Too Much Review |Lena Dunham’s RomCom Attempt Has Too Many Frills, Too Little Intensity

The first thing that strikes you about Lena Dunham’s Too Much is that the central character Jessica (Megan Stalter, hungover from Hacks, 2021-2023) doesn’t add up. An advertising producer in New York, she has recently been dumped by Zev (Michael Zegen, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, 2017-2023), her live-in boyfriend of seven years, and decides to move to London to nurse her heart break. When she is not surfing the internet for 10 red flags at her new job, or insta-stalking the new fiancée of her ex (knitting influencer Wendy, played by Emile Ratajkowski), she is FaceTiming across the pond with her mother, grandmother or sister—discussing vaginas, chlamydia, UTIs and pee-holes. At other times, she is burning one too many candles and setting herself on fire, or watching British TV shows. She likes all things English— Bridget Jones (2001-2025), Notting Hill (1999), Jane Austen, the accent, tea (but gets gobsmacked when someone says ‘bollocks’). Let’s just say she is a less clever version of Hannah Horvath in Girls (2012-2017).

Jess is naïve, clingy and over-sharey, with a hysterical sense of style and is a true believer in her own sparkle. She wears frilly dresses and diaphanous nighties with frilly shorts, too much makeup to bed, has a gremlin dog Astrid who matches her frill for frill, bow for bow. She is refreshingly and unashamedly not skinny, like Hannah Horvath in Girls, but her romantic rivals are played by epitomes of conventional ‘hotness’: Emile Ratajkowski and the French movie star Adèle Exarchopoulos.

Yes, she is too much, but don’t say they didn’t warn you.

On her first evening out in London, she meets Felix (Will Sharpe, White Lotus, Season Two, 2022), a gloomy but disarming indie musician at a pub. By the end of the first episode, they are a couple, even though he reads her as “one of those Love Actually girls”.

They have a lot of moany sex and their relationship moves at warp speed: meeting the friends (too many Pollys, all of whom have had sex with Felix at some point), dinner with her boss, cocaine with the boss’s wife, plus-one at his school-mate’s wedding and almost ‘meeting the parents’.

It’s a hard time for romance all around, but the kind of love that is in Too Much is strangely closer to real life than most—two people being together because each offers something that the other needs. However, without a visceral sense of desire, it doesn’t feel like a romance unfolding for our pleasure. Jess sees him as someone who will care for her, and Felix sees in her the security he lacked in his own home: his father’s lack of fiscal wisdom lost them their home, plus he ran out of money to pay for Felix’s posh boarding school, making him drop out.

“There’s something about you that makes me want to take care of you,” Felix tells Jessica early on in their relationship.

This is pragmatic love in the time of Tinder, Hinge and Netflix. This is love that is convenient, born out of inertia; it’s about two people tagging along because neither wants to be alone. So yes, the chemistry seems off and the sex seems awkward and not photogenic, but then, so is real life.

And yet, the basic rule for any onscreen romance is that you have to buy in that these two want to be together; you have to want them to end up together. With Jess and Felix, you just don’t care and that’s Too Much’s biggest failure.

There are few moments when you believe in them: At the end of the second episode, when Jess and Felix lie down in bed - she listening to the mixed CD he’s made for her, them not speaking, not touching, just lingering in comfort—that moment has the kind of intimacy that none of their lovemaking scenes has.

The scene where he revisits his old home, and then receives a proper tuck-in from Jess, with a lullaby featuring her father’s favourite song is heartwarming.

And then there are other antipodal moments. “Just because you are not ambitious doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take pride in my work,” Jess says to Felix after a good day at her job—proxy-shooting a bland Christmas commercial for her agency when the director Jim (Andrew Scott) walks away. She has just offered to open a joint account with her broke boyfriend barely a week after dating.

The rhythm is all over the place. There are occasional moments of brilliance followed by several minutes of stupidity. As for the other characters, they look like they were cast to check the inclusivity boxes: her colleagues at work, his various exes, his friends from the band and boarding school. None of them have arcs of their own, and none of them is particularly likable. They are mostly self-absorbed, elitist and mean, and their lives always seem to happen off-screen, because nothing is built into the narrative. Too Much often drifts into the absurd, and not in a good way.

The episode titles are inspired: ‘Notting Kill’, ‘Enough Actually’, ‘Pretence and Sensibility’; the show is ridden with clichés, and then some. The only thing that has intensity is the flashback to Jessica’s relationship with Zev, with some of the most piercing scenes.

Naomi Watts, Stephen Fry, Andrew Scott (crush-worthy priest from Fleabag, 2016), and others make cameos and you keep waiting for them to come back to liven things up, because the lead pair exhausts you. Stalter lacks the range or charisma to carry off a role that expects too much (she is especially bad in the crying scenes). I can see Melissa McCarthy killing it in this role, but would she have done it? I wonder. Sharpe remains the same shade of gloomy throughout. The clothes are very costume-y, somewhat reminiscent of Emily in Paris (2020), and speak of Netflix’s need to overproduce everything. As Jess’s sister Nora, Dunham lights up the screen whenever she appears on FaceTime and her casting is on point.

Despite the mopey sexcapades, the show limps through its 10 episodes of varying lengths and suddenly, everything is gift-wrapped and tied with a ribbon and they all live happily ever after.

Sure, Dunham made television history of sorts with her seminal dramedy Girls featuring messy, compelling women, an unlikable female protagonist Hannah (played by Dunham) and unfiltered sex. She wrote and sold the show to HBO at 23.

Like Jess, Dunham broke up with her long-term partner (music producer Jack Antonoff) and moved from New York to London, where she quickly fell in love and married an indie singer, Luis Felber, who she has co-written Too Much with.

Maybe Dunham wanted all the right things with her comeback to television—inclusivity, expansiveness, a re-examination of the love stories we choose to tell. May be she wants to say that you don’t have to become the best version of yourself to ‘earn’ love. You can suck at your job, be brash, make terrible choices—and still have your happy ending.

It’s just that she doesn’t say it convincingly.