If I described Adam Sackler from season one of Girls to you—perpetually unemployed artist-slash-welder (?) sleeping with a vast catalog of girls has no apparent interest in settling down and lives almost entirely off the $800 that his grandmother sends him every month—you would likely, and correctly, dismiss him as a loser (or a “wasteman,” to use a Britishism I’m particularly charmed by). On the show itself, though, all it took was one glance at a shirtless Adam Driver for this semi-consistent-lowlife and common-as-dirt Brooklyn archetype to actually become…hot?
Lena Dunham’s new show Too Much doesn’t share a lot of DNA with Girls, apart from the fact that it also revolves around a Lena-ish figure (this one moving from New York to London in the wake of a painful breakup, as Dunham herself did). Yet, once again, Dunham proves her incredible prowess at creating onscreen men we love to hate—but would love even more to date—with Felix Remen (Will Sharpe), a funny, sweet, floppy-haired, frequent-nail-polish-wearing, fairly chaotic indie musician who sweeps Meg Stalter’s Jessica thoroughly off her feet almost the minute she lands in the UK.
Of course, one could argue that Felix’s cuteness (and Adam Sackler’s, for that matter) is primarily a feat of casting, not writing, but I stand ready to rebuff that notion. Sure, Will Sharpe is always and forever adorable, but who would have known from watching him as a tentative and somewhat henpecked boyfriend on The White Lotus that he had the range to pull off a sexy, capital-T Troubled, and not at all boring leading man who basically has me scrawling his initials in my diary while I giggle and kick my feet in the air?
Granted, I may be especially prone to finding Jessica and Felix’s relationship adorable, given that I (like Jess) am a fat white American woman who can frequently be found in a “flowing pioneer nightgown” with my tiny, weird dog on my lap while my handsome, creative, not-traditionally-masculine, half-Japanese leading man tries to get me to stop looking at my phone. That said, in lesser hands than Dunham’s, the romance at the center of Too Much could have seemed untenable, to say the least. If Sharpe weren’t so good as Felix and if the role weren’t so carefully crafted, I might have found myself yelling, “Leave this man! He’s newly-ish sober, and he has way too many hot female friends, and I’m not sure he’s sure about you!” at the TV whenever Jessica appeared onscreen.
Do I actually want to date a Felix or an Adam in my real, almost-32-year-old life? God, no. I’ve put in more than enough time begging musicians to whom I’d granted my “final favor,” as they put it in Victorian England, to take any remote notice of me after the act. And if I never have to google, “Can men have HPV?” on the C train after a disappointing tryst somewhere in Brooklyn with a flop “artist,” I’ll be forever grateful. Dunham has a real gift, though, for making what’s irresistible about these kinds of guys—the funny guys, the weird-as-hell guys, the guys who are hot precisely because they have plenty of practice being the weird kid on the playground and really don’t care if you’re into them or not—rise to the surface, even when you’re presumably old enough to know better.
