It’s a happy ending for Too Much. Boy, is it ever! In the words of Wayne’s World, it’s the mega-happy ending, with everything working out about as well as it possibly could for everyone involved. Well, almost everybody. To paraphrase Sam Elliott at the end of The Big Lebowski, I didn’t like seeing Astrid go.
Look, if they put a dying dog in the show, I’m gonna wanna honor that dying dog. It’s the least we could do.
Other than that, though? Holy moses, creator-writer-director-costar Lena Dunham cranks the wedding-comedy “and they all lived happily ever after” dial to eleven. After the tragic death of Jessica’s dog more or less in Felix’s arms, she takes her anger out on him and drives him away — but she reconsiders, reconciles with him in the middle of a climate protest shutting down a major highway, and accepts his proposal while she gets arrested and he escapes on foot. So that’s some badass parent lore for the kids to hear one day.
But it goes way, way beyond that. Jessica’s sister and brother-in-law, Nora and Jameson, also reconcile. (Lena Dunham and Andrew Rannells domestic comedy spinoff when?) Jess and Nora’s mom, Lois, is happy as can be with her doting longhair boyfriend Dane. Jonno Ratigan, the flighty head of the agency, is back together with his wife after learning how to train the enormous Irish wolfhound they have for some reason. Josie apologizes to Kim for her standoffishness and makes another sex offer. Gaz, Jessica’s neighbor, confesses his love for her, realizes after her response that what he really likes about her is simply the fact that she doesn’t call him a cunt like his mom does, and happily flirts with both the party girls who live nearby and Felix’s loathsome friends the Pollys. Felix’s roommate Auggie continues to hit on anything that moves and is female. Felix’s irritating parents are irritating, but in a loving way. Everything’s coming up roses for our girl and her people!
And before any of this takes place, we get maybe the single best scene in the whole series: Jessica meets up with Wendy Jones.
Wendy’s in London on business, you see, and wants to take the opportunity to see Jessica face to face and clear the air. What she shares is unsurprising, once you’ve seen their mutual man Zev in action: She’s realized he’s an enormous asshole, who latches on to powerful women and beats them down with his loveless sarcasm. The fact that he lied through his teeth about exactly how broken up he and Jess were when he and Wendy got together is the icing on a bitter cake it’s clear Wendy has had occasion to savor at length.
It’s a beautiful scene, and not just because Meg Stalter and Emily Ratajkowski are the actors in it. It’s funny: Watching these two creative, hamstrung people work towards each other, I wrote in my notes “this is lovely,” only for Jess to call Wendy “lovely” about five seconds later. It’s not the rapprochement itself that I was thinking of here, either: It was Wendy and Jessica’s willingness to seek a rapprochement in the first place. We live in a time when nursing hatred like some infernal infant is celebrated, where treating other people as enemies is the norm. Wendy initiated this encounter and Jessica accepted it in the spirit of saying “fuck you” to all of that, in the belief that it’s better to see each other as allies rather than competitors in a zero-sum game.
And then it all ends with the most outrageously happy filmmaking in Dunham’s catalog: wordless, old home-movie-style footage of the newlyweds and their very different but equally delighted guests as they celebrate Jess and Felix’s union. Her family, his family, her coworkers, his bandmates, his Pollys, Gaz, Auggie: It’s a motley crew, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t literally clap to see how well things worked out for all of them.
What can I say? The rom worked, the com worked, the Shakespeare/Austen happy wedding ending worked. I’d watch a second season about their married life in a heartbeat. It’s not Girls at all, but at no point did I expect it to be. It delivers on the promise of its opening moments: It gives Jessica her grand English love story, and it gives that to us too.
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.