Too Much, the 10-episode Netflix series from Lena Dunham, invites a series of unflattering comparisons to the Girls auteur’s earlier work.

There’s the shared cast (Dunham, show-stealer Andrew Rannells, Rita Wilson, and beloved character actor Richard Grant all make reappearances); the rapid-fire, zeitgeisty dialogue (Dunham wrote or co-wrote every episode); the messy, socially dysfunctional, yet ultimately lovable heroine at the center of it all (Meg Stalter, the social-media comedic phenom and Dunham’s on-screen avatar and somewhat eerie doppelganger).

Recommended Stories

• Life imitates art in 'Tehran'
• Joy Behar slips The View is going on 'hiatus' after this week
• South Park mocks Paramount deal and 'pro-Trump messaging' in season premiere

As Dunham’s return to episodic confessional mythmaking, Too Much falters first and foremost when it comes to her usually preternatural ability to speak for, as she once famously said, “a generation,” emphasis on the nondefinite article. Dunham’s genius, and what made Girls a legitimate cultural event, was to meld heartfelt James L. Brooks-style melodrama with brutally honest reportage about millennial mores, desires, and deficits.

She still has the chops, as she demonstrated with 2022’s aptly titled Sharp Stick, an icy, confrontational dramedy about domestic turmoil. But with Too Much, Dunham leans far too hard on the other end of the fulcrum, resulting in a heinously mushy, insincere romantic comedy with a sweaty cultural pastiche a million miles removed from the wry insight of Girls.

Considering the premise of the series is closely based on Dunham’s own life, this lack of authenticity would seem unlikely: Bruised from a bad breakup (on-screen with a comically heinous Brooklynite not-so-“nice guy” who might as well be twirling his ironic mustache, and in real life with pop mega-producer Jack Antonoff), Dunham’s doppleganger moves to London and finds herself in a whirlwind romance with a foppishly handsome musician (a winning Will Sharpe and in real life the British songwriter Luis Felber, also a co-creator of the series).

Jessica, played by Stalter, responds to this affair with a type of young person’s hyper-online hyper-self-consciousness that recalls more populist hackwork such as Netflix’s Emily In Paris than the Emmy-nominated Girls. Jessica, with religious sincerity, searches the internet for guidance on romantic “red flags.” Her coworkers caution her about “lovebombing.” A key narrative device is a brutally contorted, Chekhov’s finger-gun series of “private” Instagram videos, in which she monologues to her ex’s new fiancée (portrayed, in quintessentially Dunham-esque so-clever-it’s-stupid-it’s-clever casting, by Emily Ratajkowski, the actual most famous supermodel in the world).

Perhaps with Dunham, underrated as an actress with her ability to simultaneously wink at the camera and convey the utmost sincerity, in the lead role, these perfunctory jibes might have worked. Unfortunately, Stalter, whose most notable credit to date is a supporting role on HBO’s Hacks, does not share her writer-director’s protean, unpredictable, Bugs-Bunny-with-an-MFA quality. Stalter’s performance toggles back and forth between a smirking, manic, “pwease-don’t-take-me-too-seriously” comic patter and a pained “serious” look that recalls the discomfort of the dentist’s chair, whether she’s reminiscing about her ex, lamenting her creative woes, or getting rogered from behind.

It is hard to overstate how much this performance sinks the series, which is otherwise not without redeeming qualities. Dunham is writing her own life, and therefore the vast majority of the show’s screen time is given over to Stalter’s gratingly unfunny, emotionally inert performance, to the point where one starts to feel bad for an actor of her limited range being put in such a position. The feeling is especially palpable during the series’ pivotal fifth episode “Pink Valentine,” which, in a nod to the 2010 Derek Cianfrance film from which it adapts its name, tells the retroactive story of Jessica’s doomed romance with her glib, two-dimensional manchild ex-boyfriend.

Jessica is meant to be roughly the same age as Dunham in real life, which invites the question of why Dunham didn’t simply play a roughly autobiographical version of herself, as she did in Girls. One can easily conjure metanarrative reasons for this, such as a writer-director hoping to move more assuredly into the next phase of her career behind the camera, or her not wanting to invite the absurd scrutiny of her personal life that accompanied Girls‘s confessionalism.

But Occam’s razor provides a simpler on-screen explanation: For whatever reason, this character is simply not as interesting as Dunham might have been. Where her Girls protagonist Hannah Horvath was self-assured, Jessica is retiring and apologetic; where Hannah voraciously embraced the high- and low-brow in quintessential millennial fashion, Jessica one-dimensionally defends her love of Ke$ha and Vanderpump Rules in patty-cake, out-of-date poptimist style; where Hannah had stormy, emotionally complex affairs with varied, offbeat avatars of masculinity as portrayed by Adam Driver or the underrated, uber-smarmy Jake Lacy, Jessica has a scoundrel and a white knight more suited to circa-2010 CW drama.

Did Netflix, famous for its inane “data-driven” studio notes, demand this level of “accessible” idiocy? Did Dunham simply want to make her version of a cheesy, feel-good Y2K-era rom-com? Can falling in love really just blunt your aesthetic sensibilities this much? Too Much still shows flashes of Dunham’s shrewdness as a writer, especially the sly upstairs-downstairs sensibility she honed as a childhood observer of the Manhattan art world (her parents being the painter Carroll Dunham and photographer Laurie Simmons). Despite its foreshadowing of a treacly subplot about downward economic mobility, a scene where a volatile, coked-to-the-gills Grant awkwardly attempts to brawl with Jessica’s beau inspires actual laughs, as does much of the repartee that happens between the ensemble cast while Stalter is otherwise occupied somewhere offscreen attempting to emote.

BANANA BALL, ‘MONEYBALL,’ AND THE HEART OF BASEBALL

Ultimately, Too Much resembles nothing so much as one of those strange albums recorded during a fallow creative period in a pop artist’s career, where there wasn’t quite the right cultural fit, or they happened to pick up the wrong artistic tools — think Elvis Costello’s schizophrenically synth-drenched 1984 misfire Goodbye Cruel World, or Bob Dylan’s similar Empire Burlesque. 

The talent is still, clearly, there, but the end result is misguided, disfigured, and simply no fun. Dunham remains a preeminent millennial voice, representing a generation that, if for no other reason than economic ones, will likely dominate American and global culture for decades to come. Hopefully, Too Much will stand one day as a similar odd, developmental beat in her wider oeuvre, and not a harbinger of a newly diminished creative phase.

Derek Robertson co-authors Politico‘s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.