(courtesy IMP Awards)
In the hands of most romantic comedies, love is a shiny, faultlessly perfect paragon of all that is good and lovely, and while there may be minor hiccups for anyone falling prey to its life-transformative charms, they are easily dispensed with via a peak hour rush to the airport or a heartfelt pronouncement of love everlasting in front of a crowd of loved ones and strangers in a hugely public settings.
Life may be problematic, even when Cupid’s arrow strikes in the most definitive of ways, but it always plays second fiddle to the obstacle-crushing, euphoria-inducing, soul-nourishing glories of love, true love.
But what if, wonders Too Much, a new streaming show from Girls‘ creator Lena Dunham in collaboration with musician husband Luis Felber, love wins out in the end BUT the path to it getting its inevitable way is ridiculously messy, convoluted and difficult as hell.
That might seem as unromantic as a rom-com can get, and to be honest there are times when Too Much feels less rom-comy and more an indie trial by flawed individuals’ fire, but by and large the 10-part series does a reasonably good job of exploring how the path to true love isn’t always the fairytale we expect.
The lead character, Jessica, played by Hacks‘ Megan Stalter, is way more flawed than most rom-com protagonists but that’s not to say she’s a trainwreck in search of a good scrap metal yard.
Rather, Jessica, who’s the product of a dysfunctionally loving home made of grandmother Dottie (Rhea Perlman), mother Lois (Rita Wilson) and sister Nora (Lena Dunham) who is recovering from the break up of her marriage to newly-minted polyamorous bisexual James (Andrew Rannells), is Everyperson flawed, neither faultless nor cataclysmically broken.
In the series’ first episode, Jessica flees to London after a toxically nasty end to her eight-year relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen), taking up the offer from her brother-in-law and boss, James, to produce a high-profile Christmas ad for a valued client.
Jessica, smarting from the way she was dumped with Zev spending years emotionally abusing her before unceremoniously dumping year for glam knitting influencer, Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski), is still hurting but relishes the chance to get a restart on life and her career doing what she does brilliantly well which is keeping fractious personalities and thorny logistics together long enough to produce a final product which is just what the client ordered.
She thinks Britain will be just like a Jane Austen novel, and Too Much does have some effective visual fun with this, both when Jessica goes to her first pub and when she’s at a wedding which is way more toxic, guest-wise anyway, than nuptuals have any right to be, but of course, it’s not, and after getting over the shock of her temporary home being in a council estate and not a sprawling, stately home-punctuated combination of well-manicured lawn and gardens, she heads to a local pub for a drink where she meets aspiring musician, Felix (Will Sharpe).
It’s a meet-cute made in rom-com heaven with garrulously chatty Jessica given the sort of pithy lines that no man can resist and before you know it, Felix and Jessica, after a slightly flammable episode, end up falling hard for each other.
Jessica goes from being distracted about her job because she’s grieving the end of what she thought would be her forever love to being distracted because she and Felix are staying up all night having s*x and talking about everything; it’s all the sparkling loveliness that the start of true love should be and honestly you get the feeling that Too Much is going to go down a very British rom-com path, helped by the fact that the production partners of the show are Working Title, creators of flims like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love, Actually.
The presence of Working Title adds a very authentic Britishness to proceedings, but also play-on-words episode titles like “Nonsense & Sensibility”, “Pity Woman”, “Notting Kill” and, of course, “Enough, Actually” and a slew of British actor cameos including Jennifer Saunders, Richard E. Grant as Jessica’s UK boss, Jonno, Stephen Fry as Felix’s hopeless-at-life dad and Andrew Scott as preciousl sleazy director, Jim Weinlich Rice who, inadvertently, gives Jessica her big break.
Too Much is likely one of the few American shows to get its depiction of life in England authentically right, which means that you aren’t cringing about the production values or characterisation; rather, you save that for the way the series sometimes drops the ball romance-wise.
Now, Too Much does do exactly what was observed at the start of this review and is far more sanguine and honest about romance than even the most cynical of rom-coms manage, leaving you feeling as if you’re inability to live out the perfect fairytale has been seen and honoured.
However, there are some whiplash-level tonal shifts, especially in the middle-to-late episodes, which give you whiplash, and stretch to breaking the idea that love happens between groundedly flawed individuals; what you instead seeing instead is that Felix and Jessica are so broken that there’s likely no way love, or anything else really can fix them.
That’s a pity because there’s a lot Too Much gets right; alas, all of that bullseye striking observations of true love down in the trenches, all delivered with a lowkey funny and sad indie vibe, is almost laid asunder by how darkly unrealistic Jessica and Felix’s reactions are at various points.
It’s like they become totally different people and any sense that they are meant for each other, which is strained too by the lack of popping chemistry between the two otherwise highly likeable leads, goes well and truly out the window, which is not good for a rom-com aiming to end on a triumphantly romantic note.
That Too Much does end with roses and love and all the good rom-com things isn’t a given at quite a few points through the show, but get there it does, which would be lovely except that the final episode, “The Idea of Glue”, is such a jerky shift from the fraught and darkly troubled episodes that precede that Felix and Jessica’s happy-ever-after doesn’t feel even remotely well-earned.
In fact, it feels like someone panicked, though it all too dark and gloom y and shoehorned in a Working Title final act before viewers through shoes or something hard at their screen of voice.
Don’t get me wrong – Too Much has a fun premise, memorable characters and sharp dialogue that feels very Indie improv worthy, and you will want to stick around for all ten episodes, but it also feels like it squanders its refreshing honest take on love, true love, delivering up a rom-com that is not so much refreshingly subversive as it is clumsily enjoyable, unsure if it wants sparkly happy-ever-after or a grim indie meditation on how love is to survive after it comes your way.
Too Much streams on Netflix.