In the pantheon of soul-crushing celebrity breakup lines, one has haunted me the most. In a 2019 Domino cover story, “Girls” creator and star Lena Dunham detailed her split with musician Jack Antonoff, sharing his parting words: “You can finally eat in the bed without anyone getting mad at you.”
I can never know exactly how it was intended, or received, but I felt deeply unsettled by it: I sensed revulsion at a practice he maybe once found charming. As someone with my own panoply of silly habits, I was indignant on her behalf. So what if she ate in bed? I figured out why it unsettled me so four years later, when my own partner abruptly left me, litany of annoying behaviours in hand. Turns out, Lena’s bed wasn’t the only one filled with crumbs. Once again, I felt unlovable, strange, indulgent. Too much.
In the two years since then, slowly, slowly, I’ve returned to myself. I wear what I want, eat what I want, do what I want. And have sex with who I want. It is freeing and delicious and affirming, but the territory often feels uncharted: I lack curvy, unapologetically horny characters clad in bold outfits I can turn to onscreen that look and act and have sex — well, like me.
“When fat women do appear (in film and TV), the majority of them are slotted into sidekick or punchline tropes, not lead roles with full erotic lives,” according to sex educator Luna Matatas. “The result is a creative pipeline that keeps recycling the myth that only thin bodies deserve desire, sex, pleasure and a main romantic plot line.”
And then my crumb queen returned.
Dunham has come roaring back to television with a show just as revolutionary — and fantastically funny — as “Girls.” And the title says it all. “Too Much” (streaming on Netflix Thursday) is an ode to women like Dunham. Like me. Those who are told they’re too much and feel like they’re not enough. It is also a love letter to its star.
A world-class casting talent, Dunham tapped “Hacks” scene-stealer, TikTok comedy supernova and 2025 breakout star Megan Stalter to tell our story: killing it at her creative job, sometimes brash, sometimes stymied, usually shamelessly enjoying both wild fashion and hot dudes. “Too Much” is loosely based on Dunham’s own post-“Girls” life. Jessica (Stalter) endures a terrible breakup with a hipster boyfriend (Michael Zegen, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) and moves to London for a job contract, where she falls in love with a kind-hearted but slightly troubled musician (Will Sharpe, “The White Lotus”).
And it is one of the best shows of the year.
The relationship at the heart of it feels raw and rough and ridiculous — real. They share witty rom-com banter, sure, but the pairing is the salty stuff of real life rather than eye-rolling rom-com contrivances. Instead of having characters march in lockstep toward an inevitable happily ever after, the show is richer for the mess, featuring a sprawling cast (the weird boss’s wife! the deadbeat dad! the tiny dog! Dunham as the sassy sister!) and teeming with complex compromises, past relationship pain, childhood trauma, workplace drama and on and on. Theirs is a life in full.
So is their sex, which feels groundbreaking, honestly. They have a lot of it, for starters, and it has the urgency, intimacy and occasional goofiness of real-life fornication. (Just look to the scene of Felix spitting in Jessica’s mouth that caused a minor uproar online.) Even more importantly, plus-size Jessica is unabashed in her enjoyment not just of life, but of sex. And Felix is very, very hot for her.
Desire without a “but” is radical, according to Matatas. Most onscreen romances with fat women carry a caveat: they’re loved despite their size, or as a makeover-in progress. “‘Too Much’ normalizes a hotter reality: many people are genuinely into bigger bodies. Showing that chemistry — eye contact, make-outs, laugh sex in daylight — chips away at the cultural lie that fatness and desirability are mutually exclusive,” Matatas said. “It tells plus-size viewers: you’re not a compromise; you’re someone’s fantasy.”
Growing up, Dunham told me, there were so many women who inspired her in comedy and film — but, like me, she never saw people who looked like her. (Even the rest of her family was tall and thin.) “We all have something in life that makes us feel other,” she said. “It’s not always about your body. It can be about your gender presentation or your race, or anything about your identity that makes you feel like you’re unseen.”
If you never see a body like yours being wanted onscreen, it’s easy to internalize the message that your desire is excessive and your desirability negotiable, Matatas said — and conditional on your appearance. Clients have told her they mute their flirtation, choose dim lighting for sex or stay in situationships with crumbs of affection because, she said, “they’ve absorbed the idea that fat women should be grateful for any attention at all.”
Dunham is well-versed in fat phobia in particular: the feeling of walking into a space and having people make assumptions about who you are and your own capabilities based on your weight is real, she said, “but we wanted Jessica to be someone who leans into who she is and meets someone who also embraces who she is.”
For both director and star, it was crucial to show Jessica as a complicated person. “She’s had her pain, but none of it is about what she looks like. None of her success or her failure — like, her story is not about having a physical glow-up,” Dunham said. “And it was very healing to put that on the screen and to do something that felt joyful with that character at the centre.”
It made Stalter feel amazing, too. “It’s really validating and also so exciting because it feels so real to me,” she said.
She was also eager to explore the paradox of the powerful woman dating a mean little man; “Too Much” contains some of the most stomach-churning scenes of subtle emotional abuse seen onscreen in recent memory, culminating in a brutal wielding of an especially potent insult that elicited an actual gasp out of me. This is, sadly, commonplace for the brazen among us; I remember all too well the million little cuts made by exes that sliced away my own self-esteem, chunk by agonizing chunk.
“Patriarchy socializes heterosexual men to earn status through the partner they ‘secure.’ Dating a confident, unconventional fat woman can feel threatening to that hierarchy, so some try to shrink her: verbally, emotionally, sometimes literally,” Matatas said.
One upside? Showing that dynamic onscreen can give audiences a social red flag glossary and teach them the all-important lesson: “Love that erodes your confidence isn’t love,” according to Matatas. “It’s control.”
Stalter talked with Dunham a lot about how Jessica is such a confident person, but even the most confident woman who loves the way she looks and loves all these things about herself can be in a bad relationship. “And maybe she’s losing some of her spark,” Stalter said. “But it’s healing to see that onscreen and (then after) giving hope to people that are in relationships that aren’t right for them, because it’s like, ‘Well, look what else is out there for you.’”
And if there’s someone out there for Jessica, there’s probably someone out there for me, too. The right person won’t care about food in bed. Hopefully they’ll join me there.
