When it comes to good serialized comedic storytelling, fourth seasons can be tough. First seasons are for introducing characters and plots and conflicts. Second seasons are the best seasons, because that's when shows really dive on into their own nitty gritty messiness and get to show us something new and special. Third seasons, you essentially get to build on a second season and bring it to some sort of breaking point. But fourth seasons? Fourth seasons, you've got to start over. Or at least you've got to redirect your characters, reconfigure your conflicts. Your characters should not be the same people with the same flaws and needs and brokenness after three seasons. Something has to have happened to them, for better or worse and often both, for the show to have any real narrative arc.
BoJack Horseman pulled this off very well this year. It had a shaky first season but became just a glorious gut-punch of a series in its second season, kept on pulling that thread in the third season, and left the titular character and a few others at absolute low points in their lives. BoJack is still one of my favorite shows and one of the best things on TV, but I was never under any illusion that Season 4 was going to be better than Seasons 2 and 3. And it wasn't. But it was still very good! They didn't just keep ramming their characters into rock bottom; rather, there was growth. There was change. There was still sadness and brokenness, sure, but it was a new sadness and brokenness, you know?
Veep pulled this off, too. Actually I don't think Veep really hit its stride until its third season, and then it was just this absolute force in its fourth and fifth seasons because of the groundwork laid out in its first three.
Oh, Silicon Valley. There's one I worry is floundering a little. It's still an enjoyable show, but man, it is the same show its always been! Like I even had to just check whether it had been on for three seasons or four, because they're all the same.
Parks and Recreation and The Office also lost a little something off their fastballs somewhere around their own fourth seasons. Parks rebounded, but leaned heavily on heart and late Obama era "anything is possible" feel-good-isms in its final years; The Office was just sort of all over the place and messy, but its own sheer weight was enough to keep it afloat even after Steve Carell left.
Anyway, all of this is to say, You're the Worst was in a tough spot entering its fourth season. Its initial central premise - that two genuinely terrible people not interested in pursuing a relationship were, of course, perfect for one another - hit an impasse in the Season 3 finale, when a marriage was proposed, accepted, and immediately called off in the span of, like, one on-screen minute. How do you rebound from that? For a while it looked like this whole season would be an extended "Gretchen vs. Jimmy" war. And that really could have been something! Gretchen and Jimmy are both terrible people - broken, and therefore understandable and easy enough to sympathize with, but terrible all the same - and so the show really could have made hay out of them trying to emotionally destroy one another. And that's sort of how things started out, sure enough. But then, halfway through the season, Jimmy and Gretchen just sort of made up. And where did that leave us? It left us watching secondary characters and tertiary characters just being dicks to people. That's fine, and there's even a version of this show where that's funny, where that's all we could hope for. But the second and third seasons really were very good! And they dove so much deeper than a show whose premise is "these people are assholes" really should have. Like imagine Always Sunny taking a deep, serious look at, say, Charlie's mental incapabilities. Or Dennis's completely fragile ego. That show has done these things, sure, but it's always been through a comedic lens. It's always from an ironic distance. You're the Worst has gone there, though, earnestly. "Oh, here's Gretchen, and she's deeply and horribly depressed. Here's Edgar, and he's got crippling PTSD from his time in Iraq. Here's Lindsay, so unhappy in her marriage that she's aborting her baby and cucking her husband under the guise of saving their relationship. But Season 4 took a breather, took a step back, and sort of just said, "look, these people just being total assholes to each other is funny enough." And that's too bad! You're the Worst had surprisingly become a legitimately great show. Now it's just another intermittently funny one.
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