Too Much Proves That Only Lena Dunham Could Revitalize the Rom-Com

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Netflix's Too Much.]

Ask any Girls fan about their favorite scene from the HBO comedy's six-season run, and there's a good chance they'll say "the one where Adam runs to Hannah." For those unaware: A particularly memorable moment from the Season 2 finale finds Adam (Adam Driver) running shirtless through the streets of Brooklyn to be with Hannah (Lena Dunham) while she's experiencing a brutal OCD relapse. The relationship between the two fizzled out at the end of the show's first season, but it only takes one FaceTime from Hannah for Adam to realize she shouldn't be alone while she's, as she puts it, "unraveling." The sequence, inspired by When Harry Met Sally, is as kooky as it is crucial to Girls lore. It's a character-solidifying moment for Adam, and it lays the foundation for why he and Hannah, no matter how crazy they may always be for each other, will never be able to make it work. It's also the only evidence anyone needs to prove that Dunham is the only person who could ever truly revitalize the romantic comedy genre.

Dunham's long-awaited television follow-up to Girls (we don't speak of Camping) comes in the form of the Netflix series Too Much, a romantic comedy that she co-created with her husband, Luis Felber, about self-discovery and reinvention. Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe play the show's lead couple; Stalter breathes naturalistic life into Jessica, an American who moves from New York to London after a bad break-up, while Sharpe delicately maps out the rough edges of Felix, a British musician who can't commit to much of anything, be it their relationship or his own sobriety. Jess is a classic Dunham protagonist — chatty, hyperbolic, and intense — while the impulsive Felix reads like a slightly (slightly) more grown-up version of Adam.

Their romance is as unlikely as it is charming, filled with light moments of comedy and heavier moments where both struggle to confront their own histories in effort to protect what's special between them. Jess spends most of the show speaking in a jealous voiceover to her ex-boyfriend's (played by Michael Zegen) new fiancée, an influencer named Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski). An episode in which Felix visits his family forces him to face just how deeply he's buried the trauma of his unstable childhood. Girls might have lingered in these open wounds, but Too Much is older and wiser, pushing its characters to move forward. 

One of the many strengths of Too Much is how quickly it throws the viewer into their dynamic. It's as much of a whirlwind for the audience as it is for Jess and Felix: By the end of the finale, the two are married. Once again, Dunham, who wrote and directed the majority of the episodes, doesn't tread water by dwelling on the rashness of Felix's proposal to Jess, which comes while she's being arrested for participating in a climate protest. (Her participation is accidental: She was only there to reunite with Felix, whom she'd broken up with in the penultimate episode after finding out he cheated on her. He is, in turn, spared from arrest, which they both express vocal confusion over.) Instead, the episode embraces the fantasy by cutting right to Jess and Felix's bemused loved ones waiting for the newlyweds outside the ceremony. Dunham, of course, knows that the best rom-coms don't waste time.

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Recent years have seen an influx of Hollywood romantic comedies, from the massive hit Anyone But You to this year's Bridget Jones fourquel, Mad About the Boy. With the release of every new one comes the inevitable discussion about how this movie is the one that will single-handedly remix the entire genre, regardless of any concrete evidence. In actuality, Too Much is the closest thing we've had to a genre revitalization in years, a series that carefully and tenderly traces all the oddities that come along with unexpected love and digs into the ways people use their pasts as an excuse to get in (and stay in) their own way. And where Girls was cynical about twentysomething life, the entirely mature Too Much embraces the necessary hopefulness of any good romantic comedy. We believe in Jess and Felix because of how much Too Much believes in them.

Each episode of Too Much is named after a famous romantic film: The pilot is cheekily titled "Nonsense & Sensibility," while an interlude that explores what happened between Jess and her slimy ex is called "Pink Valentine." Too Much is as much of a salute to Dunham's love of the romance genre as it is its own fully realized animal, a 10-episode graduation of Adam sprinting through the streets of New York to get to Hannah's apartment. With Too Much, Dunham proves that she knows love isn't easy, but that sometimes giving yourself over to a perfectly timed rom-com moment is essential to making it work.

Too Much is now streaming on Netflix.