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I know what you’re thinking – why isn’t Girls getting rebooted like every other TV show these days? Why isn’t Lena Dunham contorting herself to make that happen? Isn’t everything else she works on going to be Girls 2.0? It’s understandable that her new Netflix series, Too Much, will be compared to the show that launched her career to global heights, but it’s a lazy contrast.
You see, I am not a Girls fan. Aside from brief flashbacks of Dunham’s character Hannah spaced out on drugs while wearing a string vest that wasn’t hers, much of the show’s scenes blur into one hazy hallucination for me. That’s not to say the hit TV show was a bust in my eyes – far from it – but 17-year-old me wasn’t ready to embrace the messy reality of womanhood when Girls first aired in 2012.
Aged 30 in 2025, I couldn’t have fallen harder for Too Much. Set in my back garden of London, Jessica (Megan Stalter) takes the opportunity to move to the city for work after her ex-boyfriend, who she’s still not over, proposes to a popular influencer. It’s not the most original lead-in to a new Netflix show like this, but it’s the springboard for something even better.
No matter your opinions on Dunham or her work, she’s able to remain effortlessly relevant in a way that’s absolutely astounding. The script and situations feel fresh without ever venturing into laughable territory, incorporating 2020s culture like Instagram reels and TikTok beauty hacks with successful irony. Trust me, you’ve never wanted to own a hairless dog who wears bespoke turtleneck jumpers more.
Where Dunham has largely stepped behind the camera (aside from a few stray appearances), Megan Stalter’s Jessica is a flawless replacement. We’ve known she’s a comedy queen in the making since her role on Hacks, but Too Much is her circus ring for the performance of a lifetime. Jessica might question her choices every 0.5 seconds, but she never truly sacrifices her sense of self, unashamedly returning to the things that give her joy in darker moments. She’s a typical 2020s twentysomething and proud of it, and that in turn makes us feel better about the ways we’ve adapted cliché and overdramatic habits.
Clearly Stalter is our star here, but the rest of the ensemble cast is just as chaotically fleshed-out, and we want to sink our teeth into all of them. Even better is the frankly insane level of celebrity cameos, popping out more frequently than a teenager’s acne. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but Naomi Watts’ diabolically unfazed British housewife Ann has to cinch it for me. Keep a close eye on every episode, though – I won’t spoil it, but there’s a particularly good cameo in episode 9 that might remind you of a character they’ve played before.
There are a few downsides, but regardless of how Too Much tackled its subject, they were bound to be there. Jessica’s fixation on her ex-boyfriend becomes as tiring as it is in the show as we experience watching it ourselves, with the stereotypes of her new London chums not doing anyone any favours either. Roll the two together too frequently and the show becomes its namesake, but sadly, Jessica needs to wade through the worst to learn her lessons.
Too Much isn’t an in-depth exploration of what it means to love and live as a young woman in a new decade, and it doesn’t have to be. In hindsight, Girls was heralded as exactly that for its time and place, but to judge Too Much in the same way is to miss the raw emotion and humanity on display here. It’s never slacking on the chaotic front, and going with the emotions and bad decisions in real-time is what makes Dunham’s show feel like a new take on something we’ve seen before. Sometimes you’ve just got to make your peace with the fact your life has resulted in eating cold instant noodles at 1am, and that’s okay.
