Some Kind of Closure

Here we reach the end of my You’re the Worst rewatch, having gone through the previous seasons (S1, S2, S3, S4) in the build up to the finale. With Season Five now done and dusted once more for me, it’s time to look back at the series and see how I felt about all of it. What worked, what didn’t, if I felt like the show as a whole actually managed to be just as interesting and hilarious as I remembered. And in the end… I think I liked the earlier seasons better.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do like the later seasons just fine. They put a lot of focus on the characters and really get to the hearts of who they are. Each character goes on something of an emotional journey, from Jimmy realizing he wants to settle down, Gretchen wanting to try and improve herself and not just be broken all the time, Lindsay trying to grow up and be an adult, and Edgar figuring out how to work on his own and not be beholden to Jimmy all the time. But it also feels like, in the end, not much of that growth actually mattered.

Season Five of You’re the Worst is all about Jimmy and Gretchen getting married. They set a date (June 9th because, of course, 69) and they start preparing to join their lives fully to each other. Except each of them continues being, well, them. Jimmy end up getting a blow job from the florist he picked out, and then lies about it and tries to justify it by having a “fuck week” so Gretchen can cheat as well and balance it all out. That blows up, and then Jimmy has to make up for it, but it all goes to show that Jimmy hasn’t really grown at all.

And then there’s Gretchen who somehow lucks into a massive promotion at her job, hires Lindsay to work for her, passes her clients off, gets a new client, and then manages to blow up her whole career and flush it all down the toilet. But instead of telling Jimmy all of this, she hides it and pretends she didn’t do anything. Finally, when it does come out, he accepts her, but, again, it shows that she hasn’t really grown at all and everything she was working on (including talking to her therapist) she threw away and is, more or less, back to square one.

And she’s not the only one, Lindsay goes to work for Gretchen, throwing away that fashion job she had in the fourth season that she actually seemed good at. But then when she stands up for Gretchen to her boss (who, sidenote, she was also sleeping with) her boss fires her. And the show just… let’s that stand. Out of work she somehow falls back in love with her ex, Paul, who she divorced for good reason, but now it’s okay? Again, no growth, back sliding, everything they worked on was thrown out the window.

The whole fifth season feels like the show retracting, pulling back inwards because it doesn’t want the characters to grow or change. This despite the fact that the series spent four years slowly putting them together and letting them expand as well. There is a sweet montage at the end, showing the characters all moving on, with Jimmy and Gretchen starting a family and being good parents, but that feels like it runs counter to the whole storyline of season five, which ran counter to everything we saw before. It’s uneven and doesn’t work.

In fairness I didn’t have this reaction the first time I watched through the series, and that is, in large part I think, because I wasn’t binging the series. I may have binged the first season after everyone said it was great, but the rest of the time I watched the series slowly, week by week and season by season, keeping up with the characters as the show expanded outwards. But going back and binging it now highlights some real issues with the character growth which, if you didn’t track these characters over their lives in short succession, you might not notice as clearly.

I actually think the only character that got true character growth was Edgar, which is fascinating since he’s the one character that, for the longest time, I didn’t feel actually fit the show. Edgar has been growing as a person over the last two seasons, getting a job, settling down, being an adult. He’s good at what he does, and now that he’s found himself he has clarity and focus. He could be a success anywhere, even free of living with Jimmy. In the end he tries to convince Jimmy not to marry Gretchen, and it essentially ends their relationship, forcing Edgar to move out and move on and, frankly, that’s the best thing for him. He gets to be a better person, a more complete adult, than any of the people he’d been hanging out with for all these years.

So what does it say about the show that the one person that actually gets to move on in this series is the only one to break free of the whole friend group. Everyone else, from the lead characters to the side players like Becca, Vernon, and Paul, are all trapped circling each other, over and over, never to get free. Hell, even Gretchen’s clients, Sam, Honeynutz, and Shitstain II, end up hanging out with all the rest of the friends despite the fact that Gretchen was fired and is otherwise out of their lives. This friend group is a blackhole that prevents them from ever expanding as people.

The show even weirdly introduces storylines that don’t pay off. Gretchen gets herself fired, but that means that the growing feud between Sam’s rap group and new star Nock Nock never goes anywhere. It sort of ends on a cliffhanger, with Nock Nock about to usurp their power and become the new, hot talent at the PR agency, but we don’t see what comes of it because, once Gretchen gets fired, the show drops it altogether. It was an interesting plotline that I would have liked to follow, especially with Gretchen learning to balance both of these groups against each other so she could grow as a manager. But, there’s that word: grow. She couldn’t do that in the confines of the show, so firing her was easier.

Really, I’m quite annoyed at the way this whole season played out because it kind of ruins all the emotional and character growth that we’d gotten in the previous four seasons. And unlike with a show like Letterkenny, where it was pretty clear in that series last season they wanted to close a loop and keep the characters frozen in time, You’re the Worst doesn’t have that excuse. It reverts all the characters back to where they were, in effect, after the series premiere, but then also gives us a montage of them being grown ass adults. So which is it? What version of the characters were we supposed to accept and appreciate?

And even with all that I probably could have accepted it if the show were funny, but this last season leans hard into the drama portion of the “dramedy” category, and the laughs felt sparing and limited. This was a show that, in its first season, was uproariously funny and pretty dark, with unlikable characters that said mean, obnoxious, amazing things. You laughed with them and at them, but you laughed constantly. That was missing in this fifth season, replaced by motioning at emotional growth and connection that all got rolled back in the end. Whatever was supposed to happen here in place of the laughter it just didn’t work.

In the end, this last season, on rewatch, left me cold. I really enjoyed the previous seasons and, on the whole I still really do like this series… but I almost feel like it would be better to just skip the last season entirely and maybe, once the finale for season four has been watched, cut ahead to just the montage of the characters growing up and calling it a day. That’s a more satisfying conclusion than whatever fifth season was trying for, and it makes for a better series overall.

You’re the Worst can be great. It can be deep and wrong and interesting and funny. Many of those elements were on display in this fifth season, but that certain magic was missing. It feels like the series fell in love with the characters as they were instead of wanting to see them change and stop being the characters we knew. But you can’t keep characters locked in amber (not even on Letterkenny) and it does a disservice to this series that it felt like the show tried. Finales can be hard to write and, for You’re the Worst, if feels like the creative team didn’t nail it. Not once you go back and experience it all over again.