LOVE FINDS A WAY

How the women of Too Much made the romcom just right

- ALEXIS SOLOSKI

When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.

If you have seen Dunham's previous work, which often skews antiromantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series Girls, a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.

But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting. It’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the autumn of that year, they were married.

Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, Too Much, now streaming on Netflix.

Is Too Much a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Dunham's own story? Sure. But Too Much wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.

“I want all people in romcoms, because that’s real life,” said Megan Stalter, the star of Too Much, who had gathered with Dunham and their costars Janicza Bravo and Emily Ratajkowski to talk about the show.

Too Much joins recent comedies like Fleabag, Catastrophe, Insecure, Jane The Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in widening the aperture of the rom-com.

For the girls who grew up on Girls — which includes Dunham, who was only 23 when she sold the series — the new series is an opportunity to rejigger the genre, which despite recent efforts remains oddly regressive.