‘Too Much’ review: Lena Dunham’s likeable rom-com is never as vital as ‘Girls’

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 malaise in 2010s Brooklyn. But, in addition to co-creating Too Much with her husband, the 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 diminishing 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 never sharply observed enough to feel like satire.

Fortunately, the core of this story – Jessica’s blossoming romance with chilled indie musician Felix (Will Sharpe) – is much more convincing. They meet-cute in a grotty pub toilet, swap Anglo-American culture clash observations as they stroll home to East London, then become an item after Jessica accidentally sets fire to herself with a bedroom 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 Jonno probably belongs in a different show. It’s also symptomatic of a wider problem here: a prevailing uneven tone that flits between naturalistic, stilted and somewhat off-key. Shots of disfigured burn victims in episode one feel gratuitous in an otherwise fairly frothy 30 minutes of TV.

Other workplace scenes fall flat because other supporting characters 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 at one point, “Like, David Attenborough?” Naturally, she pronounces the great man’s surname, naturally, to rhyme with “hedgerow”.

Too much? Maybe, but also not enough in terms of focus. With some judicious pruning – of set-ups and supporting characters that don’t quite work – this show might have beeen vital instead of merely amiable.

‘Too Much’ is available to stream on Netflix now

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