Lena Dunham nailed the messy TV woman. Now she’s in chaos mode

Our initial introduction to Meg Stalter’s Jessica, the tousle-haired heroine of “Too Much,” comes by way of a shriek and a mad late night dash. She’d like us to believe she’s on the verge of living out some swanky romantic fantasy, but a flashback to her recent past in New York tells another story.

It’s no o’clock in the morning, and an inebriated Jessica breaks into the basement apartment she recently shared with her ex Zev (Michael Zegen) to find him sleeping beside his new lover. She screeches, spills a river of curses onto them and sprints off, running her way out of one shoe while hanging on to the garden gnome she used to smash a windowpane.

“Too Much” creator Lena Dunham built her reputation on writing versions of women like Jessica, many of them conveniently gathered in one show. “Girls” aired for six seasons and evoked what it was like to be 20-something for Millennials — or, more accurately, what people imagined it was like to be young, wealthy and careless in New York.

Perhaps its most lasting bequest to television, however, is the messy friend defined by Dunham’s Hannah Horvath. Hannah is as entitled and narcissistic as the others, but slovenly in a way that, for some reason, made her seem . . . what’s the word? Authentic, maybe, in Hollywood’s definition of that term.

The years following “Girls” gave us one messy woman after another until the concept lost its transgressive thrill.

Now, TV is so loaded with running mascara and bird’s nest hair that it’s difficult to tell shows apart. That many of these so-called “messy” women are thin, wealthy and blonde doesn’t help: “The Better Sister” could be a spinoff of “The Perfect Couple,” which is about a family that might live just down the road from the troubled household on “Sirens.” Or was it “We Were Liars”? Who can be sure?

Jessica, though, is not a mess. She’s chaotic. There’s a difference. The 10 episodes of “Too Much” help us appreciate the division in terms. Messy women are a week-to-week affair; Phoebe, Monica and Rachel have all been a mess at one point or another on “Friends.” But the chaos bursting through Lucille Ball’s comedy on “I Love Lucy,” or driving Phoebe Waller-Bridge‘s title character on “Fleabag,” or Jennifer Saunders’ Edina Monsoon on “Absolutely Fabulous” is the stuff of legend.

Chaos spurs its agents to take risks, such as seizing control of a commercial shoot where the male director is ignoring the wishes of its extremely famous female star, despite that celebrity having demonstrated that she knows what she’s doing and what she wants. Bygone eras called this moxie; whatever you’d call it now, its fuel jets Jessica across the Atlantic to take a job in London with her hairless, loll-tongued doggie in tow.

Stalter is an excellent representative of chaos, as anybody who’s seen her as Kayla on “Hacks” knows all too well. She knows the rules of chaos, foremost that it can be embraced and maybe channeled, but never fully quashed.

It can also be incredibly organized, contrary to what the word implies. Messy drops dishes. Chaos juggles chainsaws, a handy talent to have when heartbreak sends you flying to a new country. Especially one where everyone thinks American female tourists are making a pilgrimage to the land of “Love Actually” or “The Crown.”

Jessica blows apart that assumption in her meet-cute with Felix (Will Sharpe), the scruffy, sexy emo musician she impresses by describing herself as “a ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ‘Prime Suspect’ rising.”

He shares that he’s always liked American things, including “The Simpsons,” Captain Crunch, and, oh yeah, OxyContin. “That’s American, right?” he asks. “Big fan of that.” Ergo, Felix is a flaming hot mess — which is fitting, seeing as, shortly after he drops Jessica at home, she accidentally sets herself on fire.

That’s not the worst of it. Jessica can’t stop stalking her ex’s new girlfriend on social media; making the pain burn more acutely is that Zev’s new love looks like a supermodel (and is played by one — Emily Ratajkowski) and has a moniker taken straight from some manic pixie dream girl generator: Wendy Jones.

There are some tremendously chaotic women featured in those previously cited shows. Meghann Fahy‘s Devon in “Sirens” is one of them, a whip-smart but damaged struggle case next to her sister, Milly Alcock‘s Simone, who comes undone from time to time like a real mess. But this dynamic shows us a common feature of that type. It can be easily cleaned up into some version of happily ever after.

Jessica’s chaos is in her skin, vibrating through her even when she’s not trying. People are always trying to contain it, to snuff it out, especially men like Jessica’s British boss Jonno (Richard E. Grant), a wreck with power (another common TV personality, but with a penis).

His reaction to Jessica is to announce one day that she’s “perfectly adequate to have around” before presenting her with a list of 10 behaviors to avoid from here on out, including admonishing her for “eating quite smelly lunches” and advising her against changing her shoes in front of people.

Felix is a more tender sort, comparing her to Paddington. Jessica says she can’t relate to the bear because the bear found his family and people who love him. But Felix knows what he’s talking about, because Paddington’s chaos is what makes him lovable.

(Netflix) Will Sharpe and Meg Stalter in “Too Much”

Through Jessica, “Too Much” rebuffs the trope Dunham helped create, both by expressly calling it out in a rebuttal to a dismissive football star her colleagues are trying to court and in subtler exchanges, like Felix’s Paddington comparison where he confesses, “There’s something about you that makes me want to take care of you.”

Jessica chides the footballer for calling her messy by way of flirting with her, explaining that it’s a diss that’s risen in popularity in the last five years. She cites an online tendency among women to wield the word as a tool of self-abasement — “I’m a mess, I choose chaos.”

“But would a man ever be told that he’s a mess? No,” she sustains.

“Too Much” doesn’t entirely abandon Dunham’s impulse to make her lead character an extension of herself, and if you’re not a fan of hers, this may be a barrier to entry.

In this case, it should not be, and I say this as someone who doesn’t particularly like Lena Dunham for a variety of reasons. It’s hard to forget that she threw Aurora Perrineau to the wolves in 2017, calling Perrineau a liar when she went public with her claim that a friend of Dunham’s sexually assaulted her. Or her flaccid, C.Y.A. apology — published in The Hollywood Reporter, no less — that she managed to make all about her. Or the lack of diversity on “Girls.”

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People can evolve, if only to make their work more marketable. This is a mercenary reading of the inclusion on display in “Too Much,” I’ll admit. It’s also not as kind as my true feelings; I appreciate the way it reflects London’s diversity better than “Girls” represents New York, starting with Sharpe’s casting as Jess’ love interest.

But Dunham’s smartest move was choosing Stalter to be this comedy’s voice. I may not like Dunham, but I am very much a Meg Stalter fan. She’s too bright for anyone to get in Jessica’s way, including the woman who wrote Jessica into existence.

An early scene establishes Dunham’s defter writing when, following her heartbreak, Jessica moves home with her sister Nora (Dunham), mother Lois (Rita Wilson) and grandmother (Rhea Perlman) to convalesce on the couch and watch “Sense and Sensibility” for the millionth time.

Theirs is a house full of chaotic women who are rough and honest to a fault, led by Perlman’s grandma Dottie, who isn’t above coming on to her granddaughter’s boyfriend. “So erotic!” she says of Zev, before waxing poetic about his smell.

This isn’t simply an American derangement, although the more people Jess meets through Felix, the more she realizes how little forces like her are appreciated. At a fancy reception held at an actual country estate — not at all like the shabby flat she’s rented in a complex with “estate” in its title — a snobby guest blithely mentions the fate of one long-dead wife who wasn’t buried with the rest of the family because of her “intensity issues,” a polite way of describing a chaotic woman of years past.

Then again, is referring to this so-called intensity as chaos impolite? Like Jess tells the sports star who’s negging her, she may be messy by the world’s standards, “but actually I’m a work in progress, because I know who I am and I know what I want, and I’m listening to myself.”

“Yeah, I guess I choose chaos,” she declares. “Or actually, you know what? Chaos chose me. Because I’m f***ing irresistible!” With that, Jessica storms off, all eyes fixed on her as she goes — especially ours.

All episodes of “Too Much” are streaming on Netflix.