“Too Much” is too little

Lena Dunham’s new series on Netflix called “Too Much” is a large woman’s version of “Emily in Paris”.

Megan Stalter plays the main character Jessica Salmon, an overweight producer of commercials that is sent to London to work on ad projects as a way to overcome a bad breakup.

We are supposed to like her and empathize with her when she gets herself into sticky situations. But she is such a bumbling idiot, who is so completely self-absorbed and is a raging hypochondriac, that when she accidentally sets herself on fire with a candle one hardly feels any sympathy for her.

Her first mistake upon landing in London is taking a cab into where she’s staying in the city, resulting in a 96 British pound fare! Duh! Everyone knows to take the tube in from Heathrow, or the train in from Gatwick. Jessica doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at such an expensive fare and instead is shocked to find that the apartment she’s rented in a housing estate, is not in a royal estate with manicured lawns and stately buildings.

The only relief for our eyes and intellects is the charming musician she meets at a local pub called Felix, played by Will Sharpe. He is intelligent, creative and level-headed, the opposite of Jessica. But their endless scenes of having sex three times in one night was too much. I don’t know what Dunham was trying to prove,except that big girls can also be very horny and have lots of sex with cute guys. We get the message, but she didn’t have to hit us over the head with it!

I text my friend Anne-Marie, who lives in Los Angeles, “the main character is such a bumbling idiot, that it’s hard to care for her. And I just felt too old to be watching such nonsense. It’s totally aimed at 20-somethings.”

She replies: “Apparently, it’s a sub-genre called ‘lacerating self-humiliation.’ Where the character puts herself into such stupid situations.”

Perhaps a la Bridget Jones movies in which Renée Zellweger plays the bumbling title character who is always too fat and too unlucky to hang onto friends and boyfriends?

I will watch the rest of the 10-part series and render a final verdict later.

Read the Wall Street Journal’s review of the series here.