At the end of the fourth episode of Lena Dunham’s new Netflix series, “Too Much,” the main character, Jess, is shouting on the streets of London. She’s standing outside her boss’s house, where she and her boyfriend, Felix, have just attended a chaotic dinner party.
The party devolved into drug-fueled chaos, which Jess gleefully participated in, while Felix spent most of the evening standing quietly in the corner. On the street, Jess is loudly proclaiming her worries that she and Felix, who’ve only been dating for 10 days, are a bad match.
This moment, Amanda Kehrberg says, represents a major statement on the part of "Too Much" creator Dunham about the types of female characters that can — and should — anchor TV shows.
Kehrberg and teaches digital culture at Arizona State University, and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: So tell us more about this moment and what you think it represents.
AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, it's no, it's amazing because I think we like language obviously has evolved. And, and when we should know, you know, is it even summer if we're not talking about an archetype of a girl who is in some way too much?
DINGMAN: Right.
KEHRBERG: But we've always had these ways to describe a woman like Jess or, you know, like Lena Dunham's Hannah from her seminal series "Girls." Someone who is too much, who is a lot, who is extra, who is high maintenance. You know, who is trying to have it all in a way that just comes out sort of, messy and chaotic.
And so what what I love about the way that we start into this series is that we get Meg Stalters' Jess as someone who's in love with Bronte heroines and that and we're reminded that the woman who is too much in in Bronte novels would have been in the attic, not actually having the romance with the main guy.
So like, she is pretty much the attic bride of "Jane Eyre" in the first episode, when she takes out this candle because she's obsessing over her ex and her ex's new fiancé, and accidentally lights herself in a very Bronte nightgown on fire. And if that isn't too much, know what is?
DINGMAN: Yeah. It's, I mean that actually in the dialogue that precedes that clip we just played, you hear Felix, the boyfriend, saying, like, you know, the first time, the first night I met you, you set yourself on fire. She has moved to London, sort of on a whim, without any, like, real clear plan. Yeah. She's just kind of careening through her life.
And it struck me that she's the kind of character who, just to take it out of even the Dunham context in a lot of shows, would sort of be like the goofy sidekick, you know, the person who other characters are sort of using as a way to bounce off of.
KEHRBERG: Absolutely, absolutely. So centering the plot around her as the protagonist is such a great choice, I think. And then having, again, putting her in a romantic context, too, because of course, like "Girls," if we're going to use that again, you know, it was so much about these characters, centered around friendships among them. And so this is a kind of romantic arc with yeah, the goofy sidekicks. You're right. The people who would set the kind of side tone for the main characters, are now becoming the main character.
And I think that also speaks very much to the kind of the context of digital technology that we're seeing, too. Like, she reminds me so much of this, this moment in in "Girls," where Lena Dunham is, Hannah says that she's just lived her life chasing experiences over and over again, and that she just wants to experience everything. Pretty much before we had the phrase "do it for the 'gram" or "do it for the plot."
That's what she's talking about, right? And Meg Stalters' Jess is like that. She is just saying yes to everything in this sort of way that understands her role as being a kind of natural content creator that everything is about experiencing things to share because everything needs to be about authenticity and transparency. So you go out, you do it all. You do too much, and then you share it online in some way.
DINGMAN: Well, that element of it is very interesting because one of the central threads of the story does involve Instagram, right? Which is that Jess is following her ex and his new relationship with an influencer via Instagram, and she's constantly recording these monologues that one would normally post on stories. But she tells us these are actually just a way of her sort of keeping a journal.
KEHRBERG: Yes, which I love, too. I love the idea of taking the new technology, but making it private again is such a great way to acknowledge the way that we we kind of want to talk to ourselves now because it's what we're embedded in, but also kind of keeping it under lock and key to the degree that, you know, we can.
DINGMAN: Right. Well, that's very interesting because if I'm following the plot correctly, at least in the first few episodes, she doesn't post these stories.
KEHRBERG: Yes.
DINGMAN: It's just a way for her to sort of keep track of what she's feeling.
KEHRBERG: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I love that so much. The connection to the ex's new fiancé, Wendy Jones, because she is sort of this archetype of the person that all of us see when we get online, right. This aspirational, you know, model, perfect person who probably needed a whole outfit, her first time picking up a pair of knitting needles, just that person that all of us.
We open our feed and we go, oh my gosh, I'm not that. I'm not that across all of these categories. So she not only has this aspirational perfect figure who she gets to watch on Instagram, but that person is the person who was recast into her life.
Like, imagine that. We all sort of have that now that when we're broken up with or we leave a job, the show continues and we were recast, but we can still watch the show. That's so disturbing.
DINGMAN: Yes, well in this vein, in this vein of attention and how we're sort of forced to have it, we have just about a minute left here.
How do you feel this show fits into the general trend towards more of what is often called ambient TV? TV that's kind of on in the background. Do you think Dunham is trying to speak to that trend in this project?
KEHRBERG: I think so, and I think it being on Netflix is so interesting, too, because Netflix, of course, had "Emily in Paris," which became the archetype of ambient TV.
TV that is a screensaver while you scroll on your other screens, or you do your hobbies or you do whatever. And this show is not that, this show is like bizarro "Emily in Paris." It's just in London, not background noise. You cannot turn away from it. And I think that speaks so much to the idea of how loud and overwhelming our lives are.
That's where it goes beyond femininity. Like we have information overload. We have everything in our lives that are too much, but that impacts all of us. We are all asked to be more roles than could possibly fit in a LinkedIn bio, let alone a gravestone. When we die, we will not become trees. We will become Linktrees.
