What to Binge This Weekend: Get to Know TV's Best 'Worst' Comedy
If you’re looking for the cure to the common romantic comedy, you can’t do any better — or should that be worse? — than You’re the Worst, the comedy series that FX launched last summer to much acclaim, if not as much viewership. But the network has shown itself to be lenient to underperforming shows if the critical buzz is there, so Stephen Falk’s portrayal of two A-holes in love (or something that approximates it anyway) is coming back for a sophomore run on Sept. 9. This season, the series will be airing on FX’s sister network, FXX, paired with veteran comedy The League, which is going into its final season. The two series actually make great partners; beyond the fact that they’re hysterical, they each follow awful people who do awful things to each other for our amusement.
The awful people in You’re the Worst are Jimmy (Chris Geere), a British author transplanted to L.A., and Gretchen (Aya Cash), a PR doyenne. The two meet ugly at a wedding thrown for mutual frenemy (and Jimmy’s ex), self-delusional blond Becca (Janet Varney). A hate-sex fueled one-night-stand follows, after which the two vow to go their separate ways. Except, they can’t. They like each other too much — and hate the fact that they like each other too much — to move on to making other people miserable. Besides, they’ve got friends to harass in the meantime; Jimmy treats his PTSD-suffering roommate Edgar (Desmin Borges) with barely-concealed disdain, while Gretchen rolls her eyes at her pal Lindsay’s (Kether Donohue) decision to marry a rich guy she doesn’t really like all that much.
The key to making a show like You’re the Worst work is that the central duo has to be likable in their unlikability. And that’s the trick that Geere and Cash manage to pull off in episode after episode, in large part by not winking at the camera in order to soften their characters’ awfulness. They fully commit to being rude, self-absorbed, and venomous, and because it’s clear that they’re on equal footing, we don’t view either Jimmy or Getchen as a victim. It’s a mutually destructive relationship that, strangely enough, makes them both better people. (You won’t realize how invested you are in their non-romance until an episode late in the first season where the relationship is derailed by a disastrous “meet the parents” session.) Trust us: You might watch the first episode of You’re the Worst and vow never to spend time with these twits again. But you’ll be back for more abuse — and laughs — before you know it.
The first season of You’re the Worst is streaming in its entirety on Hulu; Season 2 premieres on Sept. 9 at 10:30 p.m. on FXX.
