“Americans think British people are snotty and pretentious but smart. British people think Americans are stupid and vulgar but funny,” a family member tells Jessica, the protagonist of Lena Dunham’s new rom-com series Too Much, before she boards a plane to London. Whether this statement is true would be unseemly for me to comment on, as a British person writing in an American publication, but the line serves as a thesis statement for the series as a whole: Americans and Brits—we don’t quite get each other.

Too Much, newly released on Netflix, follows Jessica (Megan Stalter), a commercial producer in her early 30s fresh off an agonizing breakup with the man she thought she would be with forever, as she leaves New York and tries to start a new life in London. On her first night in town, she meets a musician, Felix (Will Sharpe), at the pub, and from there they begin a situationship. The England she had imagined living in—full of dashing Hugh Grant types or perhaps hard-bitten Yorkshire policewomen, maybe an empire-waist dress or two—turns out to be a fantasy. When she imagined her new flat located on what she believed to be a Hoxton “estate,” she pictured manicured gardens, not concrete tower blocks. England is (surprise, surprise) not how it looked on the television.

People love to shit on Lena Dunham. When Girls came out 13 years ago on HBO, it was, I suppose, intolerable to many that she was very young, very talented, and very artless in the way she presented herself in public. To be frank, I am a firm Dunham apologist. Whatever you think of her as a person, it’s childish to try to deny that Girls was anything short of sensational. All of which is to say that hopes will be high for this series; mine certainly were when I heard that Dunham, who has been living in London for four years and whose relationship with a British man—her now husband, Luis Felber—served as the inspiration for the central relationship, was making a splashy new TV show. Or maybe hopes is the wrong word. I felt in some ways genuinely anxious that, while I had escaped the crosshairs of painful self-recognition in Girls because I wasn’t a woman in her 20s trying to tough it out in New York City at the time, as a woman currently in her 30s living in London, Too Much might make me cringe into oblivion. The protagonist develops an all-consuming crush on a grimy, repressed rollie-smoking guy who plays pub gigs with an indie band? What woman in London, God help us, has not?

Instead, I found the London of it all a little grating. Not because the show’s depiction of life in Britain is inaccurate. Much of it is actually on the money. Aristocratic British people do indeed always seem to be wanging on about dogs they’ve loved who are now dead, and launching some harebrained new business just for something to do, like one woman Jessica meets who has a “Cretan sandal” company. We do like to talk about our favorite instances of what you guys would, I think, call “highway gas stations.” Felix correctly notes that we find it tiresome when Americans think it’s funny to repeat what we’ve just said back to us in that Dick Van Dyke accent. Our homes are damp, our teeth are not as nice as yours (yours are too nice, by the way, but let’s close that can of worms), pub toilets are mostly disgusting, and we do indeed say flat instead of apartment. All that is correct. Rather, it felt as if the show was trying too hard to continually prove that it gets Britain. At points, watching it left me with the same mild secondhand embarrassment I experience listening to Taylor Swift’s “London Boy” or reading the following line, which Dunham wrote in a recent piece for the New Yorker about how she finds life in her new city: “I moved with ease, whether walking on Hampstead Heath or sliding into a black cab, greeted by a gruff ‘Oy! Where you ’eaded?’ ”

While not a cartoonish depiction of London, it is sort of entry level. Which is fine—most people watching this show will have only a basic familiarity with Britain—but it meant that I found the repeated British lore elements more dull than anything else. We already know them, after all. Lines about, say, the Jaffa Cake tax controversy or George Michael crashing his car into a branch of a photo lab called Snappy Snaps might sound fresh to non-Brits, but these quips are stale to us. While watching the first few episodes of Too Much, I found myself thinking: How much juice can they be hoping to get out of the simple fact that Americans and British people are different?

Thank God that doesn’t go on for the entirety of the series. Halfway through the season, Dunham finally won me round. At the beginning of the series, we learn that Jessica has been dumped by her longtime boyfriend Zev (Michael Zegen) for an influencer-slash-model, played by Emily Ratajkowski. But it is only in the fifth episode that Dunham takes us back in time to really let us feel how painful the collapse of that relationship was. In the early years, Zev made Jessica feel safe and loved, played games with her family, delighted in all the qualities of hers that might seem “too much” to other people. Just like Jessica and Felix do as they get to know each other, we see that Jessica and Zev once flopped around their apartment, talking about everything and nothing in the wee hours of the morning. Having those meandering, mundane conversations that quietly get at the heart of what is real and profound about people trying to live alongside one another—that is what Dunham has always written so beautifully. Slowly, we see Zev start to pull away, to chip away at Jessica’s self-esteem little by little until she felt as if she had paper cuts all over her body, as she puts it. And her falling for Felix runs alongside and bleeds into her getting over Zev, a familiar tale to many people who have been spat back out into the world of dating in their 30s after thinking they were out of that chaos for good.

The emotional core of Too Much, two people trying to connect in their 30s with the weight of past hurt heavy on their shoulders, is moving and messy and compelling. And it’s done well enough that, by the end, I had almost forgiven the fact that the Brits-vs.-Americans shtick was, for me, too much. Too Much works best when it’s not emulating the fish-out-of-water approach of Emily in Paris. Let it just be, and we may just have our long-awaited successor to Girls.