It seems like one season was just enough for Netflix Too much.
The Lena Dunham romantic comedy series will not return to Netflix for season two, according to reports and comments Dunham made at an FYC panel last week, where she said that Too much was envisioned as a limited series.
Dunham co-created the 10-episode TV show that premiered this summer with her husband Luis Felber, with Dunham and Felber’s own love story serving as loose inspiration for the romance of Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe’s characters. THE Girls former student met and married Felber in the United Kingdom, where she has lived for several years.
The series, which was one of Dunham’s biggest small screen creations since Girls finished in early 2017, followed Stalter’s Jessica moving from New York to London after a bad breakup, where she meets Sharpe’s Felix, a musician and a “walking series of red flags,” as the Netflix synopsis describes it. Despite these concerns, the two quickly fall in love and (spoiler alert) end the first season (and the series) by getting married.
Although the series has been called “semi-autobiographical”, Dunham said it was more about the “seed” of the series based on her romance with Felber.
“A girl moves to England. She meets a musician. They fall in love. It was the exoskeleton. But he’s such an incredible, creative thinker and he loves stories, and so it really expanded way beyond what we had even dreamed of, into a totally different world,” Dunham said. The Hollywood Reporter before a Tribeca festival Too much event in New York a month before the show’s premiere. “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 took over. So while the seed of it all may be autobiographical, it’s gone in directions that I could never have dreamed of.”
At last week’s FYC panel, Dunham said, “Our intention has always been to ensure that Too much in limited series. It was supposed to be like a classic transatlantic love story, but with time to really delve into the complexities that a movie doesn’t have room for.
She added, of the temptations of a season two, “Of course, I fell completely in love with Meg and Will’s dynamic and started imagining what the rest of their characters’ lives might be like – Felix and Jess have a baby! Felix and Jess are on the first ship to populate Mars! But as Luis and I sat with what we had done, we realized that we had told the story. It ends in a wedding. There’s even a little egg Easter, that is, in the final scene you can hear me shouting “cut!” We had done what we had to do, and part of the job is knowing when to park it.
Nonetheless, she said she would be open to seeing Jessica and Felix again in the future.
“Who knows, maybe there will be a time when it will be appropriate to see them again,” she said. “But right now, I’m pulling a Mary Poppins and heading to the next (imaginary) family that needs me.”
When THR asked Dunham about a possible season two shortly after the first season of Too much began airing, Dunham had ideas for the characters’ futures but was not actively planning another episode.
“As far as the second season goes, we’re not there yet,” she said. THR at the time. “But when I think about where these characters would go, when Luis and I talk about it, what we really think about is that marriage is not the end of a love story, it’s the beginning. And especially with two characters who don’t know each other well and who feel like they are because of this kind of radical intimacy that they’ve experienced, they actually haven’t experienced a huge amount of life as a team. So [we’d be] looking at what happens when two people make the decision to be together and are then thrust into the reality of each other’s world. …There is so much they have ignored – and some of that is taken from our [real] part of life is not. …But I think [it’s interesting] to see something you don’t often see in romantic comedy films, which is: what happens after the final kiss, after the curtain is drawn, and how do these people behave? »
The finale also ends with Felix, immediately after the wedding, joking to Jessica: “How long do you want to stay married?”
Dunham was writer-director for Too much and executive producer alongside Good Thing Going Production partner Michael P. Cohen, as well as Working Title’s Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Surian Fletcher-Jones and Bruce Eric Kaplan.
In addition to Stalter and Sharpe, the series’ cast included Michael Zegan, Janicza Bravo, Richard E. Grant, Leo Reich, Daisy Bevan, Adele Exarchopoulos, Dean-Charles Chapman, Rita Wilson, Naomi Watts, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Andrew Rannells, Rhea Perlman, Emily Ratajkowski, Stephen Fry, Kaori Momoi and Adwoa Aboah.
Dunham’s Good Thing Going has a deal with Netflix and she spent the summer in New York filming a romantic comedy for the streamer called Good sexwith Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo and Role Model.
