Too Much
Directed & Written By: Lena Dunham Released: July 10, 2025
The girls that get it, get it. The girls that don’t, really don’t.
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Photographed by Ana Blumenkron
Lena Dunham has returned to the writers’ room with Too Much, a Netflix limited series, after a seven year hiatus. Despite the new platform, she cannot seem to escape the long shadow of her inaugural creation. The HBO series Girls (2012) continues to haunt Dunham’s career and person to such a degree that, at one point, she not only stepped away from acting, but uprooted her life to escape the noise.
Once heralded as a wunderkind for writing, creating, and starring in her first major production, Dunham ultimately found herself worse for wear. Years of relentless commentary about her body and appearance took a toll on her mental health and creative output, leading her to take a sabbatical in London. It was there she met her now-husband and Too Much co-creator Luis Felber in a whirlwind romance that inspired the new limited series.
While Dunham wasn’t the first to portray a foursome of white women taking on the Big Apple (Sex and the City anyone?), Girls stood out for its raw, awkward portrayal of young adulthood. The show was singular in its ability to capture the coarse, fumbling reality of early twenty-something life. Indicative of the times, Dunham was considered revolutionary for even daring to show her “imperfect body” on screen.
But where Girls was messy and provocative in a way that felt sharply-of-the moment, Too Much feels like a romanticized diary entry where the stakes are low and the writing is overly self-indulgent. Perhaps the show creators are too invested in their own story to realize that the intimacy they experienced does not translate on screen.
Too Much follows Jessica (Megan Stalter), an American woman in emotional free fall who flees to London and meets a brooding, British musician. Its premise mirrors Dunham’s real-life love story, but the fictionalized version lacks the grounding and specificity that once made her work so compelling. Dunham has always had a knack for writing herself into the narrative, but unfortunately, Too Much reveals that her voice doesn’t necessarily work through someone else. The rhythm, awkwardness, and emotional register of her writing are intimately tied to her own performance style. Without that direct channel, the material falls flat.
What once made Lena Dunham “the voice of a generation” – and it bears repeating, for white women specifically – was that she wrote from what she knew and performed it with total conviction. Her character Hannah Horvath, in Girls, was self-absorbed, chaotic, insufferable even, but the precision of Dunham’s performance made her believable. All those Hannahisms were undoubtedly Lena Dunham peaking through.
In Too Much, she’s absent from the screen, and her absence is palpable. The burden of channeling Dunham’s voice falls on comedian Megan Stalter, miscast in a role that requires her to do the impossible: be someone she isn’t. The script is unmistakably written in Dunham’s cadence, but the delivery is botched. The result feels forced and hollow.
More broadly, Dunham’s once-lauded cultural relevance now feels glaringly out of step. Her lived experience, once aligned with her audience’s, no longer mirrors the concerns or tone of this generation. The show is marketed toward millennials and younger viewers, but its world view feels disconnected from the current cultural moment.
Too Much echoes the tone of Duhnam’s earlier work, but lacks the clarity, urgency, and impact. More than a fully realized narrative, it reads as an attempt to recreate the conditions that once made her essential, not accounting for the dramatic shift in culture. The issue isn’t that Lena Dunham has changed, it’s that her work hasn’t.