1 day ago
7
I have watched all six series of Girls at least four times. I watched it as it was castigated for its unlikable characters, lack of diversity, supposed misogyny and sex that wasn’t “fun” enough, and I’ve watched it during its recent gen Z-fuelled renaissance. I never thought Lena Dunham’s show was perfect, or a window on to all of humanity. But as an arch portrait of a handful of upper-middle-class twentysomething women in New York, thousands of miles away from my reality, I’ve always believed that it couldn’t be bettered.
Then Dunham moved to London and released a new show, this time about … me? Too Much’s protagonists are thirtysomethings living in London: Jessica (played by Megan Stalter) moves over from New York after a breakup; her love interest Felix (Will Sharpe) is a Londoner jaded by years of struggling as a session guitarist. The stakes felt high. Not only could a show about my city by an American celebrity be unstoppably cringe, but it could call into question everything I loved about Girls.
The first signs were concerning. Too Much opens with Jessica striding over Tower Bridge, and a fantasy sequence in which Stalter swishes over a moor as a Brontë sister, then butchers a Yorkshire accent in a pastiche of Happy Valley. Jessica is obsessed with “love stories set in rural England”, and projects on to the city a mental landscape of period ballgowns, Mr Darcy and Alan Rickman. In an essay for the New Yorker about her own move, also prompted by a breakup, Dunham contrasts the chaotic grit of New York with the “spaciousness” of London – a city that “doesn’t jangle me”. Dunham, as you may by now be sensing, lives in one of the leafier parts of north London.
Jessica, however, moves to a council estate in Hoxton in east London (her understanding of the word “estate” results in a few painful jokes in which she asks where the “arches and gardens” are). And it’s here, in the real London that disrupts the fantasy, that Too Much comes into its own. This London is one of dreary jobcentres, NHS nurses with a side hustle in “lip flips”, and creatives trying to come up with a Christmas ad that isn’t “some posh woke John Lewis bullshit”.
Dunham’s unique skill, according to Girls co-star Allison Williams, lies in her ability to “write what she was living as she was living it”. But the greater talent still, one so often ignored in early critiques of Girls, is Dunham’s ability to satirise her own life as she is living it, too. Where Too Much is cringe, it’s cringe because Dunham is willing to so entirely send up the mentality of an American abroad. During an argument with Felix, Jessica screams: “When I came to find my English dream I wanted to be in bed with, like, Mr Darcy, or Hugh Grant from the BRITISH JONES DIARIES!!”
By contrast, the satire of London life is more offbeat and unexpected. Instead of leaning into US stereotypes of British prudishness, Too Much has a thumb-sucking dominatrix who struggles to access her feelings, and Naomi Watts as Jessica’s boss’s wife, the kind of posh British woman who cannot stop talking about sex and tries to send guests away with some “cooling lube”.
Meanwhile, hipsters take ketamine at a daytime “donkey fest” at Hackney City Farm, Felix is repeatedly moved to tears by the Paddington film, and his flatmate tries to woo a 20-year-old by hosting her environmental direct-action group at his squat. By contrast, Richard E Grant, usually a delight, hews so closely to his well-worn type that he is almost disappointing as Jessica’s boss.
At their height, Too Much’s scripts pull off the same magic as Girls: conversations so bizarre that they can only seem real. “Why does your dog smell of vinegar?” Felix yells at Jessica. “You’ve never explained that!”
As a Londoner, it is of course possible to nitpick: would the so-chill-he’s-horizontal Felix travel all the way from Angel to Peckham to play five-a-side? Would Jessica’s unbearably sceney colleagues really take her to a branch of the Ivy to meet a potential love interest?
But despite its bubble gum Netflix veneer and a shift away from the subdued cool of Girls, Too Much is a wry portrait of Dunham’s new city, in all its variety and strangeness. Just as she affectionately satirised twentysomethings trying to find themselves in New York, in London she depicts another city upon which people project their dreams, and instead encounter reality.
Jessica first sees London as her escape – and Dunham herself was drawn to a city where she had “yelped in pain on exactly zero street corners”. But in Too Much, she shows that no living, breathing place can be purely a vehicle for our neuroses. It stubbornly insists on being itself.
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Barbara Speed is the deputy head of Guardian Opinion
