10 years ago, You’re the Worst debuted on FX. It was a half-hour comedy in a cable landscape littered with shows too niche for over-the-air broadcast, too edgy for CBS or without enough Danny McBride for HBO. It could have easily been ignored.
When it ended, it marked an exhaustive review of flawed people careening through the atmosphere like lost ions, crashing into each other to spark something greater.
Across five seasons and 62 episodes, Stephen Falk’s show was an examination of the things that break us and how faults lead us to break others. It was a look at modern relationships and adulthood in general for people locked in a state of arrested development. It was a hand extended to millennials who saw growth as an effort not worth making.
It was also extremely funny. Clever. Well-written. Revealing. Devastating. Take your pick, because You’re the Worst understood the burden of other people better than anything else on television.
It began with a wedding and ended with something approaching one. It stars Aya Cash and Chris Geere and Gretchen Cutler and Jimmy Shive-Overly, respectively, two late-20s-ish adults in Los Angeles who unite over shared feelings of contempt and horniness. Their gravity drags Lindsay (Kether Donahue) and Edgar (Desmin Borges) into their orbit. Behind them is a star studded cast of “where do I know them from?” recognizability, which we’ll address later because every role is played to perfect, lived-in and thoroughly annoying perfection.
The love story of Gretchen and Jimmy, a cluster of defensive apathy and too-intense sentimentality, drove the show across five seasons. And if that were it, it would still be a great comedy. Cash and Geere are magnetic as the kind of people you’d only want to ever hang out with 22 minutes at a time. Gretchen stumbles upward into a publicist job behind instinct, not effort. She has no quarter for impostor syndrome because that would require an amount of caring beyond her capacity. Jimmy is a novelist, insecure in his station in life but assured of his own genius.
From there, Falk filled in the blanks. Gretchen is detached thanks to overbearing parents, ready to bolt the moment things get difficult and prone to seeing connections where there are none. Her way to deal with the clinical depression inside her is to ignore it until it paralyzes her.
Jimmy strives for the approval of a negligent father and family who mocked his intelligence. He yearns to be the smartest person in the room no matter what, projecting a veil of confidence to cover the scared boy underneath. Unsurprisingly, each is absolute garbage when it comes to relationships until they find each other — two pit bulls, as Gretchen puts it, no longer looking to tear another dog to shreds but finally comfortable to just sleep on the couch together under the threat of mutually assured destruction.
But You’re the Worst shined because of its supporting cast. Donahue made Lindsay’s slow journey from trophy wife to functioning adult sympathetic while simultaneously occupying one of the funniest characters of the 2000s. Borges alternated between subservient and haunted before coming into his own as an adult.
Vernon (Todd Robert Anderson), Becca (Janet Varney) and Paul (Allan McLeod) were pitch perfect — and, notably, terrible — in their quirks and flaws. Brandon Mychal Smith, Darrell Britt-Gibson and Allen Maldonado served as the mirror to the inanity of Jimmy and Gretchen’s life from their place as the dysfunctional rap trio Gretchen manages, stealing scenes along the way.
Because I don’t have a better place for this, I’m just gonna drop this supercut here with the warning it, like pretty much every episode of the show itself, is wildly not safe for work.
You’re the Worst bled into my vernacular. It’s the reason I understand phrases like “trash juice” or “great fart, real poopy” or “new phone, who dis?” or “like a poor” or many other incredibly quotable lines. It was a show that made a war veteran’s haunted “I didn’t know it was a school” a running joke and it worked.
This all made the moments that stared into the abyss that formed these characters so meaningful. Season two reckoned with Gretchen’s depression in a realistic way foreign to television at the time. Her sadness isn’t fetishized or even obvious, with some exceptions. Cash played it perfectly, embodying the “scooped out” soul she’d taken over, shuffling between days with no sense of joy or distress and threatening to quietly but irreversibly destroy the relationships around her.
Season three gave Edgar’s journey deeper meaning, examining his combat-related post traumatic stress disorder with the exceptional episode “22.” It’s a look to the other side of the mirror, allowing us to peer into life without Jimmy and Gretchen at the forefront. It showcased Borges’ ability beyond the comic relief and supportive friendship he’d offered the first two seasons.
He gave us a man worn down to a nub but unable to prevent his mind from racing through every threat, real or (mostly) perceived until placing him at the brink of exhaustion. You can feel the static inside Edgar’s brain as you watch him struggle through a regular day.
Later that season, “The Seventh Layer” gave Paul and Vernon a spotlight episode to explore masculine roles within a family and male friendships. It climaxes by a campfire with an act USA Today’s standards and practices won’t let me describe on its website.
Oh, and Ben Folds shows up around season three, playing Ben Folds. It’s wonderful.
Ultimately, You’re the Worst succeeded because it understood people’s flaws and how they lingered under the surface, quietly navigating its hosts into hostile environments. Its characters were unpleasant at first glance, but 62 episodes gave us the opportunity to understand why they held others at arm’s length and sabotaged themselves as happiness approached. This wasn’t a Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia situation. These weren’t caricatures waiting to devolve into tropes over time. They were real people, albeit extreme versions of them.
The series ended with a frank discussion about self harm (over breakfast food, naturally) and a joke before a pitch perfect montage set to the Mountain Goats’ “No Children” wrapped it the only way it could have ended. Broken people bounced off one another for years until something wound up fixed; maybe briefly, maybe forever. You’ll never understand just how long, if ever, it takes to undo all the things that messed you up in the first place. You won’t know what the day brings until you wake up the next morning.
That was You’re the Worst’s thesis. Across five years, we saw flawed characters slowly work to improve themselves, never in a linear pattern but eventually getting there. There was hope in a series predicated on beating DUI checkpoints, hooking up with randos, doing cocaine and stealing poorly disguised Google Earth cars. It was a show that understood the human condition and hid it under layers of people you recognized, but didn’t necessarily want to hang out with.
Jimmy and Gretchen were supersized versions of the parts we ignore when taking stock of ourselves in order to feel better. In the end, they weren’t fixed. They were merely better.
It was perfect.
