In his 2023 standup special Literally Who Cares?!, Leo Reich bemoaned the fact that his life wasn’t more like a TV comedy. “All the sitcoms I watched as a teenager really made me imagine that being in my early 20s would involve a lot more navigating the dating scene in the big city,” he groaned. “And a lot less Googling the words ‘death toll’.” Reich was playing a caricature of a self-absorbed zoomer, who had taken up smoking during the pandemic because “some part of me decided it might be worth cutting 20 years off my life”. Behind this performance there was, of course, a rather big dollop of truth: life for gen Z has – for the most part – been less sitcom, more doom-filled rolling news bulletin.
Reich – now 28 – is a rare comic to land an HBO special, and now an A24/Channel 4 series, putting him in the ideal position to redress the balance with his very own sitcom. Like HBO’s I Love LA (spiritually gen Z, if written by a millennial, Rachel Sennott), it juxtaposes grossness with aspiration. And like Girls before it, it is helmed by a perfectly un-self-aware protagonist, Ethan (Reich), whom – we are told at the outset – has had “one of the easiest lives in recorded human history”. There are hints of Fresh Meat, too, and traces of Reich’s comedy hero Simon Amstell in its dry neuroticism and Jewish-themed LOLs. Sometimes, it verges on the satirical – as when Andrew Scott cameos as a hookup who offers Ethan free therapy as foreplay. (Ethan tempers his complaints by saying that at least he hasn’t “lived through Aids” – Scott’s character, Brian, snaps back: “How old do you think I am?!”)
