I've written a bit on You're the Worst over its run, but still have some thoughts on its just-ended second season. Read on for a mini-review below, and check out links to other writing I've done on the show at the bottom of this post.
After a fresh and funny first season, FXX’s excellent dating satire You’re the Worst went in a bold direction for its sophomore campaign. The series began as an anti-romantic comedy of sorts, wherein two jaded 20-somethings fell in love and couldn’t stop complaining about it. Over its first season, it grew into itself as an inventive, if still familiar, millennial comedy – the budding romance between Jimmy (Chris Geere), a low-level novelist, and Gretchen (Aya Cash), a snarky publicist, ranged from unconventionally sweet to outrageously funny. And as Worst began its second run, the series continued on that path: with Jimmy and Gretchen moving in together, new comedic angles and focuses were ripe for the picking.
But with great sensitivity and craft, creator Stephen Falk bucked expectations. For one thing, Gretchen’s emotional distance from Jimmy, initially a source of innocuous comedy, fed into a startling exploration of clinical depression. Though still witty and well-observed, You’re the Worst tilted into an entirely new arena, exposing the selfishness of its characters from dark new perspectives, and challenging them – and the audience in turn – to sacrifice throwaway comedy for the messiness of the real world. In the back half of its second season, the series underwent a tonal transformation.
That said, You’re the Worst remained steeped in its cynicism through the twists and turns; the story shift reflected a natural evolution rather than an abrupt departure. Gretchen’s character development was impressive for precisely that reason: by no means did it contradict the way the series had previously sketched her out. The first season’s embracement of narcissism transitioned into a meditation on its very limits. From that perspective, the new focus on Gretchen not only made narrative sense, but it also deepened and enlivened the show’s broader purpose.
Falk grew as a writer under the mentorship of Jenji Kohan, the mastermind behind Weeds and Orange Is the New Black. It’s hard not to consider her influence here. In both of Kohan’s groundbreaking series, artifices of sunny institutional satire – suburbia in Weeds, and women’s prison in Orange – were steadily overtaken by the thornier issues of, respectively, widowhood and the cycle of poverty. Her shows turned bleaker, more pointed – they emerged out of comedic shells to reveal the deeper ideas that had always lurked within. The journey of You’re the Worst is certainly comparable: hiding inside its exterior of ha-ha nastiness were harshly humanistic themes.
Throughout the second season of You're the Worst, Falk fleshed these ideas out. One standout episode thrived as a formal experiment, moving alone like a low-key indie short before settling back into the show's set parameters. It followed the mundane tribulations of a neo-hipster Los Angeles couple (with the husband played by Weeds standout Justin Kirk); Gretchen, like us, observed them in the background, fantasizing about their life until she inadvertently dug up its ugliness. Almost a metaphor for the show itself, the episode – titled “LCD Soundsystem” – presented an attractive image before forcing Gretchen to consider what was being covered up. And that wasn’t all: Falk managed a breathtakingly bonkers halloween installment, which alternated between trippy and tender, and a pair of episodes to close out the season that were as touching and genuine as anything that’s been put on television lately. (The phrases “You stayed” and “I love you, too” now stick on me like never before.)
The season wasn't quite perfect. As the dramatic content intensified, Falk and his team struggled to integrate humor as effectively – here was that rare comedically-inclined show that seemed more comfortable with the heavy stuff – and, even when they managed to do so, there was a feeling of laughs lost. A string of episodes in the second season were all but laugh-free, admirably but also suffocatingly focused on Gretchen. It’d be hard to blame an original fan for lamenting such a change in direction; though it soared to new heights, You’re the Worst has yet to fully recover its vicious comic bite.
Falk churns out pop-culture references better than anybody, though, and his ambitions finally met a successful balance by season’s end. The ensemble, from reliable regulars Edgar (Desmin Borges) and Lindsay (Kether Donohue) to promising newbies Dorothy (Collette Wolfe) and Amy (Mageina Tovah), clicked into place as it hadn’t for much of the season. And even when the ride was a little bumpy, the more varied material gave both Geere and Cash the opportunity to deliver gut-wrenching performances.
In this new era of television specialization, the opportunity to explore more “difficult” topics is yielding remarkable artistic rewards. You’re the Worst ended its second season in a relatively optimistic place, but it's still in limbo, feeling out its new depths and navigating the imposing terrain it’s laid out for itself. There’s no telling where the darkness will take it. Like many series out there right now, it’s insisting on placing comedy and tragedy side-by-side – on allowing its audience to recognize misrepresented populations as equally human.
That’s a goal worth getting behind. There were better shows in 2015, but few were as emotionally destabilizing as You’re the Worst. Through a season of character revelations and tonal breakthroughs, its audience was offered new modes of laughter, sadness and – most important of all – feeling.
Grade: B+
I reviewed “You’re the Worst” after its first season (read HERE), and also discussed its second season in an article on Millennial TV (read HERE).