‘Too Much’ Episode 3 Recap: “Ignore Sunrise”

Jessica and Felix have a problem: They don’t really have any problems. As we open up on Too Much Episode 3 (“Ignore Sunrise”), these two crazy kids are still in that early flush of feelings for one another, possessed with a cheery eagerness to experience each other in every possible way at every possible moment. Which is great! Except when you’re trying to do literally anything else.

Unsurprisingly, considering, y’know, everything we’ve seen and heard about her so far, Jessica is struggling to maintain what’s euphemistically called “work-life balance” — “euphemistically” because it’s usually balanced very much in favor of the work side. Deep in the up-all-night stage of her relationship with Felix, she hasn’t been getting enough sleep, and her job performance is suffering.

That’s more or less what she hears from Jonno, her scatterbrained and diffident boss. “I like you, you’re perfectly adequate to have around,” he tells her earnestly, but with a major client headed her way soon she needs to get her act together. According to his laconic assistant, Josie, this means she has to stop doing things like eating gross food and saying “I have to pee” around the office. But it also means knocking off the all-nighters with Felix.

Felix has his own struggles to worry about. Up late with Jessica every night, he sleeps in every morning, practices with his band (his roommate Augie is now the drummer, if he wasn’t already), and gives excuses to the unemployment office. Actually, you know what? I take that back. “I can’t run around sending in pointless applications to dead-end jobs I’ll hate because it eats up all the time and energy I need to pursue my passion in the arts” would be a perfectly fucking valid reason to be on the dole, if we lived in a civilized society.

Unsurprisingly, neither is exactly willing to buckle down and call it an early night. Jessica does some work at home. Jessica and Felix have sex. Felix makes her watch Paddington while she obsessively checks out her ex and his fiancée, the infamous Wendy Jones, on her phone. Jessica and Felix have sex again. Jessica has a weird sexualized daydream about hitting it off with Wendy. Jessica and Felix have sex again. 

Felix tells a story of finding himself repulsed by a regular fling when he saw her eating noodles in bed with a look of “desperation” in her eyes, and says he got sober after a scatalogically disastrous hookup with his sister’s friend. Jessica talks about her late father, who died of Parkinson’s but seems like a heck of a guy before then, and who’s portrayed in a cameo by Kit Harington, of all the people to play a Long Island dad. 

For his part, Felix avoids talking about his parents at all, which seems like a bad sign. So does fixating on your ex while your new bf tries to show you his favorite movie while crying manly tears the whole time because you can only relate to stories about people who have worse lives than you do, as Jessica does. But yes, Jessica and Felix have sex a fourth time.

Well, sort of — Felix is basically all fucked out at this point, which Jessica takes as criticism. So they shower each other with compliments to make each other feel better again, then make out to Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” which in this funkateer’s opinion is an insanely morose song to make out to, but your mileage may vary!

And when Felix falls asleep, Jessica sneaks off to eat noodles with a look of desperation in her eyes, just before her 6:45am alarm goes off. 

More or less a two-hander other than the major cameos by Emily Ratajkowski and Kit Harington — I know, I know, that’s not a two-hander, but you get what I’m saying — this is an episode of fairly modest ambition. It’s a snapshot of a point in time for these two people. Writer-director Lena Dunham is using Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe, two charismatic and attractive actors with believable chemistry, to depict what it’s like to be so into your new significant other that you pull an all nighter to have sex four times. That’s a fun topic to take on, and together they do it well.

But there’s a dark lining to every silver cloud. Ending with that alarm clock going off as Jessica compulsively does something she fears will drive Felix away feels like an ominous sign for the future. So does Felix’s continued reticence about his folks, his shifting time frames regarding his sobriety, the fact that he breaks up with women who need things from him, and so on. On the other hand, this show is based on the lives of its two very married-to-each-other co-creators, so perhaps there’s a happy ending waiting for us, no matter how many late-night noodles are consumed along the way.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.