Lena Dunham’s Netflix show may be the successor to Girls.

Published

2 months ago

July 10, 2025

“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.

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Texans vs. Buccaneers prediction, odds, time: 2025 NFL Week 2 Monday Night Football picks from proven model

Published

54 minutes ago

September 15, 2025

Chelena Goldman

A double dose of ‘Monday Night Football’ kicks off with C.J. Stroud and the Houston Texans hosting Baker Mayfield and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The hosts are looking for their first win of the 2025 NFL season after stumbling in Week 1 against the Los Angeles Rams 14-9. Meanwhile, the Buccaneers head into NFL Week 2 with a victory under their belts, having held off the Atlanta Falcons 23-20 to start their season. Both teams will be missing a key receiver with Christian Kirk (hamstring) out for Houston and Chris Godwin (foot) out for Tampa Bay.

Kickoff from NRG Stadium is set for 7 p.m. ET. Houston is a 2.5-point favorite in the latest Buccaneers vs. Texans odds, and the over/under for total points scored is 42.5. The Texans are -146 favorites on the money line (risk $146 to win $100), while the Bucs are +122 underdogs (risk $100 to win $122). Before making any Texans vs. Buccaneers picks, be sure to see what the SportsLine projection model has to say.

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Now, the model has zeroed in on Texans vs. Buccaneers. You can head to SportsLine now to see its picks. Here are several NFL odds and betting lines for Buccaneers vs. Texans:

Buccaneers vs. Texans spread	Texans -2.5 at DraftKings Sportsbook
Buccaneers vs. Texans over/under	42.5 points
Buccaneers vs. Texans money line	Houston -146, Tampa Bay +122
Buccaneers vs. Texans picks	See picks at SportsLine
Buccaneers vs. Texans streaming	Fubo (Try for free)

Why the Buccaneers can cover

The Bucs went 10-7-0 ATS last season and have already covered the spread in their first game of the season. They were arguably lucky to get the win in Week 1 since they didn’t generate much yardage, but Mayfield still threw three touchdown passes and rookie receiver Emeka Egbuka shined by catching two of those TDs. Egbuka can help open up the offense by taking some of the attention off of Mike Evans, giving Mayfield options against a Texans defense that allowed 244 passing yards in Week 1. See which team to back at SportsLine.

Why the Texans can cover

Houston is in a position to rebound after Ka’imi Fairbairn scored all of its Week 1 points with three first-half field goals. Nico Collins can have a bounce-back game by frustrating a Buccaneers defense that allowed the fourth-most passing yards in Week 1 (289 out of 358 yards total). Nick Chubb had 13 carries for 60 yards against the Rams, so he should be firing on all cylinders in his first home game with the Texans. Houston was 7-8-2 ATS in 2024 and covered four times at home. See which team to back at SportsLine.

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Who wins Buccaneers vs. Texans, and which side of the spread hits almost 60% of the time? Visit SportsLine now to see which side of the Texans vs. Buccaneers spread you need to jump, all from the model that is 33-17 on top-rated picks since 2024, and find out.

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5 new members for CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices : Shots

Published

2 hours ago

September 15, 2025

The Editors

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice will have five additional members when it convenes Thursday in Atlanta.

Ben Hendren/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Ben Hendren/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Just days before vaccine advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meet to weigh who should get COVID vaccines this season, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has selected five more members to the committee he purged of Biden administration appointees in June.

The new members of the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are:

Hilary Blackburn, a pharmacist at AscensionRx, who also hosts a podcast,
Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and an affiliate of the Independent Medical Alliance,
Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an ob/gyn and functional medicine practitioner,
Dr. Raymond Pollak, a semi-retired transplant surgeon, and
Catherine Stein, an epidemiology professor at Case Western Reserve University, who has claimed the government overstated COVID risks.

“The new ACIP members bring a wealth of real-world public health experience to the job of making immunization recommendations,” said Jim O’Neill, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and Acting Director of the CDC in a media statement. “We are grateful for their service in helping restore the public confidence in vaccines that was lost during the Biden era.”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. picked eight new members for a panel that helps set national vaccine policies.

The advisory group – now numbering 12 members – makes recommendations that help determine which vaccines are offered free through the Vaccines for Children program, and what health insurers typically cover. They also influence state and local laws around vaccine requirements.

The appointments expand the committee just before it meets this week in Atlanta. On Thursday and Friday, the members will be considering policies such as who should get the fall COVID-19 booster shot, and whether all babies should get the hepatitis B vaccine at birth.

Short list of members leaked in early September

The new members were among seven that appeared on a list that was first reported by the “Inside Medicine” newsletter on Sept. 3. Two others who were named then — Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medical physician, and Dr. John Gaitanis, a pediatric neurologist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Rhode Island — were not appointed to the committee by HHS.

NPR reached out to each of the new members of the committee earlier this month, when their names first appeared in media reports. Only one responded.

Dr. Raymond Pollak, a semi-retired transplant surgeon, was still in the midst of the vetting process on Sept. 5. “I think I’d be an ideal choice for a committee like this,” he told NPR. “I have expertise in clinical trial management and ethics, and my background in transplant biology allows me to understand the science of what is being proposed.”

Pollak says he had not paid much attention to ACIP before he joined the committee, but he sees having non-vaccine experts on the panel as a plus. “I think it’s a value to have broad representation of the community at large, both with and without the necessary expertise in order to formulate policy that makes sense to everybody,” he says.

And while Pollack considers COVID vaccines “safe to administer and provided a benefit in that it kept down the severity of the illness and prevented hospitalization,” he says the vaccine rollout was “poorly managed,” contributing to hysteria and conspiracy theories that the government covered up harms and injuries related to the vaccine. “The notion that the government tried to ‘cover it up’ is false,” Pollak says. “All of the information on adverse effects is readily available in the medical literature. The problem is it tends to stay within the profession and doesn’t get disseminated widely amongst the public.”

Kennedy’s imprint on vaccine panel grows

The new members join the seven others Kennedy named to the panel in June, replacements he handpicked after firing all 17 of the panel’s previously seated members. The replacements, who met for the first time at the CDC in June, include Dr. Robert Malone, who has spread misinformation about COVID and opposed vaccine mandates, and Retsef Levi, an MIT professor of operations management who gained prominence during the pandemic for criticizing COVID vaccines.

The members Kennedy fired had been chosen for their medical expertise and understanding of vaccine policy, and had been formally vetted to ensure that they would not directly financially benefit from any ACIP votes. They had been serving in overlapping rotations over several years to ensure continuity of expertise and process.

A group of medical experts that advise the CDC largely determine which vaccines people should receive, what gets covered by insurance and which shots are made available free of charge to millions of low-income children.

“There are large gaps in the new ACIP’s composition in terms of their missing expertise on vaccinology, their missing expertise on primary care, their missing expertise on cost effectiveness and clinical trials,” says Noel Brewer, a former ACIP member who had served on the committee for a year before being dismissed by Kennedy in June. “These are folks who fundamentally do not understand vaccines in a deep way. I wouldn’t take medical advice from them, and I certainly don’t think they should be setting policy for the United States.”

Since Kennedy overhauled the panel, the ACIP has seen major changes to how it operates, for instance voting to effectively ban flu vaccines with the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in their June meeting. The change was based on debunked claims without new scientific evidence of harms. This move, among others, has led top medical organizations and public health groups to question the integrity of the group’s advice.

“Misinformation, politicization of commonsense public health efforts, and sudden changes to federal vaccine guidance is creating mass confusion and diminishing trust in public health. As we head into another fall season sure to be marked by cases of flu, Covid-19, and RSV as well as the alarming reappearance of measles and pertussis, the stakes could not be higher,” the presidents of five professional medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians wrote, in a June op-ed in Stat News.

Many state vaccine laws are tied to ACIP guidance. Some states led by Democratic governors are starting to reduce their reliance on the committee over concerns that future recommendations may be based on “ideology and not science,” says Dennis Worsham, health secretary for the Washington State Department of Health, which has formed a vaccine policy alliance with California, Oregon and Hawaii.

Rob Stein contributed to this report

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