10 July 2025

Lena Dunham has made TV funny again

In Too Much, her first major TV project since Girls, the American screenwriter proves she knows London like a local.

Lena Dunham is a creature of New York, but in 2021 she moved to London and fell in love with a British-Peruvian musician. Her charming and beautifully written new Netflix show is a love letter to the city she clearly understands well. In Too Much – a ten-part romantic comedy co-created with her husband, Luis Felber – the weather is often drizzly and sapping, people stand on pavements failing to get an Uber, and no one sane lives in Notting Hill.

The show is Dunham’s first major TV project since Girls, and she’s said that she dreads people trying to “Baby Reindeer it” – ie, attempting to work out who the characters are based on. It’s true that the biographical overlaps are hard to ignore, but the show has enough spirit and distinctiveness to feel like its own thing, thanks in large part to the impressive work done by its leads, Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe.

We meet our heroine Jessica (Stalter) in New York, where she’s had an upsetting break-up. She uses a garden gnome to break in to the flat she used to live in with her ex-boyfriend Zev (Michael Zegen), and finds him asleep beside his hot new girlfriend Wendy, a knitwear influencer played with perfect drollness by Emily Ratajkowski. Jessica, who isn’t soothed by Wendy’s therapy up-speak (“I want to hold space for how you’re feeling”), flees to ensure she doesn’t get arrested. Soon after this humiliating debacle, she moves to London.

Like Dunham, Jessica is an Anglophile: she’s seen Spice World “nine times” and loves Wuthering Heights. But soon enough, she starts to see Britain for what it is. The Hoxton estate where she’s renting a flat isn’t some honey-stoned palace, but a forbidding red-brick warren where the walls are so thin she can hear her neighbours calling each other “c***”. People don’t find her accent reciprocally delightful, and are weirded out when she tries to make conversation. Things start to look up, however, when she meets Felix (Sharpe) in a rancid pub bathroom. A sexily indolent musician with a dysfunctional family and painted nails, he is so bad at relationships he calls himself “Mr Sabotage”. Luckily they both fancy each other enough to look past the red flags, and stuff begins to happen.

There’s a lot to like about this series, which is so funny it makes you realise how little funny TV is being made at the moment. The dialogue doesn’t feel like real speech, exactly, but speech from a parallel world in which everyone is about 30 per cent wittier, and even half-jokes abandoned mid-sentence still land.

At one point, Felix introduces Jessica to Jaffa Cakes, and meanderingly tells the story that all people on this strange island tell about them – that there was once a court battle over whether they are a cake or a biscuit. At another, Felix gallantly offers Jessica his coat. In a dumber show, she’d have swooningly accepted, but here she doesn’t. “I run hot,” she tells him cheerfully. “I’m, like, sweating.” Then she changes her mind and takes the coat. Then she feels too hot, so returns it.

The show is given frequent injections of fun by its almost ridiculously starry supporting cast. Dunham herself pops up as Jessica’s morose sister, and Andrew Scott is relishable as a sex-pest director who wants to make a different kind of Christmas advert: boundary-breaking, nihilistic, Ken Loachy.

Still, there are problems, and the biggest is the show’s refusal to sugarcoat its portrayal of modern love. “I’m such a fucking mess,” says Jessica at one point. She’s right, and watching her be a fucking mess over and over can get wearing. She sets herself on fire. She slobs around at work. Whenever she meets one of Felix’s female friends, she obsesses depressingly over whether they might steal him from her. “I’m not a bitch, I am good!” she yells towards the end, and though it’s clear the show wants you to agree, I’m not sure I entirely do.

Still, there are moments of real tenderness that will stay with me. Early on, Felix says he’s noticed Jessica isn’t treating herself very well. She lets bowls of noodles go cold rather than eat them hot; she sleeps with the curtains wide open. Jessica explains that she keeps them open so that she knows it’s morning: if she didn’t, she’d keep sleeping and may as well be dead. “I’ll tell you when it’s morning,” he tells her gently. “I can be the curtains.”

Too Much
Netflix

[See also: Cruelty is Britain’s biggest export]