Lena Dunham isn’t trying to reinvent the rom-com. That’s why ‘Too Much’ works

In the early going, the Netflix rom-com series Too Much feels familiar. Jessica (Megan Stalter, so brilliant as Kayla on Hacks) has suffered a painful breakup with her crummy boyfriend, who is now dating an Instagram influencer. Tired of licking her wounds with her sister (series co-creator Lena Dunham), her mom (Rita Wilson) and her grandmother (Rhea Perlman), Jess accepts an assignment in London as a producer on a high-profile Christmas ad. While she’s in England, she meets a musician named Felix (Will Sharpe), and they stumble into a messy situationship and try to navigate around the extensive baggage they’re both carrying. It’s your basic “you go on a new adventure to try to turn the page, and then you bump right into a new complication” story, at least on the surface.

But as with any entry into any established genre, it’s the execution that succeeds or fails. Stalter is a tremendously winning rom-com heroine, just silly enough to throw herself into comedic situations (a woman in a story like this will always find herself locked in a bathroom at some point) but grounded enough that her feelings matter and can be taken entirely seriously. Jess is fixated on Wendy (her ex’s new girlfriend, played by Emily Ratajkowski), but that’s less because she’s envious that the woman took her boyfriend and more because she resents that Wendy’s shiny online presence makes it seem like life is easy, and life, she knows, is not easy.

By the way, when I say this is a rom-com, I mean it is an actual romantic comedy. It is not “elevated.” It is not trying to fix something anyone perceives to be broken in the genre. The meet-cute, in particular, is impeccable.

The show really starts to cook, though, when it invests in Felix as much as it does in Jessica. Rather than a lopsided story of this messy woman who meets a hot man and either does or does not make a success of her relationship with him, it becomes a story about both of them. Felix is a guy in a band whose sobriety feels precarious and who feels like he’s stalling out and getting too old to be … well, a guy in a band. He’s been pretty banged up by events in his life, at least as much as she has. And while she at least has her beloved family, Felix’s home life with his parents and sister is full of pain, and his childhood was largely unhappy. If she is afraid to hope a love story between them might be somehow restorative, she’s certainly not the only one.

It’s a good example of a romantic coupling where the obstacles to happiness are internal (they arise from the personalities and histories of the characters) rather than external (they work for warring companies, one of them is in a relationship, or they’re from two families in Verona with a generations-long feud). They have to figure out a lot of things, but none of them are how to get along or how to like each other. No, they like each other right away, they enjoy spending time together, and they have lots of sex that they enjoy. (Lena Dunham, who directed most of the episodes, remains devoted to showing scenes in which sex is inelegant and occasionally embarrassing but also good, fun and important to people.) What stands in their way is what makes them want to be together: the particulars of who they are.

As is often the case, the boring answer to working through all of this in real life is “these people probably would benefit from therapy,” but that’s not generally how storytelling goes. How storytelling goes is that loving and being loved, while not curative, is good for you. And that’s not not true. If there were any reason to be confident that Netflix would give us five seasons of this story, there might have been time to work through some of this baggage in a more thorough way, and I would have enjoyed seeing that, but that’s not the world we live in.

There are some conspicuous traps that Too Much avoids along the way. While Wendy and Jess have different body types, Jess doesn’t spend the series talking about how she will never be loved because of how she looks, or despairing over her attractiveness (that Felix is attracted to her is never really in question), which is a road this story absolutely might have taken with other creators.

And even though Jess is fixated on Wendy, and the conclusion to that fixation certainly has a rom-com-y quality to it, the story isn’t really mad at (or contemptuous of) Wendy; it’s mad at Jess’ ex, Zev — played by Michael Zegen, who also played Joel on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and is really carving out a niche as an ex you can totally understand why a woman once loved and emphatically no longer does.

Every romantic comedy needs supporting characters to fill out a convincing world, and on top of Dunham, Perlman and Wilson as Jess’ home team, this one gets terrific work from (among others) Richard E. Grant as the weird British boss Jess can’t quite figure out; Naomi Watts as his endearing odd duck wife; Andrew Rannells as Jess’ brother-in-law who’s also her boss in New York; Janicza Bravo as her savvy co-worker; Kaori Momoi as Felix’s loving, aggravating mother; and Stephen Fry as his casually devastating father. Andrew Scott also has a very funny drop-in that it would be unfair to explain in much detail.

There are certainly some things about Too Much that seem undercooked, including a rushed ending that doesn’t quite live up to the emotional authenticity of the rest of the story. But the more time I’ve had to sit with this show, the more affection I’ve had for it. A lot of that is down to Stalter, who gives what’s likely to be one of my favorite performances of the year as a woman who is self-evidently terrific but who plausibly feels awkward in the world, and to Sharpe, who can both be Healing Dream Guy and very much Also Damaged Guy, and whose sense of quiet can help convey that those are, in this case, the same person.