Lena Dunham’s much-anticipated return to TV arrived in the form of Too Much, a Netflix comedy-drama that reimagines her real-life breakup with musician-producer Jack Antonoff as a self-lacerating romantic odyssey. Largely staying behind the camera due to health problems, Dunham channeled her emotional chaos into a fictional avatar: Jessica (played with twitchy, unfiltered energy by Megan Stalter), a neurotic Brooklynite reeling from heartbreak.
When Jessica’s long-term boyfriend leaves her and promptly gets engaged to a social media influencer, she flees to London under the guise of career reinvention. Really, she’s chasing an English countryside fantasy where she plays Elizabeth Bennet, pining for a Mr. Darcy to sweep her off her feet. Instead, she finds Felix (Will Sharpe), a brooding indie musician with black nail polish, estranged family ties, and a relapsing drug addiction who is closer in spirit to Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff than Jane Austen’s Darcy.
From the outset, Too Much makes no pretense about subtlety. The series opens with Jessica breaking into her ex’s apartment. “I’m not the kind of girl you change locks on,” she mutters indignantly as she smashes a pane of glass, only to find him in bed with his new fiancée. It doesn’t take long to understand why the show is titled Too Much.
These are the kinds of scenes Dunham excels at: emotionally raw, comically deranged, but so self-aware they land with authenticity. Jessica’s ex, Zev, played by Mrs. Maisel’s Michael Zegen in a familiar role as a sensitive, effeminate, liberal male feminist, wakes up sobbing and gasps, “Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nothing this violent.”
This overwrought conflation of confrontation with violence becomes a recurring gag, particularly among the emotionally stunted men Jessica surrounds herself with. Felix’s voicemail later chirps: “Don’t leave a message. I find them violent.”
Dunham has a knack for skewering the outwardly progressive men of her generation. Zev, like Girls‘s Desi before him, is all surface-level empathy and quiet manipulation. The self-proclaimed “good guy” who weaponizes sensitivity. Felix, by contrast, is presented as a decent man whose defining shortcoming is a strikingly undeveloped emotional vocabulary, exacerbated by absent parents who had him raised by a nanny. When Jessica comes home elated from a career triumph, he stares blankly, unsure how to celebrate someone else’s joy.
As with Girls, Too Much thrives not on likable characters, but on the audacity to present unlikable ones with surgical specificity. Jessica is insecure, performatively feminist, emotionally invasive, and exhausting (you might even describe her as too much).
Her coworkers are Zoomer archetypes: Kim and Gaz (Janicza Bravo and Dean-Charles Chapman) who speak in perfectly ironic vocal fry, saying things like, “We are subverting expectations while playing into it totally,” or, “He didn’t have the emotional intelligence to date someone whose love language is being a bitch in a fun way.”
Jessica’s boss, Jonno, played with delightful sleaze by Richard E. Grant, is an aging cokehead trying desperately to relate to his staff. “If you need anything, just ask,” he shrugs. “Not me, but someone.” And in the show’s best cameo, Andrew Scott appears as a pretentious artsy director who flirts with women half his age on set, then spends an entire pub date obsessively reading one-star reviews of his work and declaring the criticism “violent.”
But for all its sharp dialogue and chaotic energy, Too Much suffers from a key absence: Dunham. She appears only briefly in a minor role as Jessica’s sister and steals every scene with her quirky charisma, perfect inflections, and presence. Stalter, though competent, often comes off as an uncanny imitation.
The plot, such as it is, meanders through flashbacks, flaky romances, and ketamine binges with a troupe of bohemians all named Polly. Some arcs simply fizzle out, like Felix’s estranged father, a decrepit baron played by Stephen Fry, whose storyline never quite materializes. But narrative cohesion has never been the point. The joy of Dunham’s world is voyeuristic: watching narcissists unravel in hilariously specific, painfully familiar ways.
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Like Girls, the show ends with a surprisingly conservative denouement. Just as Hannah Horvath matured out of Manhattan and into motherhood, Jessica, having matured just enough to commit, leaps into marriage with Felix and lands her long-desired directorial debut.
In a television landscape replete with sanitized empowerment arcs and tidy character growth, Too Much is a welcome return to Dunham’s original ethos: honest, messy, self-absorbed, and deeply funny. It’s not always coherent, but it is never dull.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.