Too Much TV review — Lena Dunham makes her small-screen comeback with sharp millennial satire

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When Lena Dunham reached precocious fame with her series Girls (she wrote and sold the show to HBO aged just 23), she was primed to become the next big thing for a generation of millennials. And yet nothing she’s created or starred in since the show ended in 2017 — including the 2022 comedies Catherine Called Birdy and Sharp Stick and a small role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time . . . In Hollywood — has had the same cultural impact. Dunham’s new Netflix show, Too Much, might change that. 

Its protagonist is textbook Dunham. Jessica, played by TikTok comedian Megan Stalter, is obsessive, impulsive, neurotic and insecure. She spends a phenomenal amount of time trapped inside her own iPhone. She becomes so obsessed with the new fiancée (Emily Ratajkowski) of the ex who broke her heart that she moves her whole life from New York to London to avoid them both. And even there she scrolls on Instagram for hours and records private videos where she berates and pleads with her.

Like Jess, Dunham broke up with her long-term partner (music producer Jack Antonoff) and moved from New York to London, where she quickly fell in love and married an indie singer. In real life, that singer is Luis Felber, who co-wrote the show with Dunham. In Too Much, Jess’s on-off boyfriend is Felix, played to perfection by Will Sharpe, a razor-sharp parody of every man who lives in a houseshare-cum-squat he calls a “collective” yet mysteriously attended a posh boarding school.

In Girls, Dunham starred as her own self-destructive protagonist, the self-obsessed anti-hero Hannah Horvath. Those are big shoes to fill, and Stalter, in her first lead role — she previously had a small role in Hacks — occasionally falters in filling them. Dunham plays Stalter’s older sister, divorced and depressed and FaceTiming in from their home in the New York suburbs, while Stalter finds love and meaning and takes too much ketamine in Hackney. The cast is stacked full of A-listers: Naomi Watts, flighty, beautiful and coked-up as the Notting Hill wife of Jess’s boss, played by Richard E Grant; Stephen Fry as Felix’s disgraced and penniless academic father; Adèle Exarchopoulos as one of the beautiful women that Felix slept with in his pre-sobriety past. And Rita Ora pops up dressed as Santa.

There are times when Too Much feels less like a satire of 21st-century life than a game of millennial bingo; a scorecard of polyamory, lovebombing and narcissism. Yet the level to which Dunham can mine the specificity of these experiences and turn them into something universal is what makes her so good. Her gimlet powers of observation are undiminished. “Creatives” do pretend they didn’t go to boarding school. It is always a bad idea to do coke with your boss. Londoners will say “we must hang out” and then never see you again. And even if you fall spectacularly, messily in love, there will always be the urge to compare your present relationships to a digital past. Dunham gets all this. Still, we could have done without the Rita Ora cameo. 

★★★★☆

On Netflix now