Every generation has its own idea of the romantic-comedy: the screwball japes of the 1930s, the second-wave feminism of the 1980s, the raunchy male gaze of the 2000s, and then, in our modern era, the great confessional. And the definitive text of this latest variety is Lena Dunham’s Girls, a startlingly funny TV show that, from 2012 to 2017, embraced the ambient horror of millennial dating. This week, Dunham returns with her sophomore show, Netflix’s Too Much. Co-created with her partner, Luis Felber, it looks back through the ages to sound a paean to the romcoms of yesteryear.
Meg Stalter is Jessica, an executive at a New York advertising agency who, after the breakdown of her relationship (and her mental health), is dispatched to London to oversee a shoot. Her charmless ex Zeb (Michael Zeben) has shacked up with an impossibly chipper influencer played by Emily Ratajkowski. So, naturally, Jess seizes the chance for escape. And she makes immediate emotional inroads by meeting Will Sharpe’s Felix, a washed-up musician with hair so fabulous it might’ve walked out of a Hugh Grant mugshot. Their romance – full of predictable obstacles – embraces, and then busts, romcom clichés. “When I trust my own instincts,” Jess notes, “chaos always follows.” And so it does, as life and work and love and purpose collide in a London that proves to be woefully undersold by the work of Richard Curtis.
