April 17, 2019

You're the Worst: Season 5


Even after watching and generally enjoying five seasons I kind of hesitate to say I ever really found myself completely in sync with You're the Worst, a show whose tone was everywhere form irreverent to lewd to deeply dark and disturbing. Virtually every character on this thing was one-dimensional and deeply flawed, which is fine and it makes for good enough comedy and such, but it's tough to really know whether or not you're rooting for these people and their relationships, or whether their relentless self-sabotage is funny or tragic.

Anyway, this show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Broad City all aired their final episodes within nine days of one another, but unlike with those two shows, I'm not sure anyone from You're the Worst has anywhere to go from here. That's too mean, probably - they'll all continue to get work, I'm sure - but where those two shows felt like career launching pads, this one feels more like a comfortable enough place where a bunch of not-destined-for-greatness people spent five solid years. I mean, I liked You're the Worst, but that's all! I liked it. (I might have loved the third season, unless I'm thinking of the second one.)

Oh, one final nit to pick - I think this show was too willing to use non-vanilla sex stuff for laughs and too unwilling to take any of it seriously. That's not the worst crime by any stretch, but it felt a little "hey are we laughing at or laughing with, here?" if that makes sense. Like, in the pilot, the moment Jimmy and Gretchen finally hit it off at the end of the episode comes on the reveal that he has a big old foot fetish - and I think that's revisited maybe once in the rest of the series. In Season 3, Lindsay quite literally turns her sad husband into a cuckold, male chastity cage and all, because he's a witless doofus who thinks it can save their marriage (and not, importantly, because it's a mutually held kink they have that is saving their marriage). Here in the final season Gretchen gets Jimmy to eat his own cum and to suck another man's dick after he cheats on her, and Lindsay has a two-episode arc where she turns into a lesbian just so the show can have a scene where she's eating her female boss's ass at work. It's just kind of weird, in an era where even network shows are comfortably and confidently introducing bisexual characters and polyamorous relationships (looking at you, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), to have this late night cable series getting kicks out of... not quite kink-shaming, but like, letting various sex acts and situations be entire punchlines in and of themselves. Maybe it's just a tonal inconsistency thing. Like, sex can be funny, but if you're going to be the show that tackles crippling PTSD and excruciating depression in a serious manner, maybe don't also be the show that treats off-center sex acts as inherently comical.

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