I’m Gonna Leave You Anyway

It’s been a while since we last discussed You’re the Worst here on the site. I covered its final season back when it first aired in 2019, but that was a small slice of the show. I’ve wanted to come back and review all of it, but as with any show, I needed time away first so that my time through the series would feel fresh and interesting. You’re the Worst is a (very dark) comedy and comedy relies on surprise. I needed to forget everything about the show so that when I came into it I could get shocked and forced to laugh properly all over again. So now, five years later, it’s been enough time that I can legitimately sit back and enjoy the series.

And, yeah, wow, these people are terrible. I don’t mean that in a bad way, mind you. The main characters are generally quite awful, self-centered and egotistical and jerks to everyone. That is all true. But there’s a refreshing honesty to the show, seeing these messy, fucked up people living messy, fucked up lives, and understanding where they came from. Horrible as they are, there’s also a likable quality to them that sucks you in. It makes you want to spend time with them because they’re the only real people in their story. And then, over time, you slowly learn that everyone is awful all the time and our leads are the only ones tuned into it. I really dig that a lot.

We first meet Jimmy (Chris Geere) at the wedding for his ex-girlfriend, Becca (Janet Varney), an event he went to simply to heckle and trash it. He gets up and cuts in on the bride’s dance, saying some rather nasty things to her before getting thrown out of the reception. He end up sitting on the street near Gretchen (Aya Cash), the best friend of Becca’s sister, Lindsay (Kether Donohue). Gretchen is a drunk, party girl who actually stole one of the presents from the reception (although not any of the good ones). There’s a spark between her and Jimmy and they end up going back to his place. They have sex, chat, have more sex, hang out, have even more sex, and then end up sleeping in his bed despite Jimmy telling her to get out. And that’s how she ends up spending the night.

From there, she just keeps hanging around. Jimmy is a writer struggling to create his next book, so most of the time he ends up hanging out with his roommate (who also cooks and cleans instead of paying rent), Edgar (Desmin Borges), playing video games and avoiding doing actual work. Gretchen works as a publicist for a rap trio which mostly involves her day-drinking and avoiding doing actual work. The two of them together have laughs while they slowly realize they’re both perfect for each other and absolutely are afraid of commitment. They’re cycling around each other, and the self-destructive patterns of their lives, are the meat of the stories for the show.

The trick with You’re the Worst is that while the characters are rude they aren’t unlikable. Jimmy, for starters, it’s a prick, but he’s a brutally honest prick. He doesn’t know how to be kind or circumspect with people. Hell, he hates it when people are like that with him. So instead he tells them exactly what he’s thinking, no matter if it’s nice or not. He doesn’t care about their feelings generally because he doesn’t care about people. But then when he does care about someone he reveals himself to actually be a decent person, by a certain point of view, at least to those around him. His dynamic is interesting.

Gretchen is, somehow, an even more flawed person than Jimmy. Gretchen, as we eventually learn, didn’t intend to be a publicist (even if she’s not actually that bad at the job when she actually tries). She was another publicist’s assistant and, when he was nowhere to be found and lead rapper Sam (Brandon Mychal Smith) needed assistance, Gretchen accidentally stepped in and did such a good job she got the trio as her client. All she meant to do was sit around with her best friend, Lindsay, doing coke, drinking, and fucking but then she got responsibilities and, well, she hates it. Jimmy gives her a taste of something different, a place where she can be herself without expectations, and she loves it even as she realizes that means she’s sort of settling down. Watching her struggle with what she wants and what she wants to run away from adds a lot of depth to her own character.

These are our main leads but, I have to admit, it’s costar Kether Dnonohue that really steals the show. Lindsay isn’t any better than Gretchen and, in fact, may be an even worse person. She rushed into getting married to Paul (Allan McLeod), a man she frankly doesn’t much care for, and then spends her days lamenting the party girl life she used to have (and slowly creeps back towards having again without Paul). She’s a huge disaster of a person and she should be unbearable to be around, but Donohue makes her so watchable. Her performance is amazing, with comedic timing and line deliveries that steal every scene she’s in. She’s really the perfect compliment for the series and the show wouldn’t be the same without her.

Edgar, the fourth of the set of characters, is maybe the least defined by season one’s end. He’s a legitimately nice guy who hit a rough patch months earlier when he got back from Afghanistan. A war vet with PTSD, Edgar was living on the streets when he met up with Jimmy, someone that used to buy pot off of him, and he ends up living with his friend. Thing is, Edgar is legitimately too nice, and not fucked up enough, to be in this group. It’s harder to understand why Edgar is here, at least in this season, when he has to realize how terrible everyone else is. It takes time for Edgar to get worked into the ensemble better, but I didn’t really feel it here, not the way the show clearly expected.

What’s interesting, though, is that around this group you realize so many other people are just as awful. It’s not that anyone is especially bad, just that everyone has their moments when they’re not at their best and they have to try to hide it. Becca is a stay-at-home wife who struggles with her marriage and her husband, and it’s pretty clear that, like her younger sister, she rushed into her own marriage and isn’t sure she’s truly happy. Becca’s husband, Vernon (Todd Robert Anderson), is a doctor at the top of his field, which would be great if he weren’t also still a drunken frat boy at heart who struggles to take his life, his work, or his relationship seriously. And Paul seems like an okay guy, but he’s super bland and clearly a bad fit for Lindsay, and, worst, may be having some kind of relationship behind her back.

What this really illustrates is that while our lead quartet seems like not the best people (even Edgar, considering he used to deal drugs and live on the street) everyone is basically a bad person deep down. From a certain perspective you could say that Jimmy, Gretchen, Lindsay and, yes, even Edgar are the only real people because they don’t have the time or desire to hide who they are from everyone else. Everyone has a bad side to them, they just present it front and center and say that you have to accept them for who they are if you want to be around them.

I wouldn’t call You’re the Worst a challenging show. It’s light and breezy and fun to be around. It’s a hang out show, like Friends, but also the exact opposite of Friends because it lets its trash fire characters burn openly and in public. If you can handle them at their worst you’ll enjoy them because these are legitimately fun, real characters that are hard to ignore. You just have to realize they suck and that’s okay.