stalter, meanwhile, has spent the last few years on Hacks playing Hollywood assistant turned talent manager Kayla, a character with a lack of self-awareness that rivals Hannah’s. Dunham doesn’t act much anymore (though she has a small role in Too Much), which means she needs someone else to channel her particular blend of comic neuroses and emotional bull-in-a-china-shop tendencies.
Enter Stalter, who in Too Much plays Jessica, a TV-commercial producer just out of a long-term relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen). In an attempt to move past her anger and confusion over the breakup, she takes an assignment that will temporarily relocate her from New York to London. She’s fixated on Zev’s new girlfriend, an influencer named Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajowski), and regularly records private Instagram videos where she directly addresses Wendy and brags about how well she’s doing since the breakup. But she can’t let memories of Zev go, which complicates both her work and her new romance with Felix (Will Sharpe, from The White Lotus Season Two), a struggling musician with a mysterious past.
There’s a lot to like about Too Much, which Dunham co-created with her musician husband, Luis Felber. Sharpe is incredibly charming as Felix, a character who feels very specific and lived-in. The dramatic beats of Jessica and Felix’s messy courtship land effectively, and Stalter and Sharpe have strong chemistry. Dunham, who writes and directs many of the episodes, is highly skilled at comic set pieces, and there’s at least one big laugh-out-loud sequence in each installment.
But Jessica herself is a trickier proposition. On Girls, Dunham had a handle on exactly how oblivious or canny Hannah was meant to be at any given moment, and the shifts between the two modes felt natural. With Too Much, this toggling is more jarring. At times, it feels as if Dunham wants Stalter to play Jessica as a woman who is trying very hard to not embody the series’ title. At others, it can feel like Stalter is just doing a slightly less ridiculous version of Kayla. The two modes never quite come together, making it harder to engage with either the more sincere moments or the most absurd ones, because Jessica can come across as two largely disconnected people.
Dunham wears her influences on her sleeve. The show’s main title graphic evokes the logo from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was also about a woman in her thirties starting over in a new city after leaving a long relationship. Andrew Rannells plays Jameson, the estranged husband of Jessica’s older sister Nora — played by Dunham, in a Girls reunion with Rannells (they were exes there, too) — and Jessica’s colleague, who encourages her to give England a try because “you love movies where women fan themselves and die of tuberculosis and shit!” Each episode’s title is a riff on a famous romantic movie: “Nonsense & Sensibility,” “Ignore Sunrise,” “One Wedding and a Sex Pest,” etc. In one installment, Jessica is excited to walk through Notting Hill and pose in front of a blue door like Hugh Grant’s from the film, while Felix, who grew up around the kinds of broken kids who lived in the neighborhood, is less enchanted. And calling her own character Nora is almost certainly a tribute to Dunham’s idol and friend, rom-com master Nora Ephron.
Rounding out the cast, Rita Wilson and Rhea Perlman also have recurring roles as, respectively, Jessica’s mother and grandmother, who live in the same house as Nora and her adolescent son due to various financial troubles. The family scenes feel largely detached from Jessica’s story, and like little more than an excuse for Dunham to work with actors she admires. But those scenes tend to be very funny, and funny forgives a lot. Ditto for subplots about Jessica’s co-workers, including director Janicza Bravo (Zola) as a fellow expat exploring her sexuality, the great Richard E. Grant as Jessica’s uptight boss, Andrew Scott as a pretentious director, and Naomi Watts as Grant’s seemingly perfect wife.
The material about the ebbs and flows of the relationship between Jessica and Felix, two damaged people who only seem to feel truly comfortable with one another, is excellent. There’s a scene in an early episode where Felix gives his portable CD player to Jessica so she can listen to a mix he made for her, insisting that she’s under no pressure to like any of the songs. For several minutes, the two of them are just lying wordlessly in bed next to one another, and the connection between them is palpable, despite them not doing anything at all.
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And the show’s most reliable source of comedy is Jessica’s understandable sense of discomfort and confusion with how Felix remains on great terms with his exes, all of whom seem so charismatic and sex-positive (particularly French actor Adele Exarchopoulos as one of several women Felix knows named Polly) she can never quite tell if they want to keep sleeping with him — and, for that matter, whether he wouldn’t mind doing that, too. Her anxiety then leads to her overindulging with alcohol or drugs, including one episode where she takes way too much ketamine and asks, “Am I the Meghan Markle of, like, fat white bitches?” And since Felix is sober after a long period of self-destructive behavior himself, this creates some interesting tension.
But whether with Felix or on her own, Jessica is a bit all over the map, with her behavior frequently feeling like it’s meant to meet the needs of a particular scene or joke rather than as a consistent throughline for the season. Maybe this is on Dunham as writer-director, or on Stalter, or a bit of both, but that inconsistency leaves Too Much feeling like less than the sum of its impressive parts.
All 10 episodes of Too Much are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole season.
From Rolling Stone US
