Lena Dunham’s new Netflix show Too Much is for millennials who watched Girls when it premiered, Gen Z’ers who’ve since sparked its resurgence, and…everyone who’s ever wanted to know what really went down between Dunham and Jack Antonoff before the couple ended their years-long relationship in 2018. Was it Lorde? Was it really just an amicable outgrowing of each other?
Before I pressed play on Too Much, we didn’t have those answers. But it only took me until episode 2 to realize that Too Much is probably (definitely) making multiple jabs at Margaret Qualley’s husband. Amicable, my butt.
The show follows Jessica (Megan Stalter), who moves to London after a devastating breakup with her boyfriend of five years, Zev (Michael Zegen). There, she meets Felix (Will Sharpe), a leather-clad indie musician who doesn’t wash his hands after using the bathroom. Throughout the show, Jessica struggles with self-doubt and the constant reminder that Zev moved on a little too quickly to model/influencer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski).
Starting to ring any bells? After Dunham and Antonoff split, he publicly moved on with model Carlotta Kohl (and possibly privately moved on with Lorde, though I guess we’ll never really know). Kohl and Antonoff dated until 2021, the same year Dunham moved to London, where she eventually married English musician Luis Felber. During the press tour, Dunham revealed Felber was the one who inspired the show’s name, after once telling Dunham she was “too much”—which he meant as a compliment, meaning “just enough and a little bit more,” though she initially took it as an insult.
In 2018, Dunham spoke to The Cut about Antonoff’s new relationship with Kohl: “I thought I was kind of proving weird girls can have love too,” Dunham said. “And now he’s dating somebody who looks regular and normal and like girls are supposed to look.”
Still, Dunham denies any direct comparisons between Zev and Antonoff, although physically, the two could pass for, at the very least, cousins.
“That ex-boyfriend is very much an amalgamation of every ex that I’ve had, or that a friend’s had,” Dunham told Vanity Fair of Zev. “It’s this quotidian acceptance of unkindness that eats away at a person over a long period of time and degrades their sense of self. If someone were to say, ‘Who inspired that character?’ I’d be like, ‘Do you have time for me to give you 42 examples?'” We don’t need 40 extra examples; the one is sufficient.
Zev is also marked by his faux-intellectual pretentiousness, dogging Jessica for loving Miley Cyrus and Vanderpump Rules, which, again, feels ripped from the pages of Dunham and Antonoff’s six-year relationship. In 2017, Dunham joked with VF that Antonoff frequently told her she had “terrible music taste” because Dunham is a “Top-40 hound.” (Hasn’t Antonoff produced, like, half of those songs over the last decade?)
And the show doesn’t stop there with the Antonoff references. Zev and Jessica decide to adopt a dog, Cutesie, as their relationship continues to deteriorate, and things are mostly fine—until an altercation with another dog leads to Zev to pressure Jessica into rehoming Cutesie. It sounds a lot like Dunham and Antonoff’s dog, Lamby. In 2017, Dunham wrote on Instagram that she and Antonoff decided to rehome Lamby—a decision she got a ton of backlash and online vitriol for, while Antonoff got, not so much.
Say what you want about Adam Sackler, but at least Hannah Horvath had someone who supported her at (almost) every turn. I never heard of Antonoff running shirtless through Brooklyn to get to his partner in her time of need. Or ever.
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