An overdose of oversmarts

Remember when Lena Dunham was the most important voice in television? Girls, her chaotic, semi-autobiographical HBO series, smashed its way into the prestige TV landscape like a giggling wrecking-ball, all elbows and ambition.

- RAJA SEN

Remember when Lena Dunham was the most important voice in television? Girls, her chaotic, semi-autobiographical HBO series, smashed its way into the prestige TV landscape like a giggling wrecking-ball, all elbows and ambition. It was bold and brash and unshaved. It was "cinema" for the small screen, with characters that were abrasively specific and men who were off-puttingly real. In 2012, when Girls premiered, we bought into its first season—its rawness, its honesty, its audacity—and we went in a little harder on a man named Adam Driver, breaking through with such magnetism that you could practically see future Oscar nominations floating above his head.

Then Girls kept going. And going. And it turned out, maybe that flavor of raw, like cookie-dough, was best in small doses. The series devolved into a self-indulgent mess, incoherent in tone, inconsistent in character, so uncomfortable that not even schadenfreude could keep you glued. Driver, a messy-haired escape artist, soared into stardom. The rest faded into podcast territory.

Over a decade later, Dunham returns with Too Much, a Netflix confection that, at first glance, appears to be the anti-Girls. Where Girls was grubby and narcissistic, Too Much is breezy and big-hearted. There is structure. There is romance. There is—dare I say—wholesomeness?

At the center of the series is Megan Stalter, that loud and luminous scene-stealer from