Girls is Lena Dunham’s magnum opus. The irony is that she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the HBO classic at the ripe age of 24. Since the show ended in 2017, Dunham has acted in films like Treasure (2024) and directed films like the sexually-realized Sharp Stick (2022) and the charming Catherine Called Birdy (2022), but she remains best known for creating characters like Hannah Horvath and Shoshanna Shapiro. When Girls premiered in 2012, I was a wide-eyed college freshman. The unorgasmic sex scenes coupled with the grating female friendships were so lifelike that I took everything at face value: I thought Hannah was a good writer, Adam could be tamed, and Marnie was evil. Girls is a comedy that satirizes young, upper-middle-class white women living in New York, and so it’s easy to dislike — or at least misinterpret. The show demands slow thinking, emotional intelligence, and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of humor. Watching these young women develop their frontal lobes is not for the faint of heart, but that’s life in your twenties.
Too Much, Dunham’s newest Netflix show, is the post-Saturn Return sequel to Girls. It follows Jessica, a delusional yet endearing Hannah Horvath acolyte, as she navigates life in her 30s. Dunham reinforces this notion with a literal home invasion during the first episode. Jessica amps herself up and then drunkenly breaks into the Brooklyn garden apartment of Zev (Michael Zegen), her ex-boyfriend of seven years, who left her for a knitting influencer named Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski). In the blurry aftermath of this inciting event, she accepts a job in London, leaves her family on Long Island, and starts over. The leap across continents is a textbook case of fight-or-flight (Jessica chooses the latter), but she frames the move as a romantic reinvention. Though she’s high-functioning, Jessica can’t keep up the charade for long.
Too Much quickly establishes itself as a romantic comedy in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary. It follows the tenets of the genre: i.e., the meet-cute, opposites attract, grand gestures, etc., and so unlike Girls, which flirted with and then subverted the codes and conventions of the rom-com. In that HBO juggernaut, there were romantic entanglements like Hannah’s bizarre relationship with Adam, but the show’s main crux centered on the complicated friendship dynamics among the four female protagonists. But Jessica and her love interest Felix are the primary focus of Too Much. They literally meet passing bog roll (toilet paper, to you non-Brits) back and forth in the loo, but the show isn’t completely unaware of its rom-com stereotypes. Jessica’s obsession with Jane Austen’s marriage plots and her desire to fashion Felix as either Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights or Rochester in Jane Eyre is teased throughout the show with voiceovers and dream sequences. Dunham also makes an effort to flesh out Jessica and Felix with bottle episodes: neither of them are as fulfilling or painful as “Video Games” or “The Panic in Central Park,” but they get the job done.
One of the strongest motifs in Too Much is Jessica’s dependency on technology. Early on in the series, she’s either recording voice memos, making secret TikToks to Wendy Jones, or Facetiming her family overseas. While most of these moments are shown in private, there is a performative quality to these acts that highlights Jessica’s shifting self-construction. Technology offers Jessica validation, but it’s as fleeting as one of her Lizzie Bennet daydreams. This idea is encapsulated when she accidentally sets herself on fire while making a TikTok. One minute she’s holding a candle and summoning the courage to live her life to the fullest, and the next she’s literally rolling on the ground screaming for the British version of 911. The gap between Jessica’s digital life and personal life is the key to understanding her loneliness. Jessica makes a concerted effort to present as one way online, but her obsession with technology only exacerbates her need for control and connection in the wake of her breakup.
Despite compelling writing choices that admirably service the character, Statler’s performance as Jessica is somewhat tonally uneven and emotionally flat. The actress is best known for her cringeworthy sketch comedy on TikTok, but she’s also done brilliant work as the lovably chaotic Kayla on Hacks. Statler excels at over-the-top characters that exist on the peripheries of social reality, but in Too Much, Statler is surprisingly subdued despite the occasional tic or bit. The irony is that Jessica is written as a maximalist: her costuming of daytime nightgowns and inappropriate mini dresses suggests that she doesn’t conform to traditional beauty standards, but Statler doesn’t play Jessica with the balls-to-the-wall bravado that she’s otherwise known for. Instead, she aims for realism, but in the process sacrifices nuance. For example, her flat vocal affect works against her during emotionally charged scenes, especially when placed opposite Will Sharpe’s grounded, quietly expressive performance as Felix.
Perhaps over time, Statler’s performance work with Dunham will get better — this isn’t the end of their collaboration. Since her Tiny Furniture debut in 2010, Dunham has been forming a stable of actors that function like a repertory theatre group in a similar fashion to Robert Altman and Mike Leigh. Dunham makes appearances as Jessica’s depressed older sister Nora, while other recurring Girls regulars Andrew Rannels and the incredible Rita Wilson play Jessica’s brother-in-law James and mother Lois, respectively. Andrew Scott, who plays the father in Catherine Called Birdie, is here given a scene-stealing role as a Letterboxd-obsessed douchebag director, while Richard E. Grant essentially reprises his role as coked-out Jasper from Girls, except this time he’s called Jonno. Dunham rounds out the cast by adding heavy-hitters like Adèle Exarchopoulos and Naomi Watts into the mix as supporting characters.
It’s understandable, even too obvious, that Too Much is compared to Girls, given their shared creator, stylistic similarities, and overlapping casts, but it’s ultimately an unfair comparison. Girls captured a voice of a generation. Its raw and hilarious portrayal of 20-somethings figuring themselves out was captivating, meaningful, and delivered the perfect amount of tongue-in-cheek. Too Much, on the other hand, is more conventional and has softer tonal edges. Even with modern discursive touches like Jessica’s social media obsession, the series functions to reinforce its rom-com tropes rather than challenging them. But that doesn’t have to mean that Too Much is shallow. On the contrary, it’s thoughtful, layered, and self-aware in its own way. This is a Lena Dunham production, after all.
CREATOR: Lean Dunham & Luis Felber; CAST: Megan Stalter, Will Sharpe, Michael Zegen, Janicza Bravo; DISTRIBUTOR: ddd; STREAMING: July 10
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