Some thoughts on "Too Much"

I am on a train so here we go

What to say about Too Much, Lena Dunham’s much-anticipated return to TV. I’ve read some of the criticism — New York’s pan and the New Yorker’s rave, the “Critics at Large” panel analysis — and agree with some aspects of each. Yes, Emily in Paris is to SATC as Too Much is to Girls; it is a far more commercial, broadly comic, often narratively illogical fantasy (the break-up to proposal pivot so brief you could miss it in a bathroom break) in which people don’t really act like people. But that’s alright. This isn’t Girls, whose realism in depicting the push-pull of female friendship, the grit and wonder of being young in New York, and the general tragicomedy of realizing one’s dreams might not pan out as promised is one of the most tonally singular I’ve seen. The satire of Too Much — of the unfeeling “stiff upper lip” English manner, and the sexual depravity and moral rot that lurks beneath — feels a bit done. And I wasn’t totally convinced by the chemistry of the romantic leads.

But it also has moments of genius.

Will Sharpe’s performance is a knockout; I love the episode where he returns to his childhood home. There, we meet his spliff-smoking, perpetually sedated yet suicidal mother; his quixotic and “good old boy / Oxonian” affected English father; and his strangely developmentally-arrested older sister, who all live in a solidly working class home that’s a far cry from the posh estate they forfeited to bankruptcy. In that episode, the show’s examination of the British class system and its infamous rigidity goes deep — these are characters I’ve not seen before, but who reek with a familiar desperation: a self-defeating class-striving that’s brutal to see on screen. I could’ve clawed off my skin, watching Felix’s father (played by Stephen Fry) ask him for 500 pounds to begin “buying back” the old house (which, one presumes, costs millions). It made me think of my own grandfather, who played the lottery and hit the slots with a religious intensity that, even as a child, unnerved me. The haunting face of someone’s need.

And of course, every time Lena’s on screen, it’s completely electric; her weird, idiosyncratic line delivery reminiscent of the best scenes in Girls (“It’s the new frontier of misogyny: take a woman who’s in control of her life, and then silence her. And I’m up for it!”). I loved, for instance, when she asks her son to tell his father (played, of course, by Andrew Rannells — and in fact, there’s a whole separate piece to be written about how nearly all of the toxic straight men in Too Much are played by famous gays), that she is “on a work zoom,” in an effort to show she’s doing fine since he left her for a bi-Bushwick throuple. And when her son questions that, observing her prostrate in the bed where one presumes she’s lied for days, she continues, “tell him I got a promotion, and my hair’s growing beautifully, and —” It’s pure Hannah Horvath: delusional, hilarious, tender.

In another scene, she breaks down totally, becoming the kind of gaping maw of raw emotion I’ve rarely seen on screen, but have certainly experienced — all hurt and pain and insatiable desire. It’s oddly magnetic to watch, and I felt a strange affection for the character, and through her, for Dunham herself (who has spoken about mining her own experience of romantic betrayal and abandonment for the script). Perhaps due to the trauma of being relentlessly picked at early in her career, and conflated totally with her “insufferable” character, Dunham is one of the living artists least concerned with how she’s being perceived. With being denounced as whiny or grating or ugly or old. Which of course creates performances, and writing, that is shot through with an emotional honesty for which I’d watch hours to catch a glimpse.

I’ve been thinking about this with art lately. How for me, moments of transcendence are so rare that they basically eclipse any other structural critiques of a work. I don’t know about you, but maybe one in ten or twenty things that I consume — books, films, songs, shows— give me that shimmering feeling: where you remember what it’s worth, being alive. To get to make things, and share them, and for a minute feel understood. Yes, I too thought Wicked was overlong and weirdly directed, but when Erivo hits the high note, she sends shivers up my spine, and I decide to keep breathing for a while. Lena’s work — the happy/sad feeling of riding the subway home at dusk; the quiet desperation of seeing a friend that doesn’t fit — depicts feelings I’ve wanted to bottle and preserve. “Remember what it was to be me,” Didion tells us. “That is always the point.”

Too Much has a few of these moments — and for me, that is enough.