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Too Much (Netflix, Thursday 10 July) opens with a montage of the kind of woman you could be, if you were a carefree New Yorker who upped sticks and moved to London on a whim. You could be a candlelit period heroine, roaming across the moors, or one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, or you could be a sturdy northern police sergeant, which leads to the slightly strange spectacle of seeing Megan Stalter from Hacks doing a French and Saunders-style parody of what looks a lot like Happy Valley.
The much-hyped new Lena Dunham comedy follows Jess (Stalter), an open-hearted American woman who moves to London to escape a broken heart. There, she falls for a messy indie musician called Felix, whom she meets when he’s playing a gig in a pub. Dunham co-created the series with her husband Luis Felber, and it is loosely based on their real-life romance and marriage.
Jess decides to reinvent her life following the decline of her relationship with the highly strung Zev (Michael Zegen). Zev has quickly moved on to an influencer, played by Emily Ratajkowski, and Jess records long videos about her feelings, addressed to Zev’s new girlfriend, which she never plans to send … but you can probably guess that they won’t stay private for ever. Following a post-breakup spell amid the matriarchs of her Long Island family home, she packs her bags and books a room on a British estate. What Jess imagines an estate to be is basically Mr Darcy emerging from the lake at Chatsworth. You can imagine the estate she ends up on when she arrives in London.
This culture-clash, fish-out-of-water strand is not the main point, though it does bubble under throughout. It offers the chance to hear British slang and idioms with new ears: if “getting a bollocking” never sounded strange to you, then it is worth considering that if you have no idea what it means in the first place, it can come across as a little smutty. I wonder if it is also the first time “oi oi saveloy” has made its way on to a Netflix series.
When Jess meets Felix (Will Sharpe, in leather jacket, lipstick and nail polish), her Mr Darcy/Mr Rochester dreams shuffle off in a very different direction. It is clear from the off that they like each other very much, but they don’t have the patience to pretend to be better people, or show each other their best sides. Instead, they come together over their flaws and oddities, finding a way to be together despite their considerable excess baggage. Too Much presents itself as a romcom, at least on the surface – Jess loves Love Actually and Notting Hill, and each of the episodes gets a romcom pun as its title – but in the end, it is an abrasive, complicated, grownup version of romance, rather than any picture-perfect illusion.
The Bear has sparked an ongoing debate about what counts as comedy and what counts as drama, by entering itself into various comedy categories at awards shows, despite being defiantly laugh-free and deeply traumatic in almost every scene. While Too Much isn’t quite on that same level of harrowing, viewers should know in advance that it is not exactly a laugh-a-minute lolfest. Jess must slowly work out how she lost herself in her relationship with Zev, while Felix’s family are an eccentric, unreliable nightmare, and his struggles with sobriety are pressing and ongoing. You begin to hope that it’s only loosely based on real life when it delves into the grotesque, cartoonish awfulness of the English upper classes. Not even the most obnoxious of interlopers deserves to be exposed to a country house horror show in which grown women have nicknames that make them sound like horses.
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Too Much is stacked with a stupidly strong cast, who drop in seemingly for fun: Richard E Grant, Stephen Fry, Rita Wilson, Rhea Perlman, Naomi Watts, Andrew Scott, and that really is only scratching the surface. But in the end, despite being dressed up in romcom clothing, Too Much is about broken people finding love, actually, while learning to live with pain. Look out for it in those best comedy categories, 2026.
