“I feel like it’s good to do a light launch into the first message. Right? You got to catch their eye with something a little bit more gentle,” Megan Stalter told Gayety when asked about her dating app go-tos.
The comedian is currently promoting her upcoming series Too Much, Netflix’s new romantic dramedy (streaming July 10) starring Stalter as Jessica, a New Yorker in her mid-thirties still reeling from a breakup that shattered her world. She escapes to London to be alone—but instead stumbles into something real with Felix (Will Sharpe), a man who’s somehow both charming and full of red flags.
A Messy Lead with a Big Heart
But the show explores so much more than just romantic connections. As creator Lena Dunham put it, Too Much is about people “who are figuring it out.”
“With Jessica, I also wanted to show that someone could be really messy and really complicated and also have a really good, pure heart,” Dunham said. “She says the wrong thing, she puts her foot in her mouth, but she is always trying and she always wants to make everybody feel seen and reflected. And I love that she’s a lover and that she’s a kind of—Megan and I keep joking—she’s just a good girl. She’s a good girl.”
That’s what makes Jessica’s relationship with Felix feel so refreshing—it’s not about being saved by love. It’s about feeling like yourself again.
“What I want people to understand is that it’s not about finding a relationship being the ultimate test of who you are as a person,” Dunham explained. “It’s just that she realizes that Felix makes her life better. He makes her feel happier. He makes her feel more like herself. And also, had she not found that and had she found that with a friend or with her mother and her sister or with her dog, that would also have been a totally okay version of life.”
What’s a Meet-Cute?
And how about that meet-cute? “I really enjoyed the film, how unconventional it was, how real it was,” said interviewer Caitlynn McDaniel. “And one part that really stuck out to me was of course, the meet-cute. I mean, who doesn’t love to meet in a dirty pub bathroom?”
“It’s very romantic,” Stalter joked.
Sharpe’s own love story had a similarly chaotic start. “I met…so, my other half when we were in a show called Casualty that we have in England, which is like a medical drama,” he shared. “And the first scene we had together, I see a severed head in a field, and then I’m so scared that I back away from the head and then I smash my face into an ambulance. And then she had to do a kind of routine test on my vision—am I impaired, and have I gone insane from running into an ambulance? So that was quite a weird… first encounter, I guess.”
Stalter’s story might sound more familiar—but still serendipitous. “I met my girlfriend on a dating app,” she said, before adding, “We’ve had really crazy synchronicities. And our first date was at a restaurant, which is not the same as the set thing that you were describing, but…I would say, I think meeting on… It’s interesting—even if you meet on a dating app, everything still has to align for you to meet. That you’re living in the same city…I mean, me and my girlfriend lived in the same city for a year, and then we didn’t actually meet for years…six years later. So I think that’s kind of crazy too, don’t you think?”
As Stalter summed it up: “We sent a lot of voice notes before we met. I liked that. It felt like I already knew her.”
Whether you’re dodging ambulance doors or debating your opening line on Hinge, Too Much gets it. Love is messy. People are weird. But if they make you feel more like you—that’s something worth holding onto.
