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When the FX show You’re the Worst premiered last summer, it made no attempt to disguise its premise. It’s right there in the title—embittered writer Jimmy (Chris Geere) and his new love interest, self-destructive P.R. executive Gretchen (Aya Cash)? They‘re the worst. You’re the Worst can trace its roots all the way back to Seinfeld and Archie Bunker, but a love story featuring two equally cantankerous people? That was something a little new. And one short year later, with Trainwreck the most popular rom-com of the year and shows like Difficult People and Catastrophe making waves online, You’re the Worst looks like it was at the front edge of a new love-story trend. A trend that might just save the dating world.
“I think that we’re, hopefully, exiting, or beginning to exit, a long, dark period of time where characters, according to the executives who pay for the shows, have to be quote unquote ‘likable,’” says You’re the Worst creator Stephen Falk. “I think [it’s] a complete fallacy and a misunderstanding of not only comedy, but of human behavior and the reality of humanity.” Last fall saw a rash of network rom-sitcoms such as Manhattan Love Story, A to Z, Marry Me, Selfie, etc., all of which failed to land with audiences and were promptly cancelled. Meanwhile, partially due to the lower-pressure atmosphere of cable television, You’re the Worst stuck around.
Jimmy and Gretchen, the embattled lovers at the center of You’re the Worst, do awful and hilarious things that run the gamut. They get blackout drunk, they do hard drugs, they steal cats, they’re rude to small children, they’re selfish, they’re thoughtless, they’re human. But you’re still rooting for them to make it because there’s just enough vulnerability in them for the dynamic to work. As Falk puts it, “We’re bringing our television writing a little closer to reality of human behavior and of human beings in general as being dark and damaged and fucked up and having bad motivations and terrible instincts and making mistakes and still yearning for connection.”
That connection seems even shakier as dating moves, increasingly, into the online realm of swiping left toward insta-rejection, which is why realistic romances like You’re the Worst may have the power to actually change the dating landscape for the better. Star Aya Cash, happily in a relationship for a decade, shared her relief over being out of the dating world. ”I just read that article, actually in Vanity Fair, about Tinder, and I was like, Oh my God. How horrible.”
And the romances depicted by typical rom-coms, she says, are contributing to today’s shaky dating scene. “We’re essentially exporting the idea that you can be perfect and you can be a nice supportive, wonderful human at all times, which is not realistic. Then people think that they’re terrible human beings because they are not living up to this fantasy that doesn’t exist.”
Her co-star Chris Geere thinks audiences are thirsty for something other than fantasy. “I really do think that people think differently about love these days,” he says. “It’s not ‘boy meets girl, something goes wrong, both of them mend their ways and live happily ever after.’ It’s not. Relationships are the hardest thing that two people will ever do. And so to explore that more, and give it some comedy as well, is something that I think people are craving.”
Like Trainwreck and its TV brethren Broad City and Girls, You’re the Worst feels fresh by including an unlikable female character. Gretchen is a fully formed woman who has a great career (“She’s good at her job when she wants to be or accidentally. I think she’s actually got a natural talent for what she does,” Cash says) and one of the more realistic friendships on television (“I feel like Lindsay could very easily be the star of her own show. That’s why you buy the friendship, because it’s equal”), and still manages to crash into a cop car while drunk and burn down her apartment in a vibrator fire. “There are now multiple examples of ‘women behaving badly,’ but they are out there, and we still like them and think they’re fun and funny and interesting people even if they’re not the typical female representations,” Cash says.
Geere, who is from Manchester, mentioned anxiety around playing Jimmy as his first big American role, and wanting to make him more likable as a result. But he managed to get over it. “I really don’t care about him being liked anymore. As long as he’s interesting.” As for Geere’s fear, that people would stop him on the street and call him out for being the worst? It hasn’t happened. “They find us funny, but they don’t say ‘oh they’re terrible people.’ No one person has said that, which is really interesting.”
But the bigger problem dogging You’re the Worst is, sadly, ratings. As Geere put it, “the ratings were awful,” and he credits critical response, positive word of mouth, and a late-in-the-game boost from streaming service Hulu for the show’s survival. Falk, Geere, and Cash all see the slow start as a chance to grow: “What I’ve found is that people either (a) haven’t seen it, or (b) are totally hooked,” Geere says. “There’s no middle ground, which is so flattering, really. And yes, not everyone in the world has seen it, but those that have, I think, are going to be in for this season. So hopefully, it can only grow from here.”
The best hope for You’re the Worst is the fact that American audiences are maybe a little more ready to embrace Gretchen and Jimmy than they were even a year ago. The show is much more fleshed out now than it was in its earlier episodes with Gretchen’s former party-girl friend Lindsay (Kether Donohue) and Jimmy’s PTSD-suffering roommate Edgar (Desmin Borges) stepping into co-leading roles and providing a necessary emotional counterweight to the dysfunctional lovers. But everyone is still dysfunctional in the same charming, relatable way that convinced us Amy Schumer could win over Bill Hader in Trainwreck, or that Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney could make a go of it in Catastrophe, or Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner at least deserve each other—if no one else—in Difficult People.
Even if You’re the Worst doesn’t survive past its second season—though it really should!—it will always have a place in TV history as the little show at the beginning of a revolution.
You’re the Worst Season 1 is available to stream on Hulu. Season 2 premieres on FXX Wednesday, September 9 at 10:30 P.M.
