Maybe You Can’t Separate ‘Too Much’ From Lena Dunham, But You Should Try

An expat makes her way through single life in London, where her unique personal style is a frequent topic of discussion. Her work isn’t always stimulating, but does let her mix with entertaining oversharers. When she visits a bar on a pivotal night, she has a chance meeting with a sexy artist who will become very important to her. Is he ready for love? Is she? The first season of their show really puts them through dizzying joys and shattering pain — but yes, Too Much is TV’s tenderest romantic comedy since Starstruck.

Too Much’s expat — an American this time — is Jessica (Megan Stalter), a line producer working in TV commercials. After her boyfriend Zev (Michael Zegen) leaves her for knitting influencer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), Jessica is forced to move out of his apartment and back in with her mother, sister and nephew at her grandmother’s house on Long Island. When an opportunity comes up for Jessica’s colleague and ex-brother-in-law Jameson (Andrew Rannells) to send someone to a London office for a client’s huge Christmas ad, he selects Jessica to give her a chance to reset. As a fan of Britain’s period romances AND gritty crime dramas — “I’m, um, a Wuthering Heights, Prime Suspect rising,” she says later — Jessica is eager to go. 

On her first night in town, Jessica randomly selects a pub to take herself out for a Diet Coke, happening upon an open-mic night featuring a performance by Felix (Will Sharpe) and his band. He offers to walk Jessica home after his set, and a mishap involving an open flame and a prairie nightgown is the first step toward their getting increasingly entangled. Guest stars include Jessica Alba, Stephen Fry, Richard E. Grant, Kit Harington, Rita Ora, Rhea Perlman, Jennifer Saunders, Andrew Scott, Naomi Watts, Rita Wilson — and, of course, Girls creator and star Lena Dunham, who plays Jessica’s severely depressed sister Nora. Dunham also co-created Too Much with her husband Luis Felber, wrote all or part of every episode and directed the majority of the season.

Apart from the social media fame she garnered making front-facing comedy videos, Stalter is probably best known for Hacks, where she plays Kayla. Initially a nepotism hire at her father’s talent agency, Kayla eventually follows her boss Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) to his own management company. The latest season reframes the Kayla we’d gotten to know over the first three seasons as suddenly great at her job — even in terrible ways, like rousing a messed-up client by plying her with drugs before an appearance; it’s a big ask to make of the audience, and I could never quite get on board. Even accepting the meta-story that someone in Kayla’s position can only fail upward in the entertainment industry, every minute of screen time she’s gotten would have been better allocated to any of the show’s other characters.

I warily carried this baggage into Stalter’s new show, knowing that she wasn’t playing an irritating side character but a comic and romantic lead. And to be honest, the series premiere puts Jessica at an immediate disadvantage with the audience: The first thing we see her do is scream-sob at an Instagram Reel featuring Wendy and Zev, before flashing back to a night she broke into Zev’s place in the middle of the night to berate the couple in bed. Jessica’s grandmother’s house is basically a flophouse for miserable women mostly doing nothing to help themselves. When Jessica shows up in England, she argues with her cabbie that an address with “Estates” in the name can’t be the bog-standard apartment complex where he drops her, because she’s ignorantly expecting “estate grounds, verdant gardens, archways, some real Merchant Ivory-type shit.” 

But once Jessica and Felix have their proper meet-cute, we get to see her relax into the kind of lovable goof we might want to watch for 10 episodes. Letting Felix into her temporary housing, she pretends her hairless senior dog Astrid is an intruder, and tells Felix that he shouldn’t look at her since she’s naked. The first time Jessica and Felix hook up, she tells him she’s never had sex before, and his mid-thrust “Fuck you” tells us they really might have been made for each other.

Jessica is self-conscious about having grown up without any male role models after her father’s early death; her vague ideas about seeming chill and undemanding in relationships are undergirded by buzzwords she’s read and highly edited cutesy-couple clips she’s watched online. The biggest conflicts she and Felix have revolve around moments when she can’t hide how much she cares about something — Felix’s happiness, his past relationships with sexy and mysterious women who are still in his life, the concept of justice. 

As Jessica, Stalter has to walk the same knife edge: She can’t be so needy that the audience doesn’t respect her; she can’t be so invincible that her problems don’t feel real. And, okay, yes, America Ferrera’s big Barbie monologue taught us all for the very first time ever (satire) that this is the lot not just of all female characters but all women. But all women aren’t the protagonists of shows by Lena Dunham, human lightning rod. Based on Stalter’s previous work, I didn’t think she was up for this unique challenge. Considering the scripts sometimes require her to yell thesis statements like “I’m not a bitch, I’m good, I’m special and I’m bright and you don’t care,” and frequently send her to Instagram to deliver the show’s quasi-narration in the form of private response videos she addresses to Wendy, Stalter’s performance as Jessica is unexpectedly complex.

Sharpe — whose credits include Season Two of The White Lotus and last year’s Oscar-winning feature film A Real Pain — arrives with much higher status to play a much lower-status character. As an uncompromising indie musician living rent-free in his recently divorced bandmate’s loft, Felix joins struggling actor John (Chris Evans) of Materialists as another broke artist trying to woo a lady despite his lack of prospects; if we found one more, we could officially call it a trend and dub this the Summer of Scrubs. 

Though Jessica imagines him as the Regency soldier of her Anglophile dreams, Felix is drawn with complexity too. Every meeting we see with his family, several of his exes and friends from his posh old life reveals the person he was before Jessica came into his life — why he’s working so hard to be different now, and all the circumstances that seem to be making that impossible. (An episode set at the wedding of one of Felix’s former classmates twists and curdles everything Richard Curtis movies ever told you about them; that they don’t even serve food at a British wedding reception is the least of its outrages.) 

Felix has tried to dull his shame over the damage his financially reckless father has done to the family with unhealthy substance use and sex that was meaningless to him but not his partners; at the risk of diminishing him with another term that gets tossed around the internet, Felix is at best a recovering fuckboy, disoriented by Jessica’s intense sincerity. He may not be entirely credible when Jessica anxiously asks him about “love-bombing” or “polyamorous,” and he claims not to know what those terms mean, but that’s a kind of guy one meets in the dating world. Sharpe doesn’t cheat Felix’s shittier qualities, which makes his humanity all the more authentic.

This is more than can be said for Zev, Jessica’s evil ex. A late story about his relationship with his mother in what is canonically his second-ever therapy session doesn’t balance the scales on him, which I’m actually fine with: Some characters can be pure villains, and ending the season wanting to run him over with my car felt just fine to me. Whether Zev was treated unfairly (or whom he’s meant to stand in for, since the show was loosely based on Dunham and Felber’s real relationship) is just one of many discussions Too Much may spark. 

Given the Dunham pedigree, it’s sure to be as polarizing as everything else she’s done in her career and private life. But for those who can meet Too Much with an open mind, there’s a lot here to like.