Lena Dunham is no stranger to depicting abortion onscreen.
In Season 4 of Girls, Mimi-Rose (Gillian Jacobs) casually tells her boyfriend, Adam (Adam Driver), that she’s had an abortion. While her revelation leads to a larger argument, her initial statement offered a no-frills take on a controversial topic. (In 2016, Dunham also came under fire for comments about wishing she’d had an abortion, for which she later apologized.)
Now, Dunham continues to bring abortion to TV with her new Netflix series, Too Much. The abortion takes place in the show’s fifth episode, titled “Pink Valentine.” The name is a riff on the 2010 film Blue Valentine, which charts a relationship from its romantic beginning to its painful end. Fittingly, the episode follows suit, with Too Much‘s lead Jessica (Hacks‘ Megan Stalter) reminiscing on her eight-year relationship with her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen), during a ketamine trip.
While the buildup to the ketamine trip itself is a bit clunky, “Pink Valentine”s extended flashback sequence is an emotional wrecking ball. Jessica and Zev go from a pizza meet-cute and a loving relationship to hating and resenting one another. Zev, in particular, grows disdainful of Jessica, tossing her pink pillows when they move in together, bashing her love of reality TV, and reducing her anxieties about their relationship to nothing more than “sob stories.”
The entire episode re-contextualizes what we know about Jessica and her relationships before she moved to London. She’s not just the “crazy ex-girlfriend” archetype presented in episode 1, which saw her break back into her old apartment and scare Zev and his new girlfriend, Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski). That was admittedly not the best move, but there’s more depth and history to her than that freakout. We learn that Zev made her give up a dog they got together, which gives greater significance to her attachment to her current dog, Astrid — and to her current boyfriend Felix’s (Will Sharpe, The White Lotus) care for her. We also learn that the pair once dreamed of having kids together, and that at the end of the relationship, Jessica got an abortion.
Too Much‘s abortion storyline makes for a brutal breakup — but not how you’d expect.
During a particularly rough patch in her and Zev’s relationship, Jessica cheats on him and has unprotected sex with a production assistant she’s been working with. She gets pregnant, with Too Much heavily implying that the production assistant is the father instead of Zev.
A distraught Jessica prepares to tell Zev about her pregnancy, but when he comes home and berates her for sitting alone in the dark, she switches gears to an important but devastating question: “Do you still love me? At all?”
“I don’t know,” he replies.
“OK, well, I’m pregnant, so I guess I’ll go get an abortion or something,” Jessica says.
“Yeah, that’s probably the right idea,” Zev says.
The casual language — Jessica’s “or something”; Zev’s almost-flippant “probably the right idea” — disguises the intense emotions of the scene. There’s a lot of feeling bound up in Jessica’s statement, which comes through in Stalter’s raw dramatic performance. It’s clear Jessica wants this moment to be a bigger deal, one in which Zev’s love resurfaces enough to comfort her. After all, it was just earlier in the episode that he told Jessica’s family he thought she “would make an amazing mother.”
Her response? “I want to have kids with you.”
But that desire and love fades over the course of the rest of the episode, resulting in the short exchange above with Zev. The abortion marks a brutal bookend to those earlier talks about family, acting as a definitive end to the relationship.
Too Much joins other 2025 shows, like Ginny & Georgia and Adults, in depicting abortion.
While Too Much doesn’t shy away from the emotional baggage of the abortion, it also doesn’t stigmatize Jessica’s decision. Nor does it portray the actual procedure as dangerous or painful beyond Jessica’s sadness over her breakup. That there’s no hand-wringing or dilemma over the abortion itself recalls Mimi-Rose’s abortion in Girls, which notably did not show the actual procedure.
Any frank portrayal of abortion onscreen feels relevant now, as the Trump administration targets reproductive rights, including the right to an abortion. And Too Much is not alone in its representation of abortion in the current TV landscape. Earlier this year, Ginny & Georgia Season 3 took a long, thoughtful approach to Ginny’s (Antonia Gentry) choice to get an abortion, similarly not overdramatizing the procedure. Elsewhere, FX’s Adults tackled these issues from a different angle, introducing a teen character who’s traveled to New York in order to get an abortion, as she can’t get one in her state.
While these approaches range from the comedic to the dramatic, none of them come with judgment over the pregnancy or a character’s decision to terminate it. Instead, they’re crucial portrayals of a medical procedure that hundreds of thousands of women get per year in the United States. (In 2023, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that number rose to over a million.) In the end, these thoughtful depictions aren’t just plot points. They’re necessary reminders to viewers that abortion is a possibility, and — despite what the government may say — a human right.
