'You’re the Worst': One Of The Best

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment
Updated
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You’re the Worst proved to be one of the most amusing and unusual sitcoms to premiere last season, and Wednesday night’s second-season premiere lives up to its promise. The FXX comedy that follows the complicatedly ambivalent relationship between Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) is back in all its intelligent, vulgar vigor.

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You’ll recall that at the end of last season, Jimmy (a transplanted Brit who’s rather lackadaisically working on his second novel) and Gretchen (who’s rather lackadaisically managing a music act) decided to move in together. As the title of the show indicates, they’re not exactly head-over-heels in love, and most of the time they can barely define what their attraction to each other is, but it does exist.

The premiere finds them feeling pressure to maintain their party-animal lifestyle rather than settle into demure couple-hood. Show creator Stephen Falk has written another episode that mixes humor so low I can’t repeat a couple of punchlines with higher-culture visual gags such as Jimmy’s bedtime reading—Karl Ove Knausgaard’s literary sleeping pill My Struggle. There’s also a Jennifer Garner-Ben Affleck marriage gag that the author swears was written before that couple’s split, so Falk is also something of a prophet.

The poker-faced acting of Geere and Cash, along with their ability to deliver Falk’s sometimes intricate wordplay with aplomb, does a lot to convince a viewer that their characters are made for each other. As a supporting almost-couple, Desmond Borges’ Edgar and Kether Donohue’s Lindsay have distinctive comic rhythms — by which I don’t merely mean distinct from each other, but unique among TV-sitcom co-stars.

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Add You’re The Worst’s knack for inventing phrases that ought to enter the language — the premiere has at least three, my favorite being Jimmy’s term for a calm evening spent at home: “the yacht-rock of nights” — and this show is off to a very good second season.

You’re The Worst airs Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. on FXX.