In a 2015 episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls, a flustered Shoshanna stropped into a New York bar to tell her sort-of friends Marnie and Jessa about her nightmare week trying to find a job. “I just don’t understand why nobody tells you how bad it’s gonna be in the real world,” she whined. Marnie, already peeved that no one is taking her terrible attempts at a music career seriously, is having none of it. “Yeah, they do,” she deadpans. “It’s pretty much all they ever tell you.”
Channel 4’s It Gets Worse, a fitfully funny Channel 4 sitcom about professional Gen-Z crash-outs, is like that Girls scene but without the Marnie of it all. Instead of reflecting and subverting twentysomething clichés in the same instant – and hilariously, and by incredibly charismatic actors – it just lets them play out. Bad sex is had, shoddy flatshares are lived in, contemporary pop culture references are made. Lena Dunham herself makes a cameo, as if to suggest the passing of a torch. But it’s an unhelpful, and unflattering, comparison. It Gets Worse sometimes feels like a dozen Vogue relationship essays in a trench coat, or a series of loose gripes and observations in search of a TV show.
