Does ‘Too Much’ Believe in Love?

The primary time I watched Too A lot, Lena Dunham’s return to scripted tv after a seven-year hiatus, it felt impossibly disappointing—visually flat, nearly defiantly unfunny, extra cringeworthy in its reliance on Anglo-American tradition clashes for allure than Mary-Kate and Ashley making an attempt to get a royal guard to crack a smile. The premise: Jess (performed by Hacks’ Megan Stalter) is a New Yorker working in promoting manufacturing who’s supplied the possibility to maneuver to London when her relationship catastrophically implodes. (Dunham, as ever daring us to attempt to like her characters, has Jess, within the first episode, breaking into her ex’s condo and terrorizing his new influencer girlfriend whereas brandishing a backyard gnome.) Arriving in London, Jess has an opportunity encounter with Felix (Will Sharpe), a broke musician, in a very vile pub rest room. Each are hapless in numerous however complementary methods—Jess tells Felix wash his arms, Felix helps Jess get residence when she by accident orders her Uber to Heathrow.These are arduous instances to be a romantic, particularly on Netflix. Two years in the past, on a New Yorker podcast lamenting the fashionable state of the rom-com, Alexandra Schwartz famous that essentially the most essential high quality for any romance is that this: “It’s a must to consider that these two folks wish to be collectively, and it’s a must to purchase in.” On this entrance, Too A lot barely even tries. Stalter is wackily endearing as Jess, and Sharpe provides brooding complexity to Felix’s offhand allure. However as display screen lovers, the pair have nearly destructive chemistry, coming along with a shrug and staying collectively out of what appears like inertia. Initially, this set my enamel on edge—two characters with seemingly little curiosity in one another being paired off with the chaotic insistence of a kid making her tender toys kiss. However the extra I’ve come again to the present, the extra its slack, unromantic strategy to like seems to be intentional. Jess and Felix couple up not as a result of they’re giddy with feeling, drunk on proximity and intimacy and connection, however as a result of every affords one thing particular that the opposite individual wants. Too A lot is co-produced by Working Title, and the names of its episodes nod to some gooier rom-coms served up by the corporate in bygone days: 4 Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill. However within the place the place the present’s coronary heart needs to be is as an alternative pure pragmatism: That is love for a chilly local weather.Learn: The loss of life of the intercourse sceneIf you examine Too A lot with Celine Music’s latest movie, Materialists, through which each character sizes up romantic prospects with the agenda of a hiring supervisor, you possibly can sense a theme. Can we afford to really fall in love now? On this economic system? Dunham presents infatuation as nonsensical, and even harmful: One of the best episode of Too A lot is one which particulars the breakdown of Jess’s seven-year relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen), a wannabe music author who seems like a white knight in a bar one evening when she’s misplaced her associates and her pizza (nobly, he secures one other slice) and instantly dazzles Jess into submission, charming her household, devising kissing rituals scored to songs, even massaging her grandmother’s ft. Rapidly, although, he sours. When she strikes in with him, he’s outraged by the truth that a lot of her stuff is pink. He sneers at her love for Miley Cyrus energy ballads and mocks her want for affection. “I swear you costume as a fuck you to folks typically, Jess,” he tells her, when she places on a sailor smock to exit. The longer she loves him, the extra contemptuous he turns into.Felix, against this, is cool from the beginning. Nobody is healthier than Dunham at writing sympathetic fuckboys, males in various levels of arrested improvement who’re disagreeable in uniquely beguiling methods. On the pub, Felix treats Jess like a sort of curiosity (she is, the truth is, carrying the exact same sailor smock that we later be taught Zev had been so merciless about). It isn’t till he sees the coziness of Jess’s rental condo that one thing appears to click on in his thoughts in an attractive approach, like a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet reconsidering her emotions for Mr. Darcy after she first visits Pemberley. Jess, considerably randomly, tries to kiss Felix; Felix, perturbed, admits that he has a girlfriend and leaves. He walks round for a bit listening to Fiona Apple and smoking, then goes again to Jess’s place, the place he finds her being hosed down within the bathe by a baby-faced paramedic after having by accident set her nightgown on hearth. Considerably extremely, he stays.Learn: The fact present that captures Gen Z datingToo A lot gestures on the rom-com, however it appears extra enamored with the sitcom, notably the low-fi, edgy, barely manic mode of British comedies on BBC Three: Fleabag, Pulling, Coupling. In contrast with Dunham’s Women, whose path and cinematography particularly emulated Woody Allen and Mike Mills, it’s a surprisingly unprepossessing present, the type that extra usually will get pulled collectively cheaply on the British taxpayer’s dime. In a bottle-ish episode early on, Jess and Felix keep up all evening in her condo, having intercourse, consuming takeout pho, and ignoring one another’s emotional cues. (He tells her about being grossed out by an ex when he as soon as noticed her consuming chilly Chinese language meals with a glance of clean desperation; later, in secret, Jess shovels chilly noodles into her mouth with the identical emptiness.) The characters do antic, no-stakes issues that require little clarification and sometimes defy logic. Felix goes to assert unemployment, telling the officer assessing him that if he will get a job, he received’t have time to jot down music. Jess goes location scouting with a hotshot director, nearly has intercourse with him in a firelit four-poster mattress, then exhibits up exterior Felix’s window, begging him to maneuver in together with her. Late within the sequence, Jennifer Saunders seems taking part in a personality an identical to Completely Fabulous’s Edina, all the way down to the selfsame styling and vocal supply.However with assist from flashback episodes, the present additionally begins to put out why Felix and Jess is likely to be drawn to one another. Jess, nonetheless devastated from her breakup and friendless in London, finds instantaneous stability in Felix as somebody who’ll take care of her, even when, subliminally not less than, she appears to see by means of him. Like so many Dunham heroines, Jess is a perplexing mixture of instinct and delusion; she affords Felix a joint checking account after they’ve been collectively barely every week, but in addition accurately identifies that his complete lack of ambition matches awkwardly together with her pleasure in her work. If, as an actor, Stalter typically appears much less convincing than Dunham was at pulling the mixture off, it’s as a result of it’s an exceedingly troublesome register to play in. Strolling as much as a visitor at a marriage, Jess introduces herself by saying, “Carrying neutrals is sort of a approach of claiming you’ve given up, proper?”—a line so thoughtlessly impolite that even Hannah Horvath would possibly blanch. Felix, whose childhood is revealed to have been unloving and unstable, appears to see in Jess one thing like instantaneous safety: not only a heat individual with a house that’s way more welcoming than his chaotic squat stuffed with eco-warriors, however an insta-family. If their relationship skips the heady, obsessive crush part to get straight into a cushty, stolid, home mode, perhaps it’s as a result of that’s what each of them are actually craving for.Initially, one thing about Too A lot’s insistence on citing rom-coms in its episode titles whereas so stubbornly resisting romance felt galling to me. The standard that attracts us to, say, the tortured off-on dynamic of Connell and Marianne on Regular Individuals or the unbreakable bond between Nora and Hae Sung in Previous Lives is the concept love is someway transcendent, that it elevates people above the extent of mere existence. However realistically, what’s love if not care and a spotlight? And what are care and a spotlight if not expressions of tenderness and regard? Dunham buries clues all through Too A lot that appear to recommend what she thinks about women and men: Matrimony, Felix’s father tells his spouse late within the present, comes from the Latin phrases mater, that means “mom,” and monia, that means “exercise”—it’s about getting ready a woman to be a mom, and in some ways, a maternal dynamic is precisely what each Felix and Jess are craving. “You’re like this alien,” Jess tells him within the remaining episode, “however you additionally really feel like residence.”