My dad used to have a cure for anxiety. If something’s worrying you, he said, think about the absolute worst thing that could happen. First of all, think back on your life: The worst thing that could happen rarely does happen, so chill out. Second, let’s imagine the worst thing that happens does happen. Well, so what?
In a time where the worst thing that can happen is “senile fascist builds concentration camps for his secret police to fill,” this advice is a little tougher to take. But on a small enough scale? My old man was onto something.
Take the events of this, the penultimate episode of Too Much. Right in the middle, the worst thing that could possibly happen to Jessica Salmon happens. She accidentally sets her private instagram to public and tags her nemesis, Wendy Jones, so that she and he whole internet can see over 500 slightly-to-very deranged videos calling this woman out. Yes, including the one where Jess sets her nightgown on fire. Before long, half a dozen real-world influencers, plus Wendy herself, plus her awful fiancé Zev (who send Jessica a nasty text), plus tens of thousands of total strangers are watching and commenting on it all.
This comes at a terrible moment for Jess professionally. It’s finally the day of the shoot of the big Christmas commercial, directed by that pretentious womanizing git Jim and starring pop singer Rita Ora. (Ora appears as herself and is, like all the cameoing celebs so far, very funny.) But Jim storms off when Jessica tries to keep him on task when he’d rather be trying to pick up pretty production assistants. Jonno, the agency head, is incommunicado because he’s busy getting dumped by his wife Ann, who no longer wants to be physically touched by other human beings. Even Kim is out of commission, hurt by the cold shoulder she’s gotten from Josie after their one-night stand.
So Jessica reaches down deep into some previously untapped reservoir of grace under pressure — or, perhaps, merely channels her madcap energy into something constructive. After some life coaching from Rita, who promises her no one remembers what happens on the Internet, Jessica takes charge of the shoot. She restores Jim’s grotesque commercial to the original concept (which, admittedly, isn’t really much less goofy than “Christmas during the climate apocalypse”): Rita Ora in a Santa Claus suit, singing a Christmas song by herself.
The shoot goes off without a hitch. Everyone on set recognizes that Jessica knows what she’s doing and follows orders. Boss is absolutely flabbergasted by Jessica’s domme-like command and control. (He’s still not gonna go get her a coffee, though.) Rita herself is thrilled. The commercial gets a round of applause from the crew!
It needs to be noted here that this is tremendous character work, both from star Meg Stalter and writer Lena Dunham. All season long, we’ve watched Jessica carefully observe, well, everybody she’s around, constantly searching for social cues and studying how best to answer them. She hasn’t done a good job necessarily — the wedding episode is evidence enough of that, and we’ll be returning to it shortly — but we’ve definitely learned she’s an observant person. In a circumstance where it’s all on the line, it stands to reason she’d be the person best equipped to do the job of the director, the talent liaison, and the agency head simultaneously.
And keep in mind this isn’t some sudden attack of competence. Remember back in the pilot, when her coworker/brother-in-law Jameson (who in this episode tries his damnedest to fuck his estranged wife, Jess’s shut-in sister Nora) said that until recently she’d been his most talented and reliable employee? That’s all still inside her, despite the fact that she’s been like a Tasmanian Devil of romantic catastrophes all season long. It just took a new crisis to bring it out of her, just as it took the old Zev crisis to suppress it.
As you’d expect, boy oh boy is she excited to tell Felix all this! But Felix has something else on his mind: He’s been out all night partying with cocaine up his nose and a glamorous, much older modeling agent played by Jennifer Saunders from AbFab, on his dick.
The thing is, Felix knows all this is a bad idea. It’s bad to fall off the wagon and lie about it night after night. It’s bad to let yourself drift apart from the woman you love just because you had an ugly fight at a wedding at which you secretly got fucked up. It’s bad to have sex with a woman who’s obviously still fixated on her estranged husband and who won’t even let you talk to her all-too-observant kids when she kicks you out. It’s bad, in short, to be a piece of shit.
To his credit, Felix admits pretty much all of this to Jessica pretty much as soon as he can the next morning. “I can’t lie to you,” he says when he comes clean after making the walk of shame home. But it’s more than that: He doesn’t want to lie to her, because she’s fantastic.
Even so, his revelations are a bridge too far. Jessica leaves the apartment, wordlessly communing with the feuding party girls down the corridor, so that Felix can pack up all his shit and leave by the time she gets back.
Yet in the final shot of the episode, directed by Alicia MacDonald, Jess stops. Will she head back to him, or is Lena Dunham going to give us a rom-com with an unhappy ending?
Beats me, man. People often forget that though Dunham’s own character on Girls, Hannah, got a bit of a grace note, the show’s verdict on its protagonists was bitingly cynical. I wouldn’t put it past her to craft a five-hour America-dreams-of-England rom-com with a down ending, even if it is based on the real-life happy ending she found with her own husband, the show’s co-creator Luis Felber. But I doubt it. I think we’re headed for a kind of anti-Girls, in which the creator of a show all about how grand young romances are dysfunctional and doomed throws her lot in with love, actually.
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.