Lena Dunham's New Show 'Too Much' Is Emotionally Stunted

Regressing from the maturity and insight of 'Girls'

If you could be a one-trick pony, but that one trick was really amazing, would you take it? After labouring through the first season of Too Much¹, I can only conclude that Lena Dunham will never come remotely close to anything like Girls. That’s not automatically a tragedy. Most people would be lucky to have one decent professional accomplishment in their life, let alone to have made something as unparalleled as that show.

Too Much is about Jessica (Megan Stalter), a TV commercial producer who accepts a transfer to London to escape heartbreak. Her boyfriend of nearly a decade, Zev (Michael Zegen) has left her for a popular influencer, Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski). A devoted fan of British costume dramas and romantic comedies, Jessica hopes to reboot her love life abroad and on her first night, she randomly meets local band frontman Felix (Will Sharpe²), and they immediately hit it off. The season follows their ups and downs as a couple.

Too Much isn’t a dispiriting watch merely because it’s nowhere near as good as Girls. It’s depressing because watching Jessica is like watching a 30-something Hannah Horvath who has somehow regressed as a character from when she was a 20-something.

By the end of Girls, Hannah has finally found an outlet for her talents and passions when she becomes a writing instructor at an upstate New York university. She’s accepted that she and Adam would never make it, and that her friends aren’t that great. But she isn’t bitter because, for once, she has better things to worry about, including her newborn child. The audience says goodbye to Hannah, wondering what the next phase of her life will be like.

Then we see Jessica, who’s like Hannah at the beginning of Girls. She’s so messy. She doesn’t know how to modulate her personality to win people over. She wants to be body positive but deeply envies the hot girls. She has artistic dreams. The difference is that Hannah was freshly out of college, an age that which such behavior, however annoying, is understandable and even endearing, especially in a fully realized character like Hannah.

But there’s very little that’s winsome about Jessica. She’s overbearing and irritating, but not in that memorable way like when Hannah attends her editor’s funeral and is only concerned about what’s going to happen to her book. Jessica is more like that person who barges into a group conversation with a vibe-killing joke and then makes everyone feel bad for not laughing.

Part of that is because Stalter doesn’t have Dunham’s charisma and watchability. In Stalter’s defense, it was likely mission impossible anyway since Dunham has openly said that Too Much is autobiographical (i.e. based on her break-up with Jack Antonoff). So Stalker has to play a Dunham-based character while also emerging out of the shadow of another previous superior Dunham-based character who was written and played by Dunham herself.

If it’s unfair to compare Too Much too closely to Girls, then Dunham has set herself up. In just the first episode, many returning actors from Girls make their appearance, often playing the same type of character. There’s Rita Wilson, playing the cool mom who parties harder than her daughters. There’s Richard E. Grant, playing a cokey British dandy. There’s Andrew Rannells, playing the gay/bi guy who leaves the Lena Dunham to be his most authentic self. There’s Lena herself too, of course, albeit in a small role as Jessica’s neurotic and romantically forlorn older sister.

Even the character of Jessica is an amalgamation of the main characters in Girls. She looks like Hannah and has many of her irksome tendencies like excessive snacking and oversharing about her bodily functions. She has Shoshanna’s penchant for reality TV, running off to foreign countries, and Asian guys (Felix is biracial, but close enough). And she has Marnie’s mom and her name sounds like Jessa’s too.

Felix and Jessica

Some reviews have criticized Too Much for not speaking to Gen Z the way Girls did to Millennials.³ We are still waiting for the next Lena Dunham, it appears.⁴ But I don’t think Dunham has ever said Too Much is supposed to be Gen Z’s Girls, so that criticism is off. Still, the review does touch upon the core problem with the show, which is that Dunham doesn’t truly know the world she is writing about.

For instance, Jessica’s younger co-workers in London are just Gen Z stereotypes that one could cobble together from social media. One of the first questions they ask her upon meeting her is, “How queer are you?” Jessica is taken aback by this question. The scene is potentially set for some kind of generational clash. Will Dunham have incisive and brutally honest observations here, just as she once did regarding a certain type of Obama-era Brooklyn Millennials? Will there eventually be some cathartic blowup like when Shosh goes off on her friends at the North Fork beach house, or Hannah against her Iowa MFA classmates?

No. These co-workers just become background noise with their own undercooked subplots. The side characters are mostly all a charmless and annoying bunch. One of the worst is Felix’s roommate/landlord, Auggie, who’s the type to try pulling off a suit jacket and pajama bottoms at a formal event with all the insouciant cool of a guy wearing a horsehair sweater during a Texan August.

There’s nothing in Jessica and Felix’s romance either. They meet-cute in the disgusting bathroom of a London pub and end up walking home together. Felix can’t even go for a walk without running into at least three ex-girlfriends/hook-ups, but he’s immediately smitten with Jessica. It’s not as if they bond over their love for art or drugs. It’s not as if he’s some cold Englishman who’s won over by her American whimsy. If he’s attracted to her physical type, there’s no indication of it when you see all the previous women he’s been involved with. Maybe he’s aching for somebody totally different? If so, the show doesn’t make you feel it.

And why’s she into him? She doesn’t like his music all that much, or any music at all. Or his movie tastes. In one scene, they are watching Paddington and Felix is tearfully describing why he loves a certain scene so much. Meanwhile, Jessica is looking through Wendy’s Instagram. Does she just have a thing for handsome rockers who paint their nails? But Zev is more of a nice-Jewish-boy type. Is she the one who’s looking for somebody totally different from her usual type? I don’t think the show even knows.

Zev and Jessica

Speaking of Zev, the show’s flaw is apparent in how clumsily it makes him a villain. We already get that he’s not an admirable sort because of how eagerly he trades up to date Wendy. There are relatable moments of cruelty, such as when Jessica remembers how Zev grumpily refused to participate in social media trends with her, only for her to later see him goofily doing so with Wendy. But in a single episode, Zev goes from a guy who tells her, in front of her family, that he wants children with her, to a monster who tells Jessica to get rid of her dog, publicly sneers at her for watching The Vanderpump Rules, carelessly tells her to get an abortion, and calls her a cunt during their breakup.

Zev acts like this all the while he’s pursuing Wendy (or maybe he’s already cheating on Jessica and is plotting his getaway). From Zev’s perspective, he’s already won, hasn’t he? He’s got the hot girl he’s always been dreaming of. At that point, his main goal would probably be to let Jessica down as easily as possible, if only to ease his own guilty conscience. Nobody wants to feel like the antagonist in their own narrative. And in playing the good guy, he would mess with Jessica even more, making her blame herself.

Yet the show portrays Zev as a sadist who seems to delight in breaking down Jessica. He doesn’t seem real. Or if that’s his actual character, then what a psycho and that plotline has to be explored more! But then again, the show introduces and forgets several bombshell plot points, like when Jessica becomes a viral sensation after all her anti-Wendy finsta videos are leaked. Or how Felix was sexually abused by his nanny as a child.

It's so hard not to bring it back to Girls. But Girls would never take the cheap and easy way out by stacking the deck for or against anyone. The magic of that show is how it could create a bunch of horrifically unlikable characters but somehow make you love them despite—or even because of—their shortcomings. I love Hannah Horvath. I love how she so fervently demands attention from a world that would rather not give it to her. She’s aghast at the idea of being relegated to the audience, forever having to look up at her supposed superiors.

“Them?!” Hannah would say, baring her crooked front teeth in disbelief. “There’s no fucking way they’re better than me!” And I would commiserate.

People even unironically love Marnie now! Unthinkable for most back in the 2010s (except for me and a select few others). Jessa still mostly sucks, though.

Another glaring misstep in Too Much is how Nora (Lena Dunham) and Jameson (Andrew Rannells) reconcile in the end. At the beginning of the show, we learn that he’s left her for a throuple situation, which includes another man. This feels like Hannah and Elijah all over again, but this time, Elijah comes back to Hannah. Maybe this is a bit different because Jameson is bisexual, not gay. But then again, Elijah did fuck Marnie after he came out, though he claimed it was only three pumps.

In a vacuum, Nora and Jameson getting back together wouldn’t be such a big deal. But it serves as such an unflattering contrast with Girls, especially since the scene where Elijah comes out to Hannah is the single best scene in the show. Instead of the incisive wit and keen cultural commentary of Girls, we now get the fuzzy schlock of Too Much. Jessica and Wendy even become besties in the end, teaming up against the evil Zev.

I sometimes joke that Dunham sacrificed her life to give us Girls, so we ought not to be ingrates. There’s some truth to that, though. She has been subjected to intense scrutiny and ridicule, and not just by conservative proto-Rogan-bros, but also by her envious cultural and political allies.⁵ The newfound respect for Girls is heartening, but less so when it’s because Dunham has now safely aged out of being anyone’s primary cultural threat.

I fear that Dunham, as an artist, may be permanently crippled by Girls. They say that people become frozen in maturity at the age they become famous, which is why child stars often meet such tragic ends. What if Dunham became too famous too quickly at too young an age, especially for work that was extremely personal and revealing?

What if Dunham has made Too Much because she wants to be happy? Enough with the bleak realism of Girls, and more happy endings! Near the end of “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah confesses to the handsome doctor (in whose townhouse she’s spent the weekend) that deep down, she just wants to be happy, just like every other ordinary person. She cries as she says this, as if it’s the most lamentable thing she could admit to. The doctor realizes that their little make-believe time together is definitely over, that she’s still got a lot of growing up to do.

Weirdly enough then, from that point of view, Too Much’s immaturity is a sign of Dunham’s maturity. And if she wants to make feel-good things going forward, she doesn’t owe me or the audience anything else. But it would be nice if she gave us one more great, era-defining work.

1. Damn you, streaming. It took me longer than expected to finish Too Much took longer because I kept getting distracted by Youtube. I did learn more about the Mongolian obliteration of the Khwarazmian Empire, the legacy of the 1994 Disney live-action The Jungle Book movie, and a Breitling chronograph I’ll never be able to afford for the foreseeable future.

2. Most will recognize Will Sharpe from White Lotus S2, but he’s amazing in Giri/Haji, so go watch him in that excellent show.

3. Too Much on Netflix Review: Lena Dunham loses her generation-shaping voice by Maddy Mussen | The Standard

4. Who’s The Next Lena Dunham? by me

5. Why Women Hate Lena Dunham by

Sarah Ditum

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