‘Too Much’ Episode 1 Recap: “Nonsense & Sensibility”

Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. I’ve written that as this review’s first sentence fully expecting a number of readers to hit EJECT and bail right away. Let’s give them a minute.

Okay, they’re gone? Everyone else settled in? We’re good? Great. 

Now that we’re among friends, Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. Girls, the only dramedy I’ve ever enjoyed, is as perfect a cringe-comedy portrait of Dunham’s age group and demimonde as Curb Your Enthusiasm is of Larry David’s; simply substitute fabulously wealthy middle-aged showbiz types from New York who now live in L.A. with liberal-arts college grads bumbling around Brooklyn trying to find themselves and/or get laid and you’re basically looking at the same show. Seriously, cue up an episode of Girls on HBO Max and mentally replace Michael Penn’s twee indie-guitar score with the familiar Curb stock music. Now do you get what she was doing?

Of course, Girls also frequently got serious, as dramedies do, and here’s where Dunham’s chops as a director come in. A tremendous chronicler of The City and life in it, she has an eye for beautifully lit street scenes and skylines and an ear for the kind of dialogue people regret shouting at each other in those streets once they’ve calmed down or sobered up. After you’ve finished Curb-ifying that episode of Girls, stay on the HBO app and watch the first episode of Industry: A showcase for Dunham’s talents as a director of both actors and images, it’s one of the best pilots ever made. Dunham did that!

So it was with considerable excitement that I cued up Too Much. Loosely based on Dunham’s own life and co-created with her British musician husband Luis Felber, it tells the story of a young American woman with a media job who moves to London and falls in love with a British musician. Hey, write what you know!

What’s impressive about Dunham, though, is that she’s not a person who’s ever known the professional struggles of her creations, Girls’ aspiring writer Hannah Horvath and Too Much’s no-longer-aspiring filmmaker Jessica Salmon. As best I can tell she started hooping in her early 20s as a filmmaker back in the mumblecore era and basically never let up. Yet there’s never any condescension in her writing of these characters, never a sense that the joke’s on them. Their frustration with their situation, their hunger for more, and their inability to get out of their own way — it feels real and urgent.

And also kinda goofy. Certainly that’s the way actor Megan Stalter (Hacks) plays Jessica, Too Much’s basketcase ingenue. Worn out from toiling at the fringes of the business we call show for fifteen years without much to show for it, she’s fresh off a break-up with the love of her life, Zev (Michael Zegen), a nice enough guy who left her for a gorgeous influencer, Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski). After breaking into their apartment to drunkenly confront them, then blowing a huge opportunity with Jessica Alba (playing herself) by literally running away from it, Jessica needs a change.

It’s given to her by her boss, Jameson (Andrew Rannells) — who’s also her ex-brother-in-law, after leaving her sister Nora (Dunham herself) to “explore non-monogamy.” An opportunity with their ad agency has opened up in London, and he wants Jessica, who until recently has been very reliable, to handle it. After all, he reasons, she’s a huge Anglophile, obsessed with everything from Jane Austen to Prime Suspect to Spice World, and this could be exactly the change she needs. So she packs up her weird little dog and heads overseas. It’ll be a dream come true! 

And honestly? Yeah, it kind of is. Okay, so she doesn’t know what “estate” means in England and winds up in smallish high-rise sublet instead of country house with a walled garden, where she’s attended to by her nosy neighbor Gaz (Dean-Charles Chapman, aka Tommen Baratheon from Game of Thrones). But on her very first night in London she meets a hunky, friendly musician named Felix (Will Sharpe from The White Lotus Season 2), who spends two hours walking her home, flirting heavily all the while.

But something’s not right with this dude, if you ask me. Despite sending her absolutely unmistakable “I’m available and interested” signals for the entirety of his time on screen, he freezes when Jessica tries to kiss him, suddenly remembering he has a girlfriend (Adwoa Aboah). Very understandably, Jessica kicks him the fuck out without so much as getting his number. 

Then she kind of accidentally lights her signature “pioneer nightgown” on fire while recording one of her customary, cathartic video messages to the infamous Wendy Jones. By the time Felix has second thoughts — inspired by a listen to Fiona Apple’s sultry debut album Tidal, the first album Jessica ever bought — and returns to her apartment, the paramedics have arrived and she’s getting sprayed down with cold water in her underwear. I guess that’s a meet-cute?

And oh, somewhere in there there’s a Long Island interlude in which Jessica visits her family: depressed and dumped sister Nora, wiseass nephew Dash (Oliver Nirenberg), broke and slightly manic mom Lois (Rita Wilson), and delightfully profane and mean grandmother Dottie (Rhea freaking Perlman). It involves Dottie talking about how Jessica’s ex had “an erotic smell” and Dash leaving the room with the memorable sign-off “See you in hell.” (“I’m his fucking mother!” Nora responds with bad-example outrage.)

To me, Dunham’s true strengths as a writer-director are twofold. First, in the former category, she writes rapid-fire banter that could give the likes of Aaron Sorkin or Amy Sherman-Palladino a run for their money. But her dialogue has a tendency to bend and twist in unusual directions, making it rewardingly difficult to see the punchline of any given joke coming. Nora, Dunham’s character, has one of the best lines of that sort, when she’s describing her crush on actor Alan Rickman: “I just want him to take me out back, and…put it…in my front.”

But Dunham loves city life as much as she loves the fuck-ups who inhabit said cities. As fond as she seems of Jessica, played by Stalter as a beautiful disaster with beautiful clothes that never seem to fit her right or be all the way on her body, Dunham is just as fond of London itself. Not Buckingham Palace and London Bridge and shit like that, but just random underpasses and pubs and the blackness (not blueness, not orangeness, but sweet merciful beautiful blackness) of the night sky between all the lights. Too Much may wind up feeling like light work after Girls or even the Industry pilot, but it’s good work, no matter how heavy it winds up being.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.