FX’s You’re the Worst is a half-hour romantic comedy series that rises above the tropes it presents and confuses you with how likable it is.
The characters should be some of the most unwatchable people imaginable. The romantic leads are Jimmy, a British ex-pat author with a superiority complex, and Gretchen, a snarky PR executive with an infrequent coke habit and recent DUI. After meeting at the wedding of Jimmy’s ex-girlfriend, the two begin a reluctant relationship despite both being anti-commitment and anti-romance. The main cast is evened out with Gretchen’s best friend, trophy wife Lindsay, and Jimmy’s roommate, immature war veteran Edgar.
While all of these people and the premise itself should be extremely annoying, by the end of the first season it’s hard to deny that you love all of them. What You’re the Worst achieves where others have failed is presenting cynical Gen-Xers with a rom-com about terrible, selfish people who are watchable, likeable, and capable of genuine relationships. Jimmy and Gretchen are two people who hate the idea of love but eventually succumb to a relationship because of how undeniably compatible they are. They lead a show for jaded people who hate the idea of a rom-com but give in to how much they love it because of how undeniably genuine it is.
The second season opens with Jimmy and Gretchen living together, a setup that threatens to upset the show’s balance by moving away from the will-they-won’t-they thematic focus of season one. What season two has managed to do so far is tackle questions of the rom-com genre and of relationships themselves.
One episode takes on the elephant in the room of most romantic comedies, that being: “Why don’t these people have any other friends?” Gretchen hosts a party to reunite her “girls,” only to realize that they have drifted apart for a reason—everyone has either become a boring mom or taken the party lifestyle to a deadly extreme. In the same episode, Jimmy adamantly argues that he doesn’t need friends, only to realize that the party is populated by his friends at every turn, from the tween neighbour he hired as the party’s bartender, to his ex-girlfriend’s obnoxious husband who invited himself. It’s a terrific episode that addresses the need for friendships outside of romantic relationships, while balancing the difficulties of knowing when to give up on a friendship and when to accept that the odd people you’re surrounded by are actually your friends, like it or not.
In one of the most recent episodes, Gretchen and Lindsay become hyperaware of how much of their time together is spent talking about the men in their lives. In an impassioned and failing attempt to find other topics of discussion, Gretchen suggests, “Can we shit-talk other women we know?” By the end of the episode, their brief project to talk about serious topics is dropped, and they settle back into watching Real Housewives and complaining about Lindsay’s ex-husband’s new girlfriend (she posted an Instagram photo of herself doing sign language interpretation for a Beyoncé concert.) This casual takedown of the Bechdel Test works because You’re the Worst has already established that these women are intelligent, mostly competent, and pretty good friends to each other, despite also being kind of the worst. You’re the Worst asks if you can be a mean gossipy girl who talks about boys and makes fun of people, but still be a good person.
One of the best recurring jokes of recent episodes starts when Lindsay’s ex-husband Paul declares that “Love is putting another’s needs above your own,” to which Lindsay immediately responds “Ew,” much to Paul’s distaste. His line is then repeated through the grapevine to Gretchen and Jimmy who separately give the exact same monosyllabic response. It’s a simple, dumb joke that gets funnier every time, and also legitimizes why these people have stuck with each other. As sad as it is, friendships often feel most real when you hate the same things, and what is noticeably real in You’re the Worst is that the characters hate the idea of love, but really love each other.
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