Perhaps surprisingly, Lena Dunham’s first TV series in seven years is a winsome and pretty sincere romantic comedy. Though the episode titles riff on classic films – ‘Enough, Already’; ‘One Wedding and a Sex Pest’ – Dunham’s affection for the genre is palpable, if gently subversive.
In the first 10 minutes, Dunham’s character Nora South contemplates Alan Rickman’s sex appeal while watching Sense and Sensibility, then tells her entire family: “I want to take him out back, then have him put it in my front.”
Dunham doesn’t take the lead here, as she did in her breakthrough series Girls, a flawed but fearless examination of twenty-something female malaise. But, in addition to co-creating Too Much with her husband, British musician Luis Felber, she has written or co-written all 10 episodes and directed eight of them.
The result is no dud, but neither is it Dunham dynamite like much of Girls, which prompted knotty conversations about race, privilege, body image, sex and millennial job prospects when it aired on HBO from 2012 to 2017.
Too Much centres on Nora’s sister Jessica (Hacks‘ Megan Stalter), a TV ad producer who swaps New York for London after her negging ex Zev (Michael Zegen) swaps her for a fashion influencer called Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski).
This potential comic wellspring is the first sign that something here is slightly amiss. Though we see Jessica poring over Wendy’s adorkable social media content in a desperately unhealthy way, Dunham doesn’t seem interested in skewering influencer culture: Wendy’s videos are vaguely cringey but too toothless to feel like satire.
Fortunately, the core of this story – Jessica’s blossoming romance with chilled indie musician Felix (Will Sharpe) – is more convincing. They meet-cute in a grotty pub toilet, exchange Anglo-American culture clash observations as they stroll home, then become an item after Jessica accidentally sets fire to herself with a candle.
If this plot twist feels like an intruder from an old-school sitcom, well, it’s not the only one. It’s always fun to watch Richard E. Grant, but his hammy performance as Jessica’s cold-blooded boss probably belongs in a different show. It’s also symptomatic of a wider problem here: a clangingly uneven tone that flits between naturalistic, stilted and somewhat off-key. Episode one’s shots of disfigured burn victims feel gratuitous in an otherwise fairly frothy 30 minutes of TV.
Other workplace scenes fall flat because co-workers like sex-positive Boss (Leo Reich) and self-confident Kim (Janicza Bravo) come off dated and two-dimensional. Still, there’s enough unselfconscious charm from Sharpe and comic sizzle from Salter to keep you invested. “What’s a naturist?” Jessica asks him at one point, “Like, David Attenborough?” Naturally, she pronounces the great man’s surname to rhyme with “hedgerow” – a nice touch.
Too much then? Maybe, but also not enough in terms of focus. With some judicious pruning – of subplots and supporting characters that don’t quite land – this show might have been vital instead of merely amiable.
‘Too Much’ is available to stream on Netflix now