Lena Dunham’s 'Too Much' Is Exactly Enough

What even was Girls? One of the features that notoriously distinguishes online writing about art and culture is its speed. In comparison to the kinds of slow, roiling debates among public intellectuals of previous eras, today’s discourse explodes in enlivening and exhausting near-simultaneous waves of point and counterpoint. There’s no better example of this kind of breakneck colloquy than the reception, in spring 2012, of the very first episode of Lena Dunham’s infamous HBO series Girls. Like the Big Bang for people who read recaps of episodes of television they’ve already seen, whole galaxies of discourse were born within the space of only a few days and weeks, left to expand over the course of years, and, in many ways, supplant the original text. As I’ve watched Dunham’s excellent, vexing return to long-form TV, Too Much, I’ve thought a lot about the degree to which those couple of weeks in 2012 have haunted everything Dunham has done since.