Is Netflix’s Too Much based on a true story? Events that inspired Lena Dunham’s new rom-com
Too Much is inspired by American writer and director Lena Dunham's own experience of moving to the UK and falling in love with a
Lena Dunham’s new comedy series Too Much has landed on Netflix.
The 10-part series, which stars Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe, follows Jessica (Stalter) as she moves to the UK to for a new life, following a toxic breakup.
Here, Jessica plans to live a solitary life abroad, much like the Brontë sisters, but finds herself falling head-over-heels for musician Felix, who is described as “less Hugh Grant in Notting Hill and more Hugh Grant’s drunken roommate.”
It’s a love story, and one that many can relate to. But is it based on a true story?
It is.
Too Much is inspired by American writer and director Lena Dunham’s own experience of moving to the UK and falling in love with a musician, although she has pointed out that the exact plot of the show differs to her real life.
Dunham developed the series alongside her husband, Luis Felber, whom she met and married in the UK, where she has lived for several years.
Speaking about the inspiration behind the series, she said: “When I first started coming to the UK for work … I thought to myself, ‘I want to write something about the experience of being a foreigner here, and the fantasies we have of [London] versus the realities. Then when I met my husband, Luis, I felt like I was experiencing all of that, but in the context of a relationship.”
Although the show has been described as “semi-autobiographical,” Dunham said it was more of the “germ” of the series that was based on her and Felber’s romance.
“A girl moves to England. She meets a musician. They fall in love. That was the exoskeleton. But then he’s such an amazing and creative thinker and loves stories, and so it really expanded far beyond what we had even dreamed it could be into a totally different world,” Dunham says, “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 have taken over. So while the germ of it may be autobiographical, it’s gone in directions I never could’ve dreamed.”
She added: “I have wanted to make a romantic comedy about what happens when a loud, messy, complicated Jewess descends on a city of deeply repressed people – what will occur.”
