Lena Dunham’s New Series, “Too Much” Is Too Much, Indeed

For all of Dunham’s faults and controversies, she’s one of the greatest artists working in Hollywood today. HBO’s GIRLS, the millennial-satire often compared to Sex and The City of the 2010s, was irreverent, bold, clever, and polarizing. Many didn’t get it. Or didn’t want to. To this day, people are dissecting brilliantly written scenes about hot button topics such as abortion, convinced they can reduce the contents of a writer’s complicated thoughts and beliefs into a literal reading of the situation. 

As some have described it, GIRLS was a "genius satirical representative of millennial narcissism and post-2008 recession malaise" that often went unappreciated by viewers and critics of the time, who were most distracted by Dunham’s abrasive public persona, tendency to overshare, and sometimes, just her appearance. Howard Stern famously slogged Dunham on his radio show for being “a little fat girl who kind of looks like Jonah Hill” that subjects us to nudity and sex scenes, something he claimed was such an asasult on his eyeballs it “felt like rape.” In 2013, unabashed nudity from an unattractive protagonist was groundbreaking stuff for Hollywood, before the Weinstein-esque gatekeepers opened the floodgates for all sorts of talent—beautiful or otherwise.

Stern of twelve years ago would certainly be shocked at what was to come. Dunham’s newest show Too Much takes some of the fairy dust that made GIRLS work and amplifies it to offputting proportions, including its main character Jessica, played by Megan Stalter. The show lives up to its name, delivering “too much” of just about everything that made GIRLS work, in the end overdosing on its own chutzpah. If Lena is still the “voice of our generation,” or at least “a” voice of “a” generation,” well… things aren’t looking so good.

The Real Life Inspiration Behind Too Much

The rom-com series boasts a stacked cast with the likes of Naomi Watts, Rita Wilson, Richard E. Grant, Rhea Perlman, Kit Harrington, and Stephen Fry. There are familiar faces from Dunham’s other works, like Andrew Rannells, who played Dunham’s gay best friend in GIRLS, playing a very unconvincing heterosexual husband, Jameson, which is promptly accounted for with the detail that they’ve split up so Jameson can explore “non-monogamy with a couple both named Cody.” For the cherry of modernity on top of it all: recognizable influencers like Emily Ratajkowski, whose meta-arc as an enviable hot influencer that steals the protagonist’s boyfriend (not literally, just through sheer magnetism) is very on the nose. Much like the show’s rapid-fire references to 'icks,' 'red flags,' 'love bombers,' 'emotional labor,' and pretentious directors who’ve somehow escaped #MeToo, it leans so hard into cultural commentary that it risks collapsing under the weight of its own winks.

The show opens as a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of romantic comedies and dramedies, riffing on tropes from the genre, as established by the garish titles of each episode. The ten episode mini-series proceed as follows: Nonsense & Sensibility, Pity Woman, Ignore Sunrise, Notting Kill, Pink Valentine, To Doubt a Boy, Terms of Resentment, One Wedding and a Sex Pest, Enough, Actually, and The Idea of Glue. If the titles didn’t smack you in the face, the dialogue will. In the very first episode, we learn Jessica’s only refuge is to watch “love stories set in pastoral England,” a dragged out trope that sees her framing Felix as her “Mr. Darcy” upon first swooning.

But its attempt to subvert these tropes as some sort of meta-commentary on our current culture inspires a longing, not a repudiation, of the past. At the same time, it plays with tropes about navigating cultural differences, of the London-bound American variety. Dunham drew from personal experience with expat life in crafting the show’s narrative. As an American who’s moved across the world to another country, I found the observations of cultural clashes, idiosyncrasies, and language barriers to be relatably amusing, even if they are sometimes trite and unsophisticated. There’s Jessica’s insistence she came to London wanting to bed a guy like Hugh Grant from “The British Jones Diaries” or expecting an “estate” flat to be something resembling a residence fit for the aristocracy, or its somewhat elementary observations of lexical differences like “pub” instead of “bar.”

The show follows Jessica, a very capable line producer at a New York ad agency, where she's worked for the past 15 years. Though she's good at her job, it's not what she thought she'd be doing at this point in her career. She dreamed of becoming a director to "say something about the female experience." After her New York firm merges with a British company, she's sent to London for three months for the purpose of assisting with a Christmas commercial featuring Rita Ora. At this point in the story, she and her ex-boyfriend Zev have already broken up, but we don't get a bird’s eye view of just how toxic their relationship was until the full flashback of episode five. 

Despite the one-to-one art imitates life scenarios, Dunham swears the show is only about 5% autobiographical. 

Heartbroken and resentful of Zev’s very public engagement to his new influencer girlfriend, she decides to go to London to escape the memory-prison that is New York City, and to escape the recent embarrassment of breaking into her ex's apartment while he and his new fiance were sleeping. The plot’s inciting incident is thought to be inspired by Dunham's real-life experience moving from New York to London following a breakup with Jack Antonoff (long-time collaborator with Taylor Swift and husband of actress Margaret Qualley), where she finds love in a British musician, Luis Felber (in the show, Felix Remen) who she marries at the end of the series, in a very short-lived courtship. Despite the one-to-one art imitates life scenarios, Dunham swears the show is only about 5% autobiographical. 

Whether or not this is true, I don’t fault her for saying as much, considering how unbearable the protagonist (and how pitiable her life) is. Nevertheless, the strategic use of a Jack-Antonoff produced Taylor Swift song, “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” seems like a wink and a nod, and Felber, who’s thought to be the real-life inspiration for Felix, is also executive producer, co-creator, and co-writer of the series, alongside Dunham. If you’re into schizophrenically connecting threads of red string on poster boards to put the dots together, you can cross-reference the parallels between the fictional series and Dunham’s real life, as TIME Magazine and Cosmopolitan have, noting similarities about her relationships, the breakup, rehoming her dog, and their rushed marriage. 

In the series, Jessica and her boyfriend break up after seven years together. He moves on with a conventionally attractive influencer, Wendy Jones (played by Emily Ratajowski) and she tortures herself by stalking her Instagram, tormented by how cool and pretty she is and seething over her engagement. She keeps a video diary on a private Instagram, where she word vomits “too much” information regarding her ex-boyfriend, his new fiance, and all the feelings she has about them—regularly addressing her videos to Wendy in a one-sided conversation.

If this wasn’t pathetic enough, her choice of timing regarding when it’s appropriate to record these videos is even worse. She records them while huddled in bathroom stalls during high stakes business meetings over dinner or in her own apartment. Regardless of location, people are always overhearing her talk to herself like she’s in an episode of Fleabag.

Internet sleuths believe this to be a riff on Dunham’s ex-boyfriend of six years, Antonoff, who moved on with model Carlotta Kohl and later married actress Margaret Qualley. In a 2018 profile by The Cut, Dunham even admitted that it was painful to watch his new girlfriend's Instagram stories, “I thought I was kind of proving weird girls can have love too. And now he’s dating somebody who looks regular and normal and like girls are supposed to look.”

Is There Anything Romantic or Comedic About Modern Romance?

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: size. Ambient body neutrality runs through the pulse of this show. It begs for you to acknowledge how rubenesque the lead actress is (with Stalter acting as a stand-in for Dunham in the series’ narrative largely due to Dunham’s unwillingness to have her body dissected again) but it also flies in the face of conventional wisdom of what true lived experience at that size is like. Jessica, who is at least double the size of Hannah Baker in GIRLs, is inexplicably being pursued by conventionally attractive men of all ages, whether it’s indie musicians, directors, landlords, or young interns she works with. It’s one of those annoyingly unbelievable plot holes akin to watching an early 2000s rom-com where the queen bee hot blonde inexplicably falls for an ugly dork, and you think “yep, a delusional man definitely wrote this.”

Felix is like a dreamboat composite of all the characteristics (liberal) women seek in leftist femboys—he’s an indie rocker with painted nails, who's a deeply damaged philanderer who’s soft and tender but also flighty and unreliable. He’s a walking contradiction, and it’s unclear whether the show is trying to redeem or indict him. It plays this game, positing him as the modern antithesis to a Mr. Darcy-esque leading man, but initially poses him as this impossibly perfect romantic prospect. No matter how exhausting and annoying Jessica is, he doesn’t run away. Not when she sets herself on fire the very first night they meet, not when she’s constantly fishing for compliments, not when she ignores his deep emotional investment in Paddington to scroll on her phone. 

When Jessica’s coworker first asks about her new fling, he asks if he’s the real deal or "is he, like, a trauma-bonder, gaslighter, narcissist, tinder-swindler?” That’s the central question that Jessica, and the series, is trying to answer. She wrestles with his implausibly perfect aura, googling “10 Red Flags You Should Pay Attention To” on company time; even voicing her concerns about red flags and love bombing out loud. Felix is framed as endearingly oblivious to this discourse, commenting that he recently learned what love bombing was but that he doesn’t “get it.” “Isn’t it just like being really nice to someone?” he asks, innocently. 

It’s a truly pitiable vision of modern relationships, parenthood and dysfunction that is only the tip of the iceberg. 

He’s similarly unfamiliar with the distinction between monogamy and polyamory. He tears down Jessica’s steely exterior with a powerful monologue about how he feels like she’s obsessively scanning him for red flags after spending the night at an incredibly inappropriate work dinner party involving doing coke with her boss’ wife, and talking about her UTIs at the dinner table. To make matters worse, the whole night was an obvious pretense to an orgy. “But I’m not sitting there assessing you for red flags because that’s not how my brain works,” Felix says, pointing out all the various red flags Jessica herself raises, and there are plenty.

He laughs about the situation and makes a comment about Jessica being “too much,” which, judging by Jessica’s response, is a sore subject. "Maybe I'm not too much, maybe you're just not enough,” Jessica lashes, only for Felix to reassure her this is nothing but a Britishism that she’s misperceiving to carry a negative connotation. "It's not an insult, I mean, like you're too much, like it's a good thing.” She’s “just the right amount and then a little more,” he tells her. In another scene, he admires her for “being so, like, alive.” This is a stark contrast from her last boyfriend, to whom she was stuck in an eight year relationship seemingly built on love bombing which slowly eroded into, if not an emotionally abusive relationship, at least a very toxic, loveless one. 

In “Pink Valentine” we see how the relationship evolved from “too good to be true” euphoria to poison, with Zev constantly picking Jessica apart. Even her criticisms of his writing, which he asks for, are too trite and unintellectual for his standards. He starts to break her down by targeting her biggest insecurities, becoming emotionally distant, blaming her for everything, and even emotionally cheating on her with Wendy towards the end. He tells her she’s "always dressing for negative attention because [she] is not a Hadid sister. It’s fine not to be a Hadid sister, but just be a normal person,” and tells her she’s shallower than she’ll ever admit because she’s just dying to be part of a power couple. These insults feel hyper-specific, like they come from a very personal experience with the pain of the idealization to devaluation pipeline of an abusive relationship.

To cope with Zev’s emotional abuse, she tries everything to win him back. She even gives up her dog, to no avail. Finally, she hits her breaking point and cheats on him with the first guy to show her kindness—a younger guy who gets coffee at her workplace. She gets pregnant, though she never knows with 100% certainty who the father actually is, and when she tells Zev in the middle of a heart to heart about their relationship and whether it should even continue, she suggests she could get an abortion, after he tells her he doesn’t know if he loves her anymore. Instead of pushing back, he affirms she should terminate the pregnancy. She’s distraught; leans on the women in her family for support, and adopts what’s clearly acting as a surrogate child as a way to cope with the loss of her real one: a deeply damaged dog named Astrid whose tongue permanently hangs out of her mouth. 

Dunham, on the other hand, does appear onscreen in the series, playing opposite Stalter as her older sister, recently divorced from her now experimentally pansexual husband whom she shares a child with. But she doesn’t have much screentime, mostly popping up in Facetime calls as a blobbed mass that’s nearly fused to her bed or couch. She seems to lay around in a clinically depressive state, unwilling to even get up for the sake of greeting her 11-year-old son. It’s a truly pitiable vision of modern relationships, parenthood and dysfunction that is only the tip of the iceberg. 

The show has some redeeming qualities, like its cinematography, savvy use of music, and some killer lines of dialogue, like “don’t make me feel stupid for loving things” to her pretentious ex-boyfriend after he looks down on her anodyne taste in music or Jessica misreading the vibe of the room when she chimes in to a group of British girls commiserating about men thinking they have their loyalty locked down without a ring with “tell me about it ladies, I mean men are all psychotic rapists, right?” 

There’s also a captivating performance by Naomi Watts and her on-screen husband, Richard E. Grant. However, this series loses me with its negative qualities. For one, it’s vulgar for vulgarity’s sake and is gratuitously grotesque. Disgusting shots of clogged toilets and shots of spitting in each other’s mouths during sex come to mind. Or the inclusion of gross details like not being able to wash your hands and going into detail about how the germs are going to just fester and mingle with the soap unless you actually rinse it off. The sex scenes always have some unnecessarily gross component to them by inserting some offbeat component like fatness or a geriatric woman that sucks all of the chemistry or suspension of disbelief out of the room. 

Jessica walks around with her foot permanently in her mouth. When she Facetimes her mom, she scolds her for asking "what does he do?" about her new love interest instead of "does he f*** you from behind in, like, a respectful way? Does he fingerblast you? Does he know how to fingerbang?" At a company dinner party held at her boss’ house, her conversational opener is to start talking about how many UTIs she’s had. “Other days, I’m waking up and my piss hole’s like burning fire,” she shares over the main course.

It’s vulgar for vulgarity’s sake and is gratuitously grotesque.

The annoying part is how the series rubs this grossness in your face but insists you can’t think anything about it. It’s perplexing that journalists’ take on the show is that Dunham’s insistence on “taking up more space” is exactly what the world needs right now because the titular character subverts “standard beauty molds” or The New York Times’ insistence that the show isn’t “nervy enough.” Here’s a line of dialogue Jessica says to her grandmother after she makes a comment about her ex-boyfriend being funny, “Why don't you hook up with him? Why don't you suck him off? See if you can get him to cum.” When she’s first introduced to a successful man by her coworkers, she tells him she “can’t wait to have anal sex with [him]” and when he tells her that she’s messy, she questions why women get labeled messy and chaotic while men get a freebie even if they have a wife and two-year old twins but are out trying to have sex with other people. She storms out in an impassioned monologue about how she’s a work in progress and she chooses chaos. 

Dunham’s signature offbeat female physicality is used to interrupt the rom-com fantasy. Jessica will be floating on cloud nine one second and the next, she’s scarfing down ice cold pho from the fridge in the middle of the night like she’s trying to fill an emotional void. When the camera lingers on these moments, it’s deeply uncomfortable. And that’s the point. Felix is presented to us as this impossible prospect: too good to be true. His budding romance with Jessica feels like the beginning stages of the euphoric honeymoon phase, when you’re unsure if all of this is real or if you’re blinded by rose colored glasses. Felix is everything Zev is not. He genuinely likes Jessica. He sees things in her she doesn’t see in herself. 

He appreciates the little quirks about her, doesn’t think she’s too much, and notices the little details that suggest to him she isn’t kind to herself despite his admiration for her brilliance. He notes how she eats ice cold pho without heating it up, uses rough towels on her face, and sleeps with the blinds open. When she pushes back, asking how she’s supposed to know if it’s morning and time to get up, he’s romantically reassuring, “I’ll tell you when it’s morning. I’ll be your curtains.” Whereas Zev clearly preyed on Jessica’s insecurities, slowly eroding away at her self confidence, Felix is enamored by her. But he’s also damaged. He’s a recently recovered addict with deep trauma: childhood sexual abuse and a dysfunctional family dynamic. 

Baggage & Transcendence

The show plays with the concept of trauma, childhood experiences, family dynamics, and past relationships all haunting the narrative and our characters’ inner psyches. These people didn’t emerge in a vacuum. They were shaped by these experiences. They developed unhealthy coping mechanisms and attachment styles, and they will either continue to repeat these patterns or unlearn them and break the cycle. Besides the backstory of Jessica and Zev’s relationship in episode five, we also start to see her perception of Felix unravel. 

After seemingly resolving the “red flags” issue in the previous episode, where they shared a beautiful moment of vulnerability that seemed to indicate Jessica’s paranoia was nothing but unwarranted self sabotage, her worries being validated in Pink Valentine feel like emotional whiplash. We’re introduced to the “Poly” trio: three good female friends of Felix’s, all of whom he’s been intimate with. There’s a main Poly of the group, who was his lover of ten years. They share matching tattoos and stay in close touch as good friends. The Poly group is really dismissive of Jessica and as she’s making all of these painful new discoveries, Felix feels distant. The poly girls paint a different picture of Felix: a guy who isn’t really sober and is a serial player. Jessica is forced to confront her worst fears while high on ketamine and reflects on her past toxic relationship, wondering if history is repeating itself. In some sense, this arc is a stroke of brilliance. 

The confusion of this episode is intentionally emotionally ambiguous, just like it is when you’re actually in that situation. The head Poly tells Jessica “we all play a role in relationships” which Jessica initially pushes back on. “What if you didn’t play a role in the relationship? You know, what if your relationship was literally perfect because you’re a perfect angel and the other person changed and the other person got really mean like a monster?” Poly tells her “even heroes make mistakes when it comes to love." In a drug-induced state, she reflects on her relationship with Zev. As much as we see Zev’s toxicity, Jessica confronts the mistakes she made along the way, too. At the end of the day, her anxious attachment and martyr complex played its role in degrading the relationship, and she’s the one who cheats. 

When Felix comes back to her flat to ask her why she left, she confronts him about his supposed coke use and ignoring her, but these turn out to be projections of Jessica’s insecurities. He wasn’t on drugs or ignoring her. He was nervous about the gig and had diarrhea. This reveals that Jessica and Felix are both somewhat unreliable narrators. The show oscillates between presenting Felix as someone who’s misunderstood and catching a lot of flack for Jessica’s own projections, and someone who’s genuinely flaky, unreliable, and avoidant.

When he asks if he can move in with Jessica temporarily, she assumes he’s trying to take advantage of her. She projects past experiences onto him. He calls her out, “sometimes it feels like you’re fighting with someone who isn’t even here.” This is a recurrent theme, with coworker Kim blowing up on Josie (coworker and new lesbian lover) after Josie gets distant once they sleep together. Josie responds, “You’re putting a lot of projection onto me. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with me.” But here’s the catch: when Jessica behaves like this, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. She does end up pushing him away. He goes to stay with his former lover Poly, the last person she wants him to stay with. 

As compelling and complicated as their relationship is, it makes you long for the purity and stability of a Pride & Prejudice sort of love.

When he asks her to behave in a way that’s situationally appropriate at a wedding of a long-time friend of his, she continues to make a scene. Felix struggles to respond to her “I love you” because of past trauma and intimacy issues. He’s been trying to turn over a new leaf with Jessica, but old habits die hard. As Jessica continues to project onto him, he relapses on booze and drugs, goes to parties, and even sleeps with other women. They understandably break up, but as he’s packing up his things, Jessica’s dog Astrid has a medical emergency and he rushes her to the vet. Unfortunately, she isn’t able to be saved and the dog dies. 

Zev’s fiance is in town and asks to meet up after seeing Jessica’s now-public Instagram crash outs about her relationship. They have a girl’s girl moment and confide in each other’s painful experiences with the same man who “chooses strong women just to tear them down.” Wendy wishes Jessica finds happiness and the right guy for her. Jessica realizes she probably already found it with Felix but they messed it up. Wendy asks her to reconsider and tells her she’s always willing to forgive someone who’s willing to say sorry and who tells the truth. In one last grand gesture fit for a rom-com, Jessica rushes across the highway to find Felix, who is participating in a climate protest with his activist friends by gluing themselves to the road. 

After Astrid dies, she confronts Wendy, and takes action to save her work’s Christmas video production, Jessica is finally taking accountability for her life instead of playing the victim. She extends understanding to Felix, forgiving him for cheating on her and giving into his vices. Both admit they’ve played roles in sabotaging their relationship. “The sabotage twins,” they say. Felix is finally able to tell Jessica he loves her and in the middle of Jessica getting arrested, proposes. We’re left with a marriage ceremony that ends with Felix joking “so how long do you want to stay married?” As compelling and complicated as their relationship is, it makes you long for the purity and stability of a Pride & Prejudice sort of love. Just because something is “more realistic” doesn’t make it healthy or love. 

My thoughts on the series, which admittedly did improve upon a second watch, are best summed up by conservative commentator Emily Jashinsky, who put it: “She is the friend who you listen to whine constantly, and they're so smart, and it's so frustrating because they're constantly whining in a way that makes it so easy to diagnose what their actual problem is, and yet they can't see it. That's Lena Dunham—whose content over and over again projects, unintentionally, this deep discontent with post-sexual revolution feminism and liberalism but never puts its finger on why. She is fabulous at identifying the problem, but she never draws the conclusion from identifying the problem.” 

Dunham continues to create the most brutally indicting works of art castigating the emotional fallout of a generation raised on meaningless sex, intersectional feminism, and progressivism, but she stops short of connecting the dots, which is perhaps why so many on the left and right pull their hair out trying to analyze it.