Lena Dunham Describes Her Netflix Series ‘Too Much’: “When a Loud, Messy Jewess Descends on a City of Deeply Repressed People”

Audiences last week got a preview of what to expect from Lena Dunham‘s upcoming small-screen return with the teaser trailer for her Too Much rom-com series, which starts streaming on Netflix July 10.

But guests at a recent Tribeca Festival panel with Dunham and moderator Michelle Buteau were treated to more of an advance look in the form of clips and a conversation about how the show came about and what to expect from the Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe-starrer.

The series’ official synopsis is: “Jessica (Stalter) is a New York workaholic in her mid-thirties, reeling from a broken relationship that she thought would last forever and slowly isolating everyone she knows. When every block in New York tells a story of her own bad behavior, the only solution is to take a job in London, where she plans to live a life of solitude like a Bronte sister. But when she meets Felix (Sharpe) – a walking series of red flags – she finds that their unusual connection is impossible to ignore, even as it creates more problems than it solves. Now they have to ask themselves: do Americans and Brits actually speak the same language? From the creator of Girls and the producers of Love Actually, Too Much is an ex-pat rom-com for the disillusioned who wonder if true love is still possible, but sincerely hope that it is.”

But at Tribeca, Dunham provided a more blunt take on what the show is about, which was part of her initial pitch: “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.”

Dunham created the series with her husband, Luis Felber, whom she met and married in the U.K., where she’s been living for the past few years.

While the show has been called “semi-autobiographical,” Dunham said it was more of the “germ” of the series that was based on her and Felber’s romance.

“A girl moves to England. She meets a musician. They fall in love. That was the exoskeleton. But then he’s such an amazing and creative thinker and loves stories, and so it really expanded far beyond what we had even dreamed it could be into a totally different world,” Dunham told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the Tribeca event. “We feel really, really lucky that we got to do this together, and then of course the actors come in and the characters become different because the actors have taken over. So while the germ of it may be autobiographical, it’s gone in directions I never could’ve dreamed.”

Speaking further about how the series reframes the romantic comedy, Dunham explained on the panel, “Often the thing standing in the way of the two leads is somebody who wishes them ill and wants them apart or a terrible misunderstanding at a post office … And I think so often when we meet someone [at like 35] your biggest challenge, and the biggest things in your way, is yourself and all the baggage. You feel like this kind of, like, I don’t know, like Godzilla, who, at any moment might take a wrong step and just crush the whole city with your big, dumb foot. And I was like, how do you capture a relationship where the biggest challenge is that these two people have lived a lot of life before they met each other, and they don’t know how to be with another person, and they don’t even know how to be themselves?”

On the panel, Dunham explained that she asked Felber to work on the show only four weeks into their relationship, which she said was “way too soon, like inappropriately soon in the relationship — soon enough that I could have found out he had another family, and he could have been keeping it quiet that whole time.”

But “he was so funny, and his notes on things were so good and clear, and I just felt like, ‘You have a skill that has not yet been tapped into.’ I was like, ‘Have you ever thought about working on a TV show?’ And he’s like, ‘No, but like, I could probably do it,’” she added.

Speaking to THR ahead of the Saturday event, Dunham indicated that working with Felber on the show has made them closer and able to better understand each other’s approach to work.

“I love what I do, and it obviously takes up a huge amount of my life, and he loves what he does, and so the fact that we can do it together is just such a gift for us and I think allows us to be in sync in a totally different way,” she said.

Though the series is one of Dunham’s biggest small-screen creations since HBO’s Girls, which ended in early 2017, the multihyphenate told the Tribeca Festival audience that she had been working on multiple projects and it just worked out that this became her comeback vehicle.

“Maybe people think it’s I took a long, purposeful break, and then one day was like, ‘I found the thing, guys, I’m ready to go.’ But working in TV, as anyone here who works in TV knows, it’s like, you have a lot of things you love that don’t end up hatching,” she told Buteau. “I never stopped trying to push things out. You never know which is the one that’s going to make sense to someone, and that someone’s going to say, ‘We believe in you, go.’”

She continued, “So this was a project that I had been like incubating with my husband. … There were these other projects I was pushing and grinding on and and trying to will into existence, and then sometimes one comes up from the back and sneaks past all the others and becomes your primary focus. Now I’m like, if I had actually been able to make any of those other shows, you would have been like, ‘Are you okay? This was what you chose?’ This one feels like a really natural extension of the work I’ve done before. … It’s exciting to make something that feels connected to my other work. I’ve had a lot of life between then and now, and it’s changed my perspective in ways that I am excited to be able to share.”

When THR asked how creating Too Much compared to her time working on Girls, Dunham cited her additional 10 years of experience.

She explained that she was helped by “knowing the kind of set I wanted to be on and the kind of dynamic I wanted to create and trusting myself more than I did — I had so much amazing support on Girls; I wouldn’t change that experience for anything. But this was a really special one to be able to come in and trust my own instincts and create an environment that felt really safe.”

Speaking about her approach as a showrunner on the panel, Dunham indicated she wants people to speak up but also trusts the “really amazing people” she hires to “do their jobs, because we probably both know what it’s like to be micromanaged.”

“If there is something that is either putting anyone … at emotional risk,or it’s causing an unsettled feeling, anywhere, I want to know about that,” she said. “Because the no. 1 most important thing to me is to have a set where everyone, everyone feels like their job is respected, they’re seen. I always say at the beginning of every shoot: ‘Anyone in any department, if you see something, say something.’ You may be the one person who points out that we’re missing something super essential here. So we all need to be in community with each other, and I want to know those things. But if [you] had an issue [where] the camera truck is 45 minutes late but don’t worry, I’m like, ‘as long as no one’s hurt.’”

Dunham also explained how she amassed the superstar ensemble in Too Much including Naomi Watts, Rhea Perlman and Rita Wilson.

“I always try to write with somebody in mind. It just helps me when I’m writing, and usually it’s somebody either that I admire or somebody that I already have a really great collaborative relationship with, and then you just kind of write them. And my goal is always: I love this person, so what is going to get them to come do a role, a couple episodes in a half-hour TV show like this? It isn’t like, you know, Christopher Nolan is calling to invite you to do The Odyssey. This is very specific. And so my goal is always [to] write them a different kind of part than you’ve seen them do before, or write them something that’s so in their wheelhouse that they’re like, ‘It’s just going to be so fun to come in and crush it.’ But no in between; no vanilla. I’d rather go bold and send them something where they’re like, ‘Why the fuck did you send me that?’ than make them feel like they’re getting handed the same part that they get to do every time.”

For Watts, in particular, who Dunham said she’d been a fan of since Mulholland Drive and wanted her to play the type of comedic role she took on early in her career, “I thought, let me write her something that’s like, not an elegant lady role, that’s like an elegant lady to the left role, like an elegant lady who’s railing cocaine role. … I want to speak to the thing I think you don’t get to do, which is be the funniest fucking person in the world, because you also happen to look like a beautiful British aristocrat, and so people don’t always know to ask that of you. So with every part, I’m thinking how can I draw something out and make it interesting for you to show up for those days, and even I’m still shocked that all these schedules worked and all these people came together because everyone on the show is who I wrote the role for.”

Dunham also offered lighter previews of other moments in the show, including a memorable, improvised line from Rhea Perlman and how Perlman’s characters and another small personal moment inspired a comedic scene in the series.

Perlman, Dunham revealed, was entirely responsible for the lewd riff between her and Stalter’s characters at the end of the teaser.

“That was all her,” Dunham said on the panel after screening the teaser for the audience. “And then afterwards, she was like, ‘I hope I didn’t go too dirty with it.’ I was like, ‘Have you ever heard of me?’”

A longer version of that scene, which Dunham described as a “pseudo Grey Gardens anxiety puddle,” was one of the clips shown to the Tribeca audience.

After it aired, Dunham also revealed that her godson is also in the scene, as a teenager wondering why these older women aren’t out on the town.

“He’s just a little high school genius,” she said. “I was like, ‘Do you want to come be in a show?’ And he was like, ‘sure.’ He was excited because if he came they had to, like, for academic reasons, let him take tours of all these, like, important British war museums, and that was of interest to him. So he signed on. He signed on for that reason.”

And she revealed that Perlman’s character was inspired by her Grandma Dorothy/Dottie, with the show even altering Perlman’s hair and makeup to resemble a photo of Dunham’s relative and make Perlman look like she’s in her 90s.

“A lot of those lines are Grandma Dorothy’s, like ‘don’t look at me; all my friends are dead’ is a Grandma Dottie classic,” Dunham said.

The other clips shown were also longer versions of moments from the trailer, including Felix and Jessica arguing about each others’ red flags after Jessica’s “British Jones diaries” line and the pair touring Jess’ idealized version of London, yellow house and all, as she channels Julia Roberts and he disillusions her about the people who live in that neighborhood.

With respect to the latter scene, Dunham shared a larger theme behind the moment: “This was the moment where she’s like, trying to access the thing that she thinks is romantic and glamorous, and she finds out it’s a little more complicated than that.”

Dunham also offered some deeper insight into how London affects Sharpe’s character.

“London is where Felix has come of age. It’s where he feels seen,” she said. “But he sort of hit the barrier where, like, his friends know him but do they really know him? The people around him love him, but there are parts of him that he’s never been able to show.”

And she shared that one joke, in which Jess, on ketamine, asks if she’s the “Meghan Markle of fat, white bitches,” which Dunham said was “fully from my own Notes app.”

Meanwhile the “I’m Horny” dance track included in a wedding scene, which Felber wrote, Dunham said also came from a personal experience.

“We went to a wedding and, while it’s not all brought from real life, there was this one cousin … who got up and was like, not only is it so and so’s wedding. It is my opportunity to introduce my new EDM, soon to be hit EDM single and turned it on and didn’t invite anyone else out onto the dance floor, just took it herself. And I just was like, I’m so glad you’re here. So I had to honor her.”

Turning serious to wrap up the panel, Dunham said she hoped the show would spread “love and joy” amid a “barrage of news that is dehumanizing and painful and terrifying.”

“Something that [Felber] and I talked about a lot is that we all know we’re living in very painful times, and every single day we get up and we are experiencing a barrage of news that is dehumanizing and painful and terrifying. … Sometimes I mean in all of our jobs, whether you’re an artist, no matter what you’re doing, it can be hard, as you look at the news, to think like, what difference can I make in this world in which there is so much constant suffering, displacement, fear? It can feel and it can leave you feeling hollowed out and fatigued. And I know we all feel that. And so the thing I said was, like, we can just make something that we feel like spreads love and joy and hope, which was so not on my radar in my 20s. I was like I don’t care if anyone feels any joy or hope, I just hope that they think it’s crazy. And now I really wanted to make something that was unifying and loving and at the end of the day hopeful. … To show love, joy and happiness is really, I think, the best thing that we can do as artists in this moment.”

Dunham, who was wearing a Planned Parenthood pin at the event, said she was also proud to be able to show and work with the organization, which she said she consulted with for a storyline on Too Much just as she and her team had done on Girls.

“As an artist, I’m proud … that we get to be part of showing people all over the world a healthy woman making a super self actualized choice to get reproductive care [from] a really true, loving abortion provider, because those people are heroes,” she said onstage. “So to be able to represent that was really, really important to me.”

Speaking to THR before the event, Dunham elaborated, “It was also important to me to show our support for Planned Parenthood at this really pivotal moment, and while we know that television may not always change the dial on politics, what we can do is normalize very normal health procedures like abortion for our audience and especially let young people who may be watching and want to get care at Planned Parenthood know what a loving, safe place it is.”