This Week

A new Lena Dunham series to gossip about.

A new And Just Like That episode to scream about.

New reboots to actually be excited about.

A new Hugh Grant photo to rave about.

A superhero origin story to giggle about.

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Is Lena Dunham Still ‘Too Much’?

For an oh-so-brief moment this week, one of my dreams came true: I was in my twenties again.

Everyone was talking about a new TV show by Lena Dunham about characters messily navigating life, love, friendships, and self-esteem issues as they stared down the pressures of actual adulthood and—dear god!—their thirties while living in a major city.

I was roughly the same age as the Girls characters when the HBO series premiered in 2012, and covered the series from that perspective as an entertainment writer for The Daily Beast. So it’s felt like a time warp to be doing the same a decade later for Dunham’s first major TV series since, Netflix’s Too Much, which is now streaming.

(While I remember and enjoyed the short-lived series Camping, which she created but didn’t star in, I was apparently stranded alone on Dunham Apologist Island when that aired, so we won’t count that one.)

But then I had a realization that reminded me that, no, I’m not back in my twenties (sheds tear), and just how much time has passed. Looking at the response to Too Much, it seems like, finally, everyone most people have stopped being so freaking weird about Lena Dunham.

When Girls was airing, Dunham wasn’t so much a lightning rod in a storm of cultural discussion as she was a copper skyscraper during a Category 5 hurricane—a veritable Burj Khalifa made entirely out of conductive aluminum that had apparently caught the ire of Zeus himself. It was the discourse apocalypse.

I was living the hapless New York life of those characters on the show—albeit with, I’d like to think, slightly more stability and fewer instances of getting a Q-tip stuck in my ear. I was both a huge fan of the show and, as a writer for the Beast, a participant in that endless discourse.

Often, I understood complaints from my peers that it didn’t reflect their own experiences, as the show’s broadly descriptive title and Dunham’s declaration in the pilot of perhaps being “a voice of a generation” indicated some-sort of definitive universality that the series couldn’t make good on.

And it wasn’t hard to rationalize that audience members of different generations were genuinely baffled by the behavior of the young people they were watching, as scripted by a young person herself; Dunham was 23 when she sold the series.

Dunham herself proved to be a mystifying character for the media at a time when the blogosphere and social media exploded into open season for criticism, controversy, and impassioned (often vitriolic) hyperbole.

Time, however, has been good to Girls. Its 10-year anniversary was greeted with a shower of glowing tributes to how well it’s held up, and is perhaps even better now viewed outside of the media firestorm that surrounded it during its original airing.

During that decade, Dunham has had a far less public presence and reduced her pop-culture output—and has emerged, during this press tour for Too Much, with a fair amount of insight about that time.

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