Finally, An American Show That Gets London Just Right

The following article contains minor spoilers for Netflix’s ‘Too Much’.

I’ve always felt like London’s biggest fan. Despite hating it (loving London also means hating London, I can’t explain why), the city I’ve called home for three decades often feels like a life-long crush that I can’t shake even though it’s bad for me. I love the neon-coloured off licences next to old man pubs next to kebab shops. I love the night buses and Chick Chickens and how people call strangers “boss”. I love how asking someone for a Rizla is nearly always more than that, and how Londoners are up for chatting at parties and smoking areas and club toilets in this way that I’ve never experienced in New York, LA or Paris, even though everyone tends to publicly prefer those cities.

All of which brings me to Lena Dunham’s semi-autobiographical Netflix series, Too Much, which is essentially a love letter to London as much as it is a love letter to love itself. If you’ve not yet seen it, here’s a very quick rundown: Jessica (Megan Stalter) is a 30-something New Yorker who moves to London after a particularly soul-destroying, protracted break-up with Zev (Michael Zegen). She seems to think her new life might look like something between Sense and Sensibility (which is actually set in Devon), Notting Hill and Prime Suspect. But instead, she finds that London is a strange and curious city, full of guys in bands, open mic nights, grey concrete and casual ketamine use.

There have been plenty of homegrown depictions of London that capture the city with precision and from different angles: Ronan Bennett’s Top Boy. Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. Raine Allen-Miller’s 2023 rom-com Rye Lane. Russell T Davies’s It’s A Sin. But all of the above are from Londoners, or in the very least British writers. American portrayals of the UK, or British people, on the other hand, so often fall into slightly off-the-mark clichés. We’re either posh and related to royalty, or else cockney in this Oliver Twist way that feels freakish. (You will almost never hear a British person say the word “guv’nor”; it’s just not something that exists). Too Much acknowledges this, with Jessica’s love interest Felix (Will Sharpe) telling her, “That is the most annoying genre of American humour” after she asks if he wants a scone.

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You don’t get a sense of where in London Jessica lives, but it’s fun trying to figure it out, smashing the space bar and zooming in on the images. She weaves through late-night parks and graffiti-scrawled bridges and pubs that double up as clubs and also lunch spots. She goes to Hackney City Farm and someone’s boujee West London townhouse and speeds down the M4. Unlike so many visions of London from American creators, its view of the city isn’t confined to the London Eye or bland central locations in which nobody truly hangs out. At one point, Felix is pictured rolling a cigarette after playing a game of five-a-side in Peckham while wearing a pair of battered Adidas and a Barbour jacket, and while watching it I thought: Yeah, looks about right.

It makes sense that Too Much would feel both authentic and full of love. It’s semi-autobiographical, after all, and Lena Dunham herself moved to London from New York after a break-up, before falling for a British guy in a band. Said British guy, Luis Felber, now Dunham’s husband, also serves as co-creator and executive producer on the series. It’s no wonder that the show feels realistic, then, because it is by definition. Many of these things happened, and they happened in this specific location. (The pair got married at Soho’s Union Club, a members’ club that also sort of looks like an old boozer slash cafe).

There are times in the show in which the main characters come to blows due to their subtle cultural differences. “They’re cheerful, but they’re not kind, and they’re horny, but they’re not warm,” Jessica shouts at Felix during one scene, describing his friends but also somehow describing how she sees British people, who admittedly have their own idiosyncrasies that might not be easy to decipher from the outside (although I’d argue that her evaluation should be in reverse). “I get it! You went to the Harry Potter school for naughty indie boys!” It’s an excellent piece of dialogue because it’s an American poking fun at a British person without being really annoying, which I think is hard to do.

There’s plenty to love about Too Much: the script, Jessica’s slightly off-beat facial expressions, the fact Naomi Watts appears and does fat rails of coke. But what I especially love is its depiction of London, which is the part I least expected to love. Maybe New Yorkers don’t mind us – or our capital – so much after all.