The first time I watched Too Much, Lena Dunham’s return to scripted television after a seven-year hiatus, it felt impossibly disappointing—visually flat, almost defiantly unfunny, more cringeworthy in its reliance on Anglo-American culture clashes for charm than Mary-Kate and Ashley trying to get a royal guard to crack a smile. The premise: Jess (played by Hacks’ Megan Stalter) is a New Yorker working in advertising production who’s offered the chance to move to London when her relationship catastrophically implodes. (Dunham, as ever daring us to try to like her characters, has Jess, in the first episode, breaking into her ex’s apartment and terrorizing his new influencer girlfriend while brandishing a garden gnome.) Arriving in London, Jess has a chance encounter with Felix (Will Sharpe), a broke musician, in a particularly vile pub toilet. Both are hapless in different but complementary ways—Jess tells Felix how to wash his hands, Felix helps Jess get home when she accidentally orders her Uber to Heathrow.
These are hard times to be a romantic, especially on Netflix. Two years ago, on a New Yorker podcast lamenting the modern state of the rom-com, Alexandra Schwartz noted that the most crucial quality for any romance is this: “You have to believe that these two people want to be together, and you have to buy in.” On this front, Too Much barely even tries. Stalter is wackily endearing as Jess, and Sharpe adds brooding complexity to Felix’s offhand charm. But as screen lovers, the pair have almost negative chemistry, coming together with a shrug and staying together out of what feels like inertia. Initially, this set my teeth on edge—two characters with seemingly little interest in each other being paired off with the chaotic insistence of a child making her soft toys kiss. But the more I’ve come back to the show, the more its slack, unromantic approach to love looks intentional. Jess and Felix couple up not because they’re giddy with feeling, drunk on proximity and intimacy and connection, but because each offers something specific that the other person needs. Too Much is co-produced by Working Title, and the names of its episodes nod to some gooier rom-coms served up by the company in bygone days: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill. But in the place where the show’s heart should be is instead pure pragmatism: This is love for a cold climate.
If you compare Too Much with Celine Song’s recent film, Materialists, in which every character sizes up romantic prospects with the agenda of a hiring manager, you can sense a theme. Can we afford to actually fall in love now? In this economy? Dunham presents infatuation as nonsensical, or even destructive: The best episode of Too Much is one that details the breakdown of Jess’s seven-year relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen), a wannabe music writer who appears like a white knight in a bar one night when she’s lost her friends and her pizza (nobly, he secures another slice) and immediately dazzles Jess into submission, charming her family, devising kissing rituals scored to songs, even massaging her grandmother’s feet. Quickly, though, he sours. When she moves in with him, he’s outraged by the fact that so much of her stuff is pink. He sneers at her love for Miley Cyrus power ballads and mocks her need for affection. “I swear you dress as a fuck you to people sometimes, Jess,” he tells her, when she puts on a sailor smock to go out. The longer she loves him, the more contemptuous he becomes.
Felix, by contrast, is cool from the start. No one is better than Dunham at writing sympathetic fuckboys, men in varying stages of arrested development who are unpleasant in uniquely beguiling ways. At the pub, Felix treats Jess like a kind of curiosity (she is, in fact, wearing the very same sailor smock that we later learn Zev had been so cruel about). It isn’t until he sees the coziness of Jess’s rental apartment that something seems to click in his mind in an enticing way, like a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet reconsidering her feelings for Mr. Darcy after she first visits Pemberley. Jess, somewhat randomly, tries to kiss Felix; Felix, perturbed, admits that he has a girlfriend and leaves. He walks around for a bit listening to Fiona Apple and smoking, then goes back to Jess’s place, where he finds her being hosed down in the shower by a baby-faced paramedic after having accidentally set her nightgown on fire. Somewhat incredibly, he stays.
Too Much gestures at the rom-com, but it seems more enamored with the sitcom, particularly the low-fi, edgy, slightly manic mode of British comedies on BBC Three: Fleabag, Pulling, Coupling. Compared with Dunham’s Girls, whose direction and cinematography specifically emulated Woody Allen and Mike Mills, it’s a strangely unprepossessing show, the kind that more typically gets pulled together cheaply on the British taxpayer’s dime. In a bottle-ish episode early on, Jess and Felix stay up all night in her apartment, having sex, eating takeout pho, and ignoring each other’s emotional cues. (He tells her about being grossed out by an ex when he once saw her eating cold Chinese food with a look of blank desperation; later, in secret, Jess shovels cold noodles into her mouth with the same vacancy.) The characters do antic, no-stakes things that require little explanation and often defy logic. Felix goes to claim unemployment, telling the officer assessing him that if he gets a job, he won’t have time to write music. Jess goes location scouting with a hotshot director, almost has sex with him in a firelit four-poster bed, then shows up outside Felix’s window, begging him to move in with her. Late in the series, Jennifer Saunders appears playing a character identical to Absolutely Fabulous’s Edina, down to the selfsame styling and vocal delivery.
But with help from flashback episodes, the show also starts to lay out why Felix and Jess might be drawn to each other. Jess, still devastated from her breakup and friendless in London, finds instant stability in Felix as someone who’ll care for her, even if, subliminally at least, she seems to see through him. Like so many Dunham heroines, Jess is a perplexing mix of intuition and delusion; she offers Felix a joint bank account after they’ve been together barely a week, but also correctly identifies that his total lack of ambition fits awkwardly with her pride in her work. If, as an actor, Stalter sometimes seems less convincing than Dunham was at pulling the combination off, it’s because it’s an exceedingly difficult register to play in. Walking up to a guest at a wedding, Jess introduces herself by saying, “Wearing neutrals is like a way of saying you’ve given up, right?”—a line so thoughtlessly rude that even Hannah Horvath might blanch. Felix, whose childhood is revealed to have been unloving and unstable, seems to see in Jess something like instant security: not just a warm person with a home that’s much more welcoming than his chaotic squat full of eco-warriors, but an insta-family. If their relationship skips the heady, obsessive crush phase to get straight into a comfortable, stolid, domestic mode, maybe it’s because that’s what both of them are really yearning for.
Initially, something about Too Much’s insistence on citing rom-coms in its episode titles while so stubbornly resisting romance felt galling to me. The quality that draws us to, say, the tortured off-on dynamic of Connell and Marianne on Normal People or the unbreakable bond between Nora and Hae Sung in Past Lives is the idea that love is somehow transcendent, that it elevates humans above the level of mere existence. But realistically, what is love if not care and attention? And what are care and attention if not expressions of tenderness and regard? Dunham buries clues throughout Too Much that seem to suggest what she thinks about men and women: Matrimony, Felix’s father tells his wife late in the show, comes from the Latin words mater, meaning “mother,” and monia, meaning “activity”—it’s about preparing a girl to be a mother, and in many ways, a maternal dynamic is exactly what both Felix and Jess are craving. “You’re like this alien,” Jess tells him in the final episode, “but you also feel like home.”
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