mon 14/07/2025

Too Much, Netflix - a romcom that's oversexed, and over here | reviews, news & interviews

Too Much, Netflix - a romcom that's oversexed, and over here

Too Much, Netflix - a romcom that's oversexed, and over here

Lena Dunham's new series presents an England it's often hard to recognise

Woman with pet obsessions: Megan Stalter as JessicaNetflix

A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. 

The 10-part Netflix series that Dunham and her English musician husband Luis Felber have created, Too Much, is just that: a welter of verbiage, weird characters and relentless squelchy sex – though the sex scenes are virtually the only occasions our heroine stops talking about herself. Everybody here sounds like Dunham, including Dunham, who appears as Norah, her unhappy lead character’s unhappier sister. It’s a massive vent-act for her trademark quippy, rat-a-tat dialogue

The title is touched on first when our heroine, Jessica Salmon (Megan Stalter from Hacks), arrives in London from Brooklyn and hears her new advertising agency boss, Jonno (Richard E Grant), use the term. She takes it literally, as a criticism. No, no, explains her newly acquired British boyfriend, Felix (Will Sharpe from Giri/Haji, White Lotus 2, pictured below): when we here say it, it usually means something positive, an expression of wonder. Do we, you ask yourself? Maybe he is just trying to be kind to her. Felix will also have to translate terms like “bollocking” for her, though she never does get to grips with “bell-end”.

Will Sharpe as Felix in Too MUchWithin 24 hours of landing, Jessica has heard indie musician Felix performing at a pub and pounced on him (apparently what happened to Dunham and Felber, though it still seems implausible). He seems to like her originality and openness – “You’re alive!” he coos – but frankly she quickly becomes wearying. She’s a constant source of self-referential remarks, ill at ease when not talking about herself or her pet obsessions and cosseting her actual pet, a dog she has miraculously been able to bring with her. (Is it a registered therapy dog? It looks very much like the almost hairless chihuahua with its tongue lolling out that become an internet sensation back in the day.)

But in Felix, has she chosen another loser like Zev (Michael Zegen), the man who dumped her after seven years for an elfin influencer named Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski)? Jessica spends a lot of time in various bathrooms recording angry videos addressed to Wendy, after watching her posts. 

Felix may be flaky, but he’s an honest flake who admits to being a former coke fiend who is trying to stop drinking, as well as a serial boyfriend. His backstory, along with those of the other key personnel, takes up a goodly chunk of the series. Jessica’s consists of an “intergenerational Grey Gardens of single women”, who share the suburban parental home: recently separated Norah and her son, her mother (Rita Wilson) and grandma Dottie (Rhea Perlman). All are as obsessed with sex, STDs, UTIs etc as Jessica is, even Dottie. Norah’s estranged husband (Andrew Rannells) is a frequent visitor there, too.

More interesting is Felix’s family history. At a fee-paying school, he acquired a lot of posh mates until his father lost all his money and moved the family out of their big country house into a bungalow. The dad is played by Stephen Fry undiluted, an autodidact who acts as if he is still hosting QI, providing anyone who’ll listen with gratuitous etymologies and definitions. Much more interesting is Felix’s Japanese artist mother (fabulous Kaori Momoi), who speaks hilarious fractured English and drives around in a Roller, hazardously. The episode in which Felix goes home for a visit is a breath of fresh air, an oasis of relative peace where you have time for once to focus on the characters.

Felix is Dunham’s conduit for depicting a whole posse of poshos, one of whom, Auggie (Prasana Puwanarajah), is in his thrash-rock band. There are three Pollys, one of them (Adèle Exarchopoulos) still in love with Felix; there’s Fiona (Jennifer Saunders), an older clubber with “iconic breasts”, and also Oriel (David Jonsson), whose nobby wedding at a country estate is everything Jessica has ever dreamt of in her fantasies about Britain. And yes, Felix has to face numerous exes, some of them seated at his table, à la Four Weddings. There is a toad in this garden, too, a man just out of prison for sexual assault, Jessica is nonchalantly told; she flees the “rape table” in disgust.Will Sharpe as Felix, Megan Stalter as Jessica in Too MUchSteadily, Dunham builds up a portrait of moneyed and titled Brits as feckless miscreants and psychos, Saltburn rejigged as a romcom. There is little light and shade in the characterisation, except for the subtleties and textures the virtuosic Sharpe brings to his role, his voice carefully positioned near the young MIck Jagger’s, neither posh nor prole. Naomi Watts survives well, too, as Jonno’s pitch-perfect corporate wife, ably hosting his coked-up Notting Hill dinner parties (though I can’t imagine many W11 hostesses being as keen as she is to be monopolised by Jessica loudly discussing her gynaecological issues). And yes, of course Jessica and Will go to the blue door (pictured above) for selfies en route to the dinner. 

The script has it that Jessica is universally loved wherever she goes, connecting with most women instantaneously, despite her gaucheness. I tried to care whether she would despatch the ghastly Zev, who haunts her imagination, and stay in the UK with Felix, but only to the extent of hoping Felix would have a lucky escape. Is he really a nightmare, not a sweet, sad man who was never loved properly as a child? The denouement is like an abrupt handbrake turn, but not before a parade of famous faces have reported for oddball duty: Andrew Scott as a mad Irish ad director, Kit Harington as Jessica’s Dylan-fan dad, the late Don Letts as a record shop owner, Jessica Alba and Rita Ora as themselves.

Who is this charivari for? It’s intermittently witty, and maybe non-Brits will enjoy its “otherness”. But I suspect many Brits will feel they have entered a fever dream, where soundbites from Richard Curtis and Fleabag and Helen Fielding, even Emily in Paris, whirr around them in a noisy soup.

The sex scenes are virtually the only occasions our heroine stops talking about herself

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Editor Rating: 
2
Average: 2 (1 vote)

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