Is Lena Dunham's Too Much doing enough to make up for the faults of Girls?

After a hiatus from the small screen, Lena Dunham is back both in front of and behind the camera on her new series, Too Much.

The TV show draws on Dunham's real life, much like her previous cult favourite HBO show Girls. This time, however, Too Much is set in London and follows the misadventures of a New York workaholic in her mid-30s named Jessica trying to recover from an unexpected breakup.

Today on Commotion, culture critics Kathryn VanArendonk and Hanna Flint join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about the transatlantic comedy and whether it fixes some of what was wrong with Girls.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Hanna, could you set up a little bit of the plot that we're dealing with here when it comes to Too Much? Where do we meet Megan Stalter's character? Also, we should say Lena Dunham herself plays Jess' sister in the show. It's kind of nice to have Lena Dunham talking to the Lena Dunham allegory kind of character. But do you want to just set up the general plot of the season?

Hanna: Yeah, so Jessica has gone through a breakup with someone she was with for eight years. She's working at a video production/advertising agency. She wants to be a director, but she's never stepped up to that role. And her brother-in-law, who happens to be her boss — nepo baby! — says, "Why don't you go to London for three months and do a commercial?" So she's like, "Right, I'm getting out of Dodge." And then her first night out she meets Felix, this very handsome, very jaded musician. And they embark on a messy romance as she's trying to find her feet in London, but she's also processing that breakup. 

I think in many ways, Lena's very good at understanding the romantic entanglements and the stress of modern dating — how, often, you might jump into a new relationship to try to use that as an antidepressant, to get over the last one…. But, I'm torn on this. She did an interview at Tribeca Film Festival, and Lena Dunham said: "I have wanted to make a romantic comedy about what happens when a loud, messy, complicated Jewess descends on a city of deeply repressed people — what will occur." And I take umbridge with the "city of deeply repressed people." This is the key flaw in this show…. Her idea or vision of London is so in the past, so archaic. It's the London that's basically someone who's been raised on Merchant Ivory films and rom-coms from Working Title, who also produced this show. And they're showing a very small, niche subsection of London that you only ever see in these kinds of shows…. That's not reality. This is the upper-middle class, very white, privileged areas…. This is not a real portrait of London at all. It's just a romanticized image of movie London [from someone] who hasn't moved on from that, who's taken that verbatim, you know?

Elamin: What I like about that, Hanna, is that this is almost word-for-word what people said about Girls. Which is to say that Lena seems to traffic in a certain circle, and she doesn't really seem that interested, Kathryn, in being like, "I want to represent the world outside that circle."... 

This idea of "repressed London," this upper-class version of London — same thing happened with Brooklyn. When people watched Girls, they were like, "That's not the New York that I think about." And she's like, "That's the New York that I inhabit." I'm interested in that because Lena gets this pressure as sort of being a referendum on millennials and their ability to see the world. But she actually really inhabits a very specific slice of it. How much pressure does she deal with, in terms of trying to represent a wider version of the world that she exists in?

Kathryn: She deals with a lot, but she also invites a lot…. One of the most fascinating things about her as a creator is trying to figure out which of these things she is doing purposefully, and when she is actually saying, like, "This is a thesis statement that I am offering to you," and which one of them are like, "I don't know, we're just out here. It's a comedy," you know?...

One of the differences with Girls was that she had four central female characters. And there was a podcast recently where she said that she's not really a Hannah, she's more of a Shosh. I think, probably, there could be a bunch of think pieces on that one line alone. But by the nature of having these four central characters, it was more deliberately like, "It's not just me, it's not just this specific world that I'm living in. Here's a broader spectrum." It's Sex and the City, it's Friends, it's still in this very niche, privileged and bubble-like space, but it's a couple different versions of it. Too Much is like, "Here's our main character. She's playing, basically, me." And so it is a much narrower, I think, invitation for that kind of, "what does a generation mean" speculation.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.