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These Americans Went Looking the Britain Found Onscreen. They Found a Different Story.

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Like the lead character of “Too Much,” they moved across the Atlantic with visions of Jane Austen and Merchant Ivory. The reality was a little less dreamy.In the first episode of “Too Much,” Lena Dunham’s loosely autobiographical new series that premieres on Netflix this Thursday, Jessica (played by Megan Stalter) arrives in London from Great Neck, N.Y. She is subletting a flat in the fictional Hoxton Grove Estate, and expects to find verdant grounds surrounding a stately building, like something one might find in a Merchant Ivory production.“Good luck with that, love,” the cabdriver laughs as he drops her outside an apartment block with peeling paint. After all, the Britain we see onscreen — in period dramas or in modern Richard Curtis romantic comedies like “Notting Hill” — tends to emphasize a certain aspirational loveliness. It also tends to gloss over details — like the fact that “estate” can refer to both sprawling mansions and public housing.This well-established idealization means that when Jessica first meets Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie musician inspired by Ms. Dunham’s real-life indie musician husband, Luis Felber, he quickly hypothesizes her reasons for being in London: “Let me guess, you’re one of those ‘Love Actually’-loving girls?” he asks with a grin. “You’re on a pilgrimage?”Characters like William in “Notting Hill” (far left) and Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” contribute to some Americans’ fantasies of British life, like Jessica’s in “Too Much.”From left; Alamy; Netflix; BBCWhile the British pilgrims fled to America’s shores about 400 years ago, Ms. Dunham, who moved to London in 2021, is one of the many Americans making the reverse journey today, seeking refuge in the coziness they have seen depicted onscreen or on the page. But as these Americans adjust to regional accents and codes of conduct, many are surprised by what they find. “It didn’t take long for me to understand some of the decay underneath the facade,” Ms. Dunham said in an email.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    These Americans Went Looking the Britain Found Onscreen. They Found a Different Story.

    Like the lead character of “Too Much,” they moved across the Atlantic with visions of Jane Austen and Merchant Ivory. The reality was a little less dreamy.In the first episode of “Too Much,” Lena Dunham’s loosely autobiographical new series that premieres on Netflix this Thursday, Jessica (played by Megan Stalter) arrives in London from Great Neck, N.Y. She is subletting a flat in the fictional Hoxton Grove Estate, and expects to find verdant grounds surrounding a stately building, like something one might find in a Merchant Ivory production.“Good luck with that, love,” the cabdriver laughs as he drops her outside an apartment block with peeling paint. After all, the Britain we see onscreen — in period dramas or in modern Richard Curtis romantic comedies like “Notting Hill” — tends to emphasize a certain aspirational loveliness. It also tends to gloss over details — like the fact that “estate” can refer to both sprawling mansions and public housing.This well-established idealization means that when Jessica first meets Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie musician inspired by Ms. Dunham’s real-life indie musician husband, Luis Felber, he quickly hypothesizes her reasons for being in London: “Let me guess, you’re one of those ‘Love Actually’-loving girls?” he asks with a grin. “You’re on a pilgrimage?”Characters like William in “Notting Hill” (far left) and Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” contribute to some Americans’ fantasies of British life, like Jessica’s in “Too Much.”From left; Alamy; Netflix; BBCWhile the British pilgrims fled to America’s shores about 400 years ago, Ms. Dunham, who moved to London in 2021, is one of the many Americans making the reverse journey today, seeking refuge in the coziness they have seen depicted onscreen or on the page. But as these Americans adjust to regional accents and codes of conduct, many are surprised by what they find. “It didn’t take long for me to understand some of the decay underneath the facade,” Ms. Dunham said in an email.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt

    The show’s sequel, now in its third season, subjects beloved characters to a parade of humiliations. It’s oddly captivating.When I think of my childhood, and the moments that would have made it difficult for my parents to imagine I was anything other than a latent homosexual, I see myself sitting pretzel-style at the foot of an almond-colored couch while my mother and her three best friends drink martinis and watch “Sex and the City.” I was too taken with the show’s glamour and prurience to register the uncanny dynamic: Here were four cosmopolitan 30-something women, mostly single or divorced, convening to watch television’s foremost avatars of 30-something cosmopolitanism discuss the vagaries of sex and dating. I could not possibly have felt as “seen” by Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as my mother and her girlfriends probably did — but I did think of these ladies as fairy godmothers of a sort, telegraphing a future where I too might gather over frothy cocktails at trendy Manhattan establishments to debate the merits of bisexuality or golden showers.More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made Lena Dunham’s Rom-Com Just Right

    When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.“Too Much,” with Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter, was inspired by Lena Dunham’s own story of meeting her husband, Luis Felber.NetflixIs “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ronny Chieng on Trump’s Nobel Nomination: Consider the Source

    An endorsement from Benjamin Netanyahu for the Nobel Peace Prize is like “a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson,” the “Daily Show” host said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.More War Than PeaceDuring a dinner on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presented President Donald Trump with his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.On Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” Ronny Chieng referred to Netanyahu as “kosher Thanos.” Among world leaders who meet with President Trump and want to “butter him up with a special surprise — well, Bibi went all out,” Chieng said.“Yes, a Peace Prize nomination from Netanyahu is very meaningful — right up there with a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson.” — RONNY CHIENG“But Mr. Netanyahu, let me tell you something: If you think you can get Trump to keep sending military aid to Israel by sucking up to him, well, guess what? You can expect that money in your bank account by close of business.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Vacation From the Vatican Edition)“Now, this is the time of year when everyone’s on summer break, and that includes the Pope. Yes, for real. Pope Leo is reportedly taking a six-week vacation. Yes. Hold on, he’s taking six weeks off? Who the hell does he think he is, Jimmy Kimmel?” — ANTHONY ANDERSON, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“Seriously. The dude wears robes and slippers all day. He’s got no wife, no kids — his whole goddamn life is a vacation. Oh, excuse me, Father. Your whole damn life is a vacation.” — ANTHONY ANDERSON“And, by the way, Father, starting Friday, I will be available if you need someone to guest-pope.” — ANTHONY ANDERSONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” The New Yorker’s executive editor, Michael Luo, spoke with Ronny Chieng about the hidden history of Chinese Americans, detailed in his new book, “Strangers in the Land.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe WNBA superstar Candace Parker will discuss her new book, “The Can-Do Mindset,” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMs. Jackson if you’re nasty.Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesThe Amplifier revisited Janet Jackson’s lover-girl era with six of her most sensual songs. More

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    Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out’ Won a Tony, Dies at 67

    More than 30 of his plays were produced on Broadway and off. Many of them dealt with the manners and mores of New York’s upper middle class.Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out,” his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67.His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer.A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time.Works like “Eastern Standard” (1987) and “The American Plan” (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them.From left, Kieran Campion, Lily Rabe, Brenda Pressley, Mercedes Ruehl and Austin Lysy in the Broadway revival of Mr. Greenberg’s “The American Plan” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHaving once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners?“We’re always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,” Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, “and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they’re wrong.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Such Brave Girls’ Is an Audacious and Hilarious British Comedy

    For fans of “Peep Show” and Sharon Horgan, this warped series about a dysfunctional family is in some ways a satire of the trauma comedy.The blistering British comedy “Such Brave Girls,” on Hulu, centers on a dysfunctional family and features many of the archetypes one sees in a sadcom. But instead of slow poignancy and personal growth, “Brave” is all about feral, filthy awfulness. It’s hilarious and electrified, perfectly deranged.Kat Sadler created and stars in the show as Josie, the suicidal, closeted-but-also-not older sister whose biggest turn-on is being fawned over for how damaged she is. Billie (Lizzie Davidson, Sadler’s real-life sister) is the boy-crazy — craaaaazy — golden child who sexts during her abortion. Josie and Billie always seem to get what the other wants: Josie has no use for the doting, useless man who pledges his love to her, whereas Billie would give anything to have her dirtbag show her a molecule of loyalty. Josie can barely interact with women she crushes on while Billie is unfazed by a brief fling with her doppelgänger and romantic rival. Their mom, Deb (Louise Brealey), openly loathes Josie when she isn’t too busy fawning over her weird widower boyfriend, Dev (Paul Bazely). Family!The show is not for the prudish. But the vulgarity is part of the fun, part of the show’s amped-up id. The characters here do and say cartoonishly monstrous things, especially about sex and intimacy, but there is truth inside their savagery. The desperation to be loved and understood can indeed outpace reason, so while the behaviors here are outlandish, they’re not nonsense. The naughtiness is rich and coherent.In some ways, “Brave” is a satire of the trauma comedy, and it uses similar beats and moments but does so in festive, warped ways. A doomed family camping trip goes, of course, poorly, and a tiff leads to Deb kicking a tree and screaming: “We! Do! Not! Need! Catharsis!” The sisters gas each other up but with some of the worst advice imaginable, and the self-actualization moments come out tangled and grotesque.The raunch and audacity remind me of “Peep Show” and of the Sharon Horgan comedy “Pulling.” And “Brave” shares with “Fleabag” that “Oh dang, this show is really going for it!” dazzle. To its huge credit, “Brave” tenaciously resists sweetness, and yet its fallen world and all of its ostensibly unlikable characters add up to something pretty easy to love.Both six-episode seasons are available now. More

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    ‘Memnon’ Review: To Fight or Not to Fight?

    In Will Power’s play for the Classical Theater of Harlem, Eric Berryman stars as an Ethiopian king drawn into the Trojan War.The trappings of royalty don’t always send the intended signals. Take the gilded crown of laurels gleaming expensively atop the head of Priam, the king of Troy. He means the jewelry to underline his status, to augment his gravitas, but no such luck. Even gussied up, he is unmistakably a twit.His nephew Memnon, though? That man has majesty. As embodied by a gripping Eric Berryman in “Memnon,” Will Power’s Trojan War verse play at the Classical Theater of Harlem, he radiates the charisma, integrity and serious-mindedness of a leader. He has a sense of family duty, too.Not to be confused with Agamemnon (same war, different king, opposite side), Memnon has traveled all the way from Ethiopia, where he is king, to answer his uncle’s call for help. A great warrior, he is uncertain that he wants to join the battle, though Troy is a decade deep in combat and in danger of imminent defeat.Memnon has not forgotten the painful slights he has endured for being Trojan only on his father’s side: treated as “not fully Trojan, kin and not kin,” he says. Is a society that has always regarded him that way, led by a king who also sees him that way, worth risking his own life for?His moral wrestling is at the heart of the play, his blend of affection and alienation speaking to the present with bracing clarity.“It makes no sense, to fight for that which has proven time and time again that you will forever be other,” he says. “And yet, golden moments do I have. Good memories in Troy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Book Review: ‘Bring the House Down,’ by Charlotte Runcie

    Drawing on her own experience as an arts journalist, Charlotte Runcie comically skewers bad men, bad faith and (unforgivably) bad theater.BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, by Charlotte RuncieHow cruel may a critic be? I ask for a friend.David Niven was once dismissed as “tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.” (He hung the review in his bathroom.) John Simon described Barbra Streisand’s nose in “A Star Is Born” as “a ziggurat made of meat” bisecting the screen like “a bolt of fleshy lightning.”Having never gone further than calling an actor confused or miscast, I find such put-downs shocking. But they pale in comparison to Alex Lyons’s review of Hayley Sinclair in a one-woman Edinburgh Festival Fringe production called “Climate Emergence-She.” After disemboweling the script, Lyons turns his attention to its author and star. “Hayley herself is so tedious, and so derivative,” he writes, “that after you’ve endured the first 10 minutes of what the venue is loosely calling ‘a show,’ you’ll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.”Should Lyons, the lead critic at a major British newspaper, be canceled for that? How about if, in the hours between writing the pan and its publication, he picks up Sinclair at a bar and sleeps with her? She reads her one-star review in the morning, not knowing until then that the man she spent the night with was its author.And does it change the moral calculus if Lyons was right? The show sounds truly dreadful.Those are the questions heating up Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” which enjoyably pours fuel on both his and her sides of the dispute. Lyons is basically a #MeToo straw man, so grossly cavalier and indifferent to the sensitivity of other people, especially women, that you’d want to cancel him just for existing.Nor does Runcie make Sinclair a shining heroine. In a canny and commercial act of revenge, the character instantly revamps “Climate Emergence-She” as “The Alex Lyons Experience,” dredging up the history of the critic’s indiscretions and releasing the monster of internet rage. With its parade of guest star exes and its bonus semi-nudity, the new show is the hit the old one could never be.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More