Too Much

When your long-term boyfriend leaves you for an Instagram influencer, what can you do? In the new Netflix romantic comedy series Too Much, the answer is to go to London for work, and meet a struggling musician who happens to be very, very handsome with a life almost as messy as yours. Starring Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe, and co-created by Lena Dunham, it features a cast full of comedy MVPs, a meet-cute, and a very unusual dog. To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. https://plus.npr.org/happy See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Linda Holmes?

  When your long-term boyfriend leaves you for an Instagram influencer, what can you do? In the new romantic comedy series Too Much, the answer is to go to London for work and meet a struggling musician who happens to be very, very handsome with a life almost as messy as yours.

• 0:35Aisha Harris?

  The Netflix show was created by Lena Dunham and her composer husband, loosely inspired by their own story. Too Much features a cast full of comedy MVPs, a meet cute, and a very unusual dog. I'm Aisha Harris.

• 0:49Linda Holmes?

  And I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about Too Much on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

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• 2:14Linda Holmes?

  Joining us today is NPR Music reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento. Hello, Isabella. Welcome back.

• 2:20Aisha Harris?

  Howdy. Thank you for having me.

• 2:22Linda Holmes?

  So Too Much begins when a woman named Jess discovers that her boyfriend of several years has left her for an Instagram knitting influencer. Jess is played by Meg Stalter, who plays Kayla on Hacks. She gets a chance to be sent on an assignment to help produce a Christmas ad in London, and she's glad to get out of town. When she gets there, she wants to just enjoy the Jane Austen story she's envisioned for herself. Instead, she has a meet very cute with a handsome musician named Felix, played by Will Sharp.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  I think all the sinks are broken.

• 2:55Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, you can still use the soap, though. Just rub it in.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  No, you can't. You have to rinse off the soap. Otherwise, you have germs and soap on your hands, plus you'll be like really sticky.

• 3:03Aisha Harris?

  Feel that?

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're really sticky.

• 3:07Aisha Harris?

  Won't be in 10 minutes, though.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Why? What are you gonna do, chop your hands off?

• 3:11Linda Holmes?

  The two of them fall into a messy relationship that's pretty happy but instantly complicated. For one thing, Felix has problems of his own with his own family and a difficult childhood. For another, he's stuck in a phase of his life where he's not sure being in a band is his entire future. Lena Dunham co-created the series with her husband, composer Luis Felber, and she directed most of the episodes. Too Much is streaming on Netflix. Ayesha, I'm gonna start with you. Where did you come down on this one?

• 3:40Aisha Harris?

  I think I started this show curious. Lena Dunham is a very complex, complicated figure, but I've also liked some of her work. I think a lot of girls is really smart and like a perfect encapsulation of that moment of time and that very specific type of person. I also really enjoyed Catherine, called Birdie, the movie she directed. I came to it being like, this could be interesting. And at first, it felt as though I've seen this story before. It's a rom-com, rom-com-dramedy. I feel like there have been a lot of recent 30-something, early 40-something women TV shows where it's like- It opens with a terrible breakup or finding out your boyfriend cheated on you or whatever.

• 4:25Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Aisha Harris?

  And then you're also like in a career rut and all these things have to happen.

• 4:28Linda Holmes?

  They're kind of what now, the what now rom com.

• 4:31Aisha Harris?

  Exactly. You know, How to Die Alone, Survival of the Thickest, these are shows that have also done similar things. I think as it goes on, it gets a lot more interesting and I think a lot of that is due to Meg Stalter. And just how she's able to sort of both like embody this persona that I think we've all kind of gotten from Lena Dunham. In many ways, like this feels in many ways autobiographical or semi autobiographical. But she also has her own personality and I like her on hacks. So I was eventually won over. Even though it was kind of a mixed bag for me overall.

• 5:06Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. All right. Isabella, how about you?

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I totally agree with Ayesha. It was sort of ups and downs. I came to Lena Dunham's work very, very late. Like I was sort of too young when Girls was in its heyday and was

• 5:17Aisha Harris?

  Making me feel old.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Became aware of it in the like downfall of Lena Dunham.

• 5:21Linda Holmes?

  Get used to it.

• 5:23Speaker 05

  So I started watching it for the first time like two years ago and was like, oh my God, this show is brilliant and funny and has so many. There are many valid criticisms of it, but I also became sort of a Lena defender in that way. Like I think the show deserved the renaissance that it got in the last few years. So I was very excited to come to a new Lena Dunham project, like in a timely way. I wanted to like it a little bit more than I did, but I think it has a lot of really great things going for it. Especially the dialogue and especially the cast and the characters. It's a motley crew of kind of a who's who of people who have worked with Lena Dunham in the past.

• 5:54Linda Holmes?

  Really is. Yeah.

• 5:56Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 05

  And that was really fun. Yeah.

• 5:58Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I felt like as I was watching this, I was mixed on it. And the farther I got from it, the more kind of affection I developed for it. I think because I do love a romantic comedy. This is a known thing. I do think that it is an effectively done, very nice meet cute, less the thing in the bathroom and more like a little bit later when he ends up in her apartment. It's all very like messy in a way, which is obviously what the show is meant to be. I think Will Sharp is incredibly charming. My goodness. Agree. I think he's really good in this and, and really understands how to be this guy who is both like the dream guy and also the super messed up guy who in his own life is

• 6:42Linda Holmes?

  still struggling with a lot of his own stuff. I think, you know, when you talk about this show kind of starting off fairly familiar, improving as it goes, to me, it improves as you get more balance between the two of them as it becomes a story about both of them. Because the more it's a story about both of them, the less it's a story just about her trying to fix her life by meeting some guy, right? Yes, yes. They like each other from the beginning. There's an early episode where they're just kind of like obsessed with just being together and spending all this time together that I really liked. I really liked the fact that from the beginning, they're very attracted to each other. They have all this stuff going for them. And then it's just that they have history and baggage and, you know, who's willing

• 7:25Linda Holmes?

  to say I love you and who's not, and all the things that come up in their relationship felt really effective to me. I will say like, I was not a big girls person. I felt like it was a combination of sort of I became exhausted by the conversation around it and also I never particularly felt connected to those characters and I, which They're exhausting characters. They, they really are. They are exhausting characters. So I was interested to see something of hers that was a little bit more up my alley. It basically worked for me. You both, I think, felt that it dragged a little bit at times and could have been shorter. I felt like the ending is rushed. I, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I wrote a review of this for NPR and one of the things that I said was like, I think

• 8:09Linda Holmes?

  if I had any confidence that Netflix would do like four seasons of this, there might be a way to do it that's more. That feels more fully developed in terms of what is actually going on with these people and how they're going to work through their stuff. But that's not the world that we live in. So I understand why they wanted to kind of bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, you know?

• 8:31Speaker 05

  I agree. I think something that I really liked about this, to your point that the characters on Girls are exhausting, and most of them, Shoshana is exempt from this, most of them are just completely unlikable by the very end. And something I liked about this show is that it totally takes two rom-com tropes, like the neurotic, obsessive, you know, disgruntled ex-girlfriends and the sort of like, roll-your-eyes, indie, toxic, soft boy that is inevitably going to break your heart. And it manages to really humanize them and make them both really likable and flawed characters. As you start to learn more about both of them and you start to unpack that baggage and understand where they're coming from, I did feel much more invested in their relationship

• 9:13Speaker 05

  to one another and not just their individual storylines. But I thought it like took a while to get there and then I agree that then it sort of rushes into an ending. And I wish we had just gotten some more of that background earlier in the show. I would have felt invested a lot sooner.

• 9:26Aisha Harris?

  I feel like that is not a fault of just the show, but it's kind of become a common theme amongst a lot of these TV shows where you don't know, for streaming, where you don't know if they're going to come back. And so they often feel too long, too much as it were, and then like all of a sudden we're at the end. And the ending could either be a bookend, like this is the end, or it could lead to another season. And I can understand the creative issues that can arise from behind the scenes, but as a viewer, it's also kind of frustrating. I will say, I don't know if I was as enamored of Felix as you two were. To be honest, like that's never been my type of, like I've never been into the indie emo rock musician. That's just not my thing.

• 10:11Aisha Harris?

  And this is not a fault of Will Sharp at all, because I do think he's charming. I was way more curious about Jessica, really. Um, and I think for me, my favorite episode, I mean, flashback episodes, honestly, you know, I'm kind of over them as a general rule. That's another part of the formula that's just become so enlarged. It's like, we're going to have this flashback episode. But for me, the big flashback episode, it's not just a flashback, but it cuts in and out, is episode five, where we see her relationship with Zev, her ex-boyfriend, played by Michael Zigan, and

• 10:44Aisha Harris?

  I think it's like, it's really interesting because I think there are a lot of, there have often been expectations of a leading lady who looks like Meg Stalter, like what that would entail and like, what that character might be.

• 10:56Linda Holmes?

  That she would have a lot of insecurities, specifically around the way she looks.

• 11:00Aisha Harris?

  Exactly. Exactly. And I think this episode is really good about showing that she has insecurities, but they don't stem from herself. They stem from her relationship in many ways from Zev.

• 11:14Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Aisha Harris?

  And there's one scene that I really thought was just so cutting and so smartly composed, where he's talking about, like, she works in, in visual, and so she's a very flamboyant dresser.

• 11:26Linda Holmes?

  She's a fashion icon.

• 11:27Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, she loves fashion. And she wears things that like, are just like, very eye popping, eye catching, like you would walk down the street and you'd be like, there's someone who has style. Whether you like that style or not is one thing, but like, there's a moment where he addresses that, and he says this to her.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  I swear, you dress as a [BLEEP] to people sometimes, Jess. It's like you want to make them feel like idiots for looking at you. You don't want them to know that you're beautiful, or even me to know that you're beautiful. I think you think you can't compete with someone like Gigi Hadid, so you have to go in the total opposite direction.

• 12:00Aisha Harris?

  There is so much happening in that.

• 12:01Linda Holmes?

  He's so mean.

• 12:03Aisha Harris?

  The conversation keeps going, but it's like, oh my God, he's both, he's totally nagging her. He's totally being like,

• 12:09Linda Holmes?

  Awful.

• 12:09Aisha Harris?

  You're beautiful, but also you don't look like the typical beautiful girl, so let me remind you of this.

• 12:13Linda Holmes?

  Right, right.

• 12:14Aisha Harris?

  And I, I thought it was a really smart way to get at this thing that you would expect would come up all the time on the show, but thankfully doesn't. It just shows it through this relationship.

• 12:23Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Aisha Harris?

  And I really liked that.

• 12:24Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, yeah. You get that feeling from him where he's basically being like, well, because you're not conventionally attractive, as you know, you know?

• 12:31Aisha Harris?

  Yes, exactly.

• 12:32Linda Holmes?

  You know?

• 12:33Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. It's so harsh, but also real. It feels very nuanced in a way.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  That scene in particular made me want to throw something at my TV, because I agree, I think it was so refreshing to be like, no, she's awesome, and she's confident, and she has a great sense of style, and this guy's kind of a loser who's like, projecting his insecurities onto her and trying to bring her down. And I think that it gives so much more context to why she's struggling in a way that's like, oh, you've just had to put up with this really horrible relationship.

• 13:01Linda Holmes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  And that's what's making you question yourself, and that's what's giving you all of this, like, Inner turmoil is actually just your loser ex-boyfriend and she's awesome.

• 13:10Linda Holmes?

  Right.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  And that was a really refreshing character development, I think.

• 13:14Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, I agree. And shout out to Michael Ziegler. I mean, listen, this is the same guy who played Joel Maisel on The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and is really carving out this niche as like the guy you can understand why she loved him once and you can really understand why she doesn't love him anymore.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:30Linda Holmes?

  And he is in this, I think, worse than he is in that. And you get a real sense that he was, whether or not he ever sat down to intentionally like do a number on her, really did a number on her. And as she goes forward, she really is dealing with a lot of fallout from decisions that he made.

• 13:51Aisha Harris?

  Mm hmm. I mean, there's also a world where, you know, the Emily Radikowski character of Wendy, his new girlfriend, who is Emily Radikowski, like, she's a model, like, in real life. She is the blurred lines girl. Like, that's how we know her. But like, I also think the way that the show subverts that dynamic and how it's not about her and it's all about Seb and she is not the villain in this situation, even though Jessica spends much of the show creating video notes for her and being like, how dare you, what do you do? Like,

• 14:25Linda Holmes?

  Private video notes.

• 14:26Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, private video notes directed at, directly at Wendy.

• 14:29Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Aisha Harris?

  It's a way that I think Lena Dunham, she just has this understanding, I think, this clarity around that aspect of herself, even if it doesn't come through in other ways. Like, I think this is one avenue where she's just like very clear about her understanding of the way these things work. And I just really appreciated that.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  Totally. It was never Wendy. Even though, I will say, I love the knitting influencer of it all. I thought that was so funny.

• 14:54Linda Holmes?

  It's a funny bit. And I think like, I don't want to play defense all the time in terms of like, well, you know, because it's Meg Stalter, I would expect somebody to spend a lot of time talking about that she's insecure about how she looks. But I kind of would with a lot of creators. And the idea of all the things that are an issue between her and Felix, she does not walk around being like, am I pretty enough?

• 15:18Aisha Harris?

  Oh, God, no.

• 15:19Linda Holmes?

  He's so handsome. Am I pretty enough? Like, that is not really part of what is going on between the two of them. He is into her from the beginning. He makes it clear that he's into her. And being able to see

• 15:32Linda Holmes?

  Her have a whole story that's not about that. I really do appreciate it because it allows you to see all the other great things about her, this character, but also this actress who, you know, like people who mostly know her from Hacks, which is not everybody, but she came on Hacks as a very much like a, an exaggerated kind of comic relief character who was sort of always, you know, turned up to 12. Yeah, she's a lot. She's a lot on that show. But over time, they have, they have given her more depth also on that show. And I think the more you see of that, the more you understand how much there is to her ability to get into characters. I do want to just mention like the, the, the supporting

• 16:13Linda Holmes?

  cast on this thing is satakt with people who are really good at comedy of, of a lot of different types, right? Because her, you know, at home, she's got her sister who Lena Dunham plays and her, her mom who Rita Wilson plays and her grandma who Rhea Perlman plays. And I'm so delighted to be seeing more Rhea Perlman again. Yeah. But also like Andrew Rannells is in this, Richard E. Grant is in this, Naomi Watts is in this in a part that I would not have expected to be the Naomi Watts part. She's the wife of the boss. There are just a bunch of people. Stephen Fry gives this really devastating performance as Felix's father. They just really like pumped up this cast with a lot

• 16:57Linda Holmes?

  of great people. Janix Bravo is in it and also directed an episode, but also plays her coworker. Yeah. I think they have a fairly established collaboration, her and Lena Dunham. Yeah, they did that show Camping a few years ago. Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  Also notable mention, Andrew Scott, who played a really sort of out of left field character.

• 17:18Linda Holmes?

  Yes, yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  It was one of those things where he, yeah, he popped up and I was like, what? You're here too? Like, yeah. Yeah. To your point, Lynda, like I really appreciated that because we weren't so focused on how the character of Jessica feels about herself based on the way she looks. We also get to see all these other ways in which she's actually flawed and how she is or isn't dealing with them.

• 17:39Aisha Harris?

  Right.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  And that is just infinitely more interesting. Like, you know, the part where she's meeting Felix's friends and she wants to figure out what the, you know, the friends who are girls, one of which is actually one of his exes, and she's sort of trying to be the cool girl, but immediately fails and is just like so over the top, asking them questions to figure out the dynamic.

• 17:57Aisha Harris?

  Right.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Like, I love that. I love that there's other moments in which you're sort of cringing at what she's doing, but it's also so relatable because she's just like getting to the point in a not very graceful way.

• 18:07Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  And Meg Stalter just absolutely killed the ability to be such a complex character without it being hung up on tropes that we just don't need in 2025.

• 18:17Aisha Harris?

  I would counter a little bit that I love pretty much all of the secondary characters in this show, but I think there were actually too many. I love Janix Bravo and Richard E. Grant and Naomi Watts, but I think the employment aspect of it, the workplace comedy part, kind of fell flat for me because it tried to insert them in moments where I wasn't quite sure, did they cut scenes? Like, why is this all of a sudden part of a montage? There were moments where I was just like, I wanted them to either have more to do or have less to do.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  I get that.

• 18:48Aisha Harris?

  But I do think, I love seeing the friend group of Felix, especially seeing Adele Azakupus, who is like, I think her kind of breakout was Blue is the Warmest Color, but she's since popped up in a lot of really great movies over the last few years. And as one of the Paulies, because there's like multiple.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Yes, there are multiple women named Polly, yeah. Women named Polly.

• 19:08Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, I really love that because a lot of Jessica's insecurities come from not feeling cool enough. And I think it's very relatable. And she's in Europe, and so of course, like, Americans often, you know, think that Europeans are way cooler. Whether or not that's true or not, it felt very real, and I loved those interactions. And I could have lived with more of that and less of the workplace comedy stuff.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  I get that. I get that. I think I enjoyed it for itself. I think Richard E. Grant is having a great time in this.

• 19:38Aisha Harris?

  He's so fun.

• 19:39Linda Holmes?

  And so is Leo Reich, who plays one of her, like, other coworkers, who I think is also having a great time. So I think for, for those reasons, it, it stood up for me. I definitely think that you have a point that it probably was not as well integrated into the entire story as it could have been. It's almost like if you make this kind of show, like, the workplace and how she's fitting in at the workplace is always part of it. So it's in there. But again, I can kind of understand saying, like, I either want to see the six-episode version of this, or like, the three or four-season version of this. Totally. I can, I think both of those are, could perhaps be either more tightly developed

• 20:21Linda Holmes?

  and concisely developed, or kind of more fully, like, but I'm always the person who looks at TV characters and is like, therapy, you need a lot of therapy. And rarely does that happen. I'm, I'm surprised we didn't get that. I'm surprised that wasn't a component of the show. Well, it is for one person, but not for, uh... Not the one we want. Not the one we want. That's true. Not the one we want. And it doesn't seem to be doing very much for said person. Ultimately, it mostly worked for me, but I do get it. Well, we want to know what you think about Too Much. Find us at facebook.com/pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you.

• 21:03Linda Holmes?

  And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/happyhour, or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Janey Morris and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Audio engineering was performed by Sina LoFredo. And Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.

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