“Too Much” Remixes the Rom-Com
Starting over in New York is a cliché for a reason; so is starting over by leaving it behind. Lena Dunham, who became the poster child for a certain kind of Brooklyn millennial during the run of her first series, “Girls,” recently reflected on her “breakup” with the city in this magazine. Now she’s returned to television with “Too Much,” a romantic comedy about rediscovering oneself by saying goodbye to all that. The show’s protagonist, Jess (Megan Stalter), has little reason to stick around. Her live-in boyfriend, Zev (Michael Zegen), has left her. Her passion for her job, as a producer of TV commercials, is long gone, too. Unattached and adrift, she lives with her sister (Dunham), her mother (Rita Wilson), and her grandmother (Rhea Perlman) in the latter’s Long Island home—a situation that Jess describes as “an intergenerational Grey Gardens hell of single women and one hairless dog.” Jess is obsessed with the animal—a freaky-looking creature named Astrid, whom she’s forever putting in sweaters and dresses—but she’s even more obsessed with Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski), an influencer who’s engaged to her ex. Jess transfers to her company’s London office in search of a do-over; even once settled into her Hackney sublet, she sits in bed watching and rewatching a video of Zev’s proposal to Wendy. In the clip, Wendy screams. Three thousand miles away, holding a nightgown-clad Astrid for comfort, Jess screams louder.
The baggage that Jess brings with her to England is central to “Too Much,” which traces her wonderfully unlikely romance with Felix (Will Sharpe), a bar singer she meets on her first night in London. Dunham—who created the semi-autobiographical Netflix series with her musician husband, Luis Felber—breathes new life into the rom-com by exploring how both thirtysomethings have been damaged by prior relationships and by their disparate family dynamics. While her earlier projects, namely “Girls” and the film “Tiny Furniture,” dwelled on discomfort and awkwardness, “Too Much” offers a softer and more hopeful side, even as Dunham retains her satirical bite. The result is nothing short of one of the best shows of the year.
Jess could be a cousin of Kayla Schaefer, Stalter’s breakout character on the HBO Max series “Hacks,” with whom she shares a tendency toward hyperbolic declarations and off-kilter humor. Early on, Jess messes with Felix by telling him, mid-hookup, that it’s her first time—the kind of joke that lets you know immediately whether someone shares your sense of humor. Fortunately, he does. But she’s arrived in London unable to trust her instincts, especially when it comes to men. Her co-workers (Janicza Bravo and Leo Reich) insist that Felix is nothing special: as one says, “An indie musician who plays at pubs? Throw a tuppence, you hit one of those.” Their argument is made more persuasive by the fact that he lacks both a day job and a fixed address, and he wants to move in together within weeks of meeting. The red flags keep coming: He has a misspelled tattoo on his butt. He gets into a physical fight with Jess’s boss (Richard E. Grant) at a dinner party. And although he’s been clean for almost three years, he’s so noncommittal about pretty much everything that it’s hard to know whether his sobriety will stick.
Still, the season is strewn with moments of beautifully relaxed intimacy. Fittingly for a series whose leading man is in a band, many of them revolve around music. Felix spends a day making Jess a mixtape, and he relishes simply lying in bed with her that night as she listens on his headphones. The sequence lasts nearly two minutes without a word spoken by either: just Jess breathing deeply, eyes shut, face scrunched up, as Felix stares at the ceiling, then at her, before finally inching closer. When she tries more actively to get over her ex, he encourages her to sing, which leads to a shaky and emotional rendition of Kesha’s “Praying.” Their conversations alternate with ease between the serious and the silly. A make-out session is punctuated by a whispered discussion of what they’re picturing in their heads as they kiss. Both characters hesitate, for their own reasons, to say “I love you”—as Jess puts it to Felix, “I don’t want to say anything to you that I’ve said to other people before. . . . I wish there was, like, a new way to say it.” Dunham, in turn, strives to find new ways of expressing the emotion, through disarming dialogue and affecting tableaux. She repeatedly succeeds. One instance involves Felix declaring that Jess is “too much”: “Just the right amount and a little bit more.”
The tenderness of the couple’s connection—and the effortless chemistry between Stalter and Sharpe—makes darker story lines about their respective pasts hit even harder. The episode that charts how Jess became accustomed to second-guessing herself is brutal in its banality, spanning years of her life in Brooklyn as Zev gradually grows colder and then gaslights her into believing she’s needy for craving the lost warmth. (The subplot is sure to raise questions about the character’s possible real-life analogue.) An installment in which Felix visits his dysfunctional parents—and is flooded with bad childhood memories—serves as a reminder of just how well Dunham writes the decades-long aftereffects of familial instability.
Rom-coms tend not to pay much attention to their protagonists’ life stages, unless they’re imposing some artificial deadline for matrimony. Jess and Felix, by contrast, find each other at an age where they’re beginning to feel an urge to take care of someone else, even if they’re not particularly adept at looking after themselves. The series’ naturalism is bolstered by a desaturated palette, and also by the characters’ downscale circumstances. Felix’s gigs as a directionless rocker are appropriately grody, including one at a local fair where there seem to be more farm animals than humans in the audience. This aimless milieu has been largely missing—and much missed—on TV since shows such as “Girls” and “Broad City” went off the air and millennial self-parody gave way to escapist young-adult fare. The recent FX comedy “Adults” took up the baton, attempting to capture what it’s like to be young and flailing today, but Dunham’s eye is sharper, her references more pointed. Jess and Felix exist in spaces where leaving a voice mail is deemed “sorta violent,” the single and searching scroll on Raya and Sniffies, and the semiotics of Miley Cyrus as a pop star deserve serious discussion.
With its interest in the unglamorous, “Too Much” also cheerfully punctures the American-in-London expat fantasy. Jess is a fan of Austen adaptations—the first episode, “Nonsense and Sensibility,” sees her admiring Hugh Grant’s Edward Ferrars—and is delighted to visit posh neighborhoods with homes that look like they belong in Richard Curtis films. As she falls for Felix, who comes from money, she imagines him in the garb of a Regency gentleman—not without reason, since his floppy hair and strong jaw are reminiscent of a young Grant’s. But Felix’s half-in, half-out stance among his former boarding-school peers complicates the class component inherent in her favored romances. A wedding at a “Saltburn”-esque estate underscores that such properties tend to house “Saltburn”-esque people, with a panoply of personality disorders to match.
Throughout her misadventures, Jess can’t help addressing Wendy in voice-over—and in daily video rants on an Instagram account that’s set to private but will inevitably be made public. (Call it Chekhov’s finsta.) Jess knows that Wendy isn’t the right target for her anger, and Dunham manages to sidestep the usual dings against influencers: as our heroine notes, forlornly, “I can’t even hate her, because she pulled herself up out of foster care by the bootstraps and has a really unique, awesome style.” Jess’s parasocial fixation culminates in some pat feminist revelations that struck me as at once dutiful and a little too online. But “Too Much” finds other ways to surprise as it unfolds. With its quicksilver shifts and sneaking sweetness, the experience of watching feels a lot like falling in love. ♦
