Lena Dunham’s new comedy, Too Much, is a backhanded love letter to London in which the American writer and actor portrays the British capital as adorably dingy – a sort of Dickensian version of Richard Curtis’s Love Actually vision of the city.
It is very funny. Plus, for Irish viewers, there is the extra enjoyment of seeing the UK condescended to and stereotyped by Americans, much as generations of British television and cinema has done to Ireland. It is also loaded with superstar cameos. Dublin’s Andrew Scott is particularly hilarious as a pretentious Irish film-maker who spends all day arguing with his haters on the video review website Letterboxd.
The story is loosely based on Dunham’s own romantic life. Megan Stalter (fresh from her breakout role in HBO comedy series Hacks) plays a stand-in for Dunham, who flees a disastrous break-up in New York to reinvent herself in London, working Emily in Paris-style, for an advertising agency.
Jessica thinks she is going to a land of dashing Mr Darcys and adorable country villages. She is thus understandably shocked when the “estate” where she is renting is revealed to be a grotty block of flats with mould and an iffy smell. She understood that she was waltzing into Downton Abbey. Instead, she finds herself in the middle of a Mike Leigh film.
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Her Mr Darcy, meanwhile, is scruffy indie musician Felix. He is played by Will Sharpe, a shapeshifting actor who brilliantly embodies an emotionally reserved introvert – a male archetype very much a thing in the real world but rarely depicted on screen. The script cracks along, as do the cameos. Rita Wilson – Tom Hank’s significant other – is Jessica’s hippy-dippy mother. Emily Ratajkowski is the new love of Jessica’s ex. And Naomi Watts is merciless sending up a chattering class Londoner.
Dunham is best known as the star and creator of Girls – a show that was overpraised as a millennial Sex and The City when it first arrived and which then suffered a backlash which carried through to popular perceptions of Dunham.
But she has her revenge with a whipsmart comedy that is endlessly amusing in its idea of London as a kind of steam-punk version of New York – cool as anything but, in its soul, stygian, dank and miserable. It clips along, and there are all those famous faces.
Stalter, for her part, does well playing a self-obsessed, over-sharing American without raising the viewer’s hackles as self-obsessed, over-sharing Americans tend to do. You can forget about finally finishing Baby Reindeer: this is the Netflix viral hit in waiting that, come the weekend, everyone will be talking about.
Too Much is on Netflix from today
