Warning: This post contains spoilers for Too Much.
In the near-decade since Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking HBO dramedy Girls aired its final episode, its creator and star has taken a big step back from the spotlight. Though she has written, directed, and produced a handful of projects in the intervening years—including the 2018 HBO comedy series Camping and 2022 medieval comedy film Catherine Called Birdy—Dunham herself has said she took an “intentional break” from the public eye in response to the intense scrutiny that surrounded her during Girls‘ six-season run (especially in relation to a number of controversies for which she was facing backlash).
“I didn’t really understand how to distinguish between what was and wasn’t necessary for the public. I felt confused about how I was supposed to respond,” she told The Times in an interview published in June. “I thought if I explain properly who I am, or give a glimpse of who I am, people are going to have a different perception of me, that we would be friends. But no one cares—and that’s fine.”
Now, Dunham is returning to the small screen with Too Much, a new 10-episode romantic comedy series available to stream on Netflix. This time around, while Dunham does appear in the show in a supporting role, Megan Stalter takes the lead as Dunham’s semi-autobiographical stand-in Jessica Salmon, a 30-something workaholic New Yorker who moves to London in the wake of a devastating breakup with her longtime boyfriend Zev (Michael Zegen). Across the pond, she meets a troubled musician named Felix Remen (Will Sharpe) and the two strike up a whirlwind romance that forces them both to confront their individual issues.
Those who have kept track of news about Dunham’s personal life in the years since Girls ended will likely recognize several apparent similarities between the plot of Too Much and Dunham’s own story, particularly with regard to her 2018 breakup with music producer Jack Antonoff, subsequent move to London, and later marriage to Peruvian-British musician Luis Felber, who co-created Too Much. As for just how much her life influenced Too Much, Dunham told Variety, “It’s certainly not quote-unquote based on a true story, but like everything I do, there is an element of my own life that I can’t help but inject.”
Here’s everything to know about how Too Much mirrors Dunham’s life.
The breakup
After meeting on a blind date in 2012, Dunham and Antonoff dated for five years (throughout the entire run of Girls) before news of their breakup emerged in January 2018. Later that month, Us Weekly reported Antonoff had moved on with model Carlotta Kohl in a story that included a quote from an anonymous source who claimed Dunham and Antonoff “had been slowly breaking up for the last six months.” Antonoff and Kohl eventually ended things and, in August 2021, he began dating actor Margaret Qualley, whom he married in August 2023.
In Too Much, Jessica and Zev break up after seven years together and Zev pretty much immediately starts dating Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski), a knitting influencer he meets at a party while he and Jess are still together. When Wendy asks to meet up with Jess in the finale and reveals she’s done with Zev, she explains he had originally told her that he and Jess had been separated for six months before they officially broke up—which Jess says is untrue.
Too Much also makes a point of emphasizing Jess’ obsession with checking Wendy’s social media after she gets together with Zev, a storyline that—judging by a November 2018 profile of Dunham in which she admitted it pained her to look at Antonoff’s new girlfriend’s Instagram stories—seems to be pulled from Dunham’s own experiences.
“[B]eing the hysterical ex-girlfriend is kinda like the weirdest, funniest, public performance,” she told The Cut. “I thought I was kind of proving weird girls can have love too. And now he’s dating somebody who looks regular and normal and like girls are supposed to look.” (In addition to being an actor, Ratajkowski is also a model.)
Other details from Dunham and Antonoff’s relationship that Dunham has spoken about in the press also seem to be alluded to in the show, such as in a flashback scene from Episode 5 in which Zev tells Jess she needs to cut back on her pink home decor when they’re moving in together. In an essay penned for Domino magazine’s Fall 2019 cover story, Dunham wrote about how Antonoff disliked her decorating taste.
“[H]e hated it. He didn’t want to hate it. He tried not to hate it. But he didn’t like living among the insides of my mind,” she said. “I felt sick every time I made a design concession or covered up pink with dove gray. Love can only survive so much.”
Read More: Megan Stalter Is Reinventing the Rom-Com Heroine
The dogs
As part of the flashbacks to Jess and Zev’s relationship that play out in Episode 5, we see that at one point they adopted a dog named Cutesie at Jess’ behest. But after Cutesie has an aggressive encounter with another dog at the park, Jess is forced to give him away.
This plot point seems to draw from what happened in real life with Dunham and her rescue dog Lamby, who she gave up to a Los Angeles canine rehabilitation facility in 2017 after originally adopting him from the BARC shelter in Brooklyn. Dunham said in an Instagram post that the decision had been made due to “four years of challenging behavior and aggression” that was caused by abuse he suffered as a puppy.
However, Lamby’s rehoming ended up turning into quite the internet controversy after an employee from BARC wrote an email to a Yahoo reporter claiming Lamby had been totally fine until he met Dunham. “You can say a lot of sh-t about me, but I am a very committed pet owner. Ask anybody who works with me on a pet level,” Dunham told The Cut in response in 2018. “Also, what animal-shelter guy is like, ‘I’m an electronic DJ, and I’m also looking to talk to Yahoo! Celebrity’? But dragging him through the court of public opinion like that doesn’t get me anywhere. It’s better just to kick back and be like, ‘Okay, sir, you can extend your career by telling people what a bad dog owner I was.'”
Of course, it didn’t help matters with her critics that, the year after Lamby was rehomed, Gia Marie, a Sphynx cat Dunham had adopted who had lung damage after surviving a house fire, and Bowie, her 13-year-old Yorkie, both died within months of each other. The series of unfortunate events led to an online conspiracy theory that Dunham was killing her pets, which she quickly shut down, pointing to the fact that many of the animals she’d adopted were of advanced age.
In Too Much, following her breakup with Zev, Jess adopts a hairless chihuahua named Astrid who becomes her closest companion. Sadly, in the finale, Felix hears Astrid struggling to breathe and rushes her to the vet but her heart gives out before Jess arrives to say goodbye.
The marriage
After moving from New York to London in January 2021, Dunham met Felber on a blind date set up by mutual friends. “The first time we hung out, we didn’t stop talking for, like, eight hours,” Felber told the New York Times later that year. “I think it was sort of incredible, you know, I walked into that. I’d been on quite a few dates in the past year. As someone who’s quite open, I find you hold a lot back on your first three dates. Or first 10 dates. I was just a bit fed up with that, so I just walked into the situation very myself, shall I say. And Lena liked that. And she’s the same.”
By that September, Dunham and Felber had married in an impromptu wedding at Soho’s Union Club with just about 60 guests present. This is obviously similar to what happens between Jess and Felix in Too Much after they meet at a bar on the night Jess moves to London. However, Stalter says the show isn’t intended to directly echo Dunham and Felber’s relationship.
“[Lena and Luis] always made it really clear that it wasn’t just based on them. There was no pressure to do an impression of them,” Stalter told TIME. “Me and Will were able to take it and add things in of ourselves and what we thought the characters should be…[It wasn’t] like we were playing them, but bringing to life a story that has elements of them in it, and ourselves.”
Despite its happy ending, Dunham has said she still wanted Too Much to reflect the challenges that two people who have their own lifetimes’ worth of baggage can face both individually and as a couple while trying to make a relationship work.
“Everything I’ve ever made is romantically pessimistic. Even the most romantic episodes of Girls—when Marnie and Charlie reunite, a heroin needle falls out of his pants,” she told the New Yorker of Too Much‘s optimistic tilt. “This is such a mortifying answer, but I think that it had to do with meeting Lu, and being, like, ‘Oh, there actually is a feeling that you can have that it might be OK, that the thing might last, that you’re not always running as fast as you can and then realizing you’re on a treadmill.’ It was wanting to make something that was about that feeling, but also acknowledging that, when we met each other, we had both experienced an enormous amount of life, trauma, complexity, and addiction, separately. So what does it look like when you meet and you’re both just trying to be the best versions of yourself, the version that you can live with, and then you welcome someone else into that?”