It seems one season was just enough for Netflix‘s Too Much.
The Lena Dunham romantic comedy series won’t be returning to Netflix for season two, according to reports and comments from Dunham at an FYC panel last week, where she said that Too Much was envisioned as more of a limited series.
Dunham co-created the 10-episode TV show that premiered over the summer with her husband Luis Felber, with Dunham and Felber’s own love story serving as the loose inspiration for Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe‘s characters’ romance. The Girls alum met and wed Felber in the U.K., where she’s been living for the past few years.
The series, which was one of Dunham’s biggest small-screen creations since Girls ended in early 2017, followed Stalter’s Jessica who moves to London from New York after a bad breakup, where she meets Sharpe’s Felix, a musician and “walking series of red flags,” as Netflix’s synopsis describes him. Despite those concerns, the two quickly fall in love and (spoiler alert) end the first season (and the series) getting married.
While the show has been called “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 told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of a Tribeca Festival Too Much event in New York a month before the show premiered. “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.”
At last week’s FYC panel, Dunham said, “Our intention was always to make Too Much as a limited series. It was meant to feel like a classic transatlantic love story but with time to really dig into the complexities that a film doesn’t have the space for.”
She added, of the temptations of a season two, “Of course I fell fully in love with Meg and Will’s dynamic and started imagining what the rest of their characters’ lives together could look 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 made, we realized we had told the story. It ends with a wedding. There’s even a little Easter egg, which is that within the final scene you can hear me yell ‘cut!’ We had done what we needed to do, and part of the job is knowing when to park it.”
Still, she said she’d be open to revisiting Jessica and Felix in the future.
“Who knows — maybe there will be a time down the line when it feels right to check in on them again,” she said. “But right now I’m pulling a Mary Poppins and heading on to the next (imaginary) family that needs me.”
When THR asked Dunham about a possible season two shortly after season one of Too Much began streaming, Dunham had ideas for the characters’ futures but wasn’t actively planning another installment.
“In terms of the second season, we’re not there yet,” she told THR at the time. “But when I think about where these characters would go, when Luis and I talk about it, what we’re really thinking 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 have because of this kind of radical intimacy they’ve experienced, they actually haven’t dealt with an enormous amount of life as a team. So [we’d be] looking at what happens when two people make the decision to be together and then are thrust into the reality of each other’s worlds. … There’s so much that they skipped over — and some of that is taken from our [real] life, some of it isn’t. … But I think that [it’s interesting] to get to see something that we often don’t get to see in romantic comedy films, which is: What happens after the kiss at the end, 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 wanna stay married?”
Dunham served as writer-director for Too Much and executive produced alongside her Good Thing Going Production company partner Michael P. Cohen as well as Working Title’s Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and 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 movie for the streamer called Good Sex, starring Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo and Role Model.