For the worst but in better
You’re the worst
Serie. Stephen Falk’s engaging and unkempt creation returns for a fifth anf final season. And if this discreet series was the best romantic comedy on television ?
By Julien Lada
As in many romantic comedies, Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) meet at a wedding. He is a failed writer who survives thanks to his articles in low bracket magazines and come to take revenge on the bride who dumped him few years ago. She is the manager of a dyfonctionnal rappers trio and reluctantly accompanies the bride sister. Suddenly, while he is being rejected from the reception and she is escaping from it with the spouses gifts, “this is the love at the first sight”…
“Through a timeless word-of-mouth, Stephen Falk's series has, over the years, built a solid reputation and took a full advantages of rave reviews.”
You’re the Worst, Stephen Falk s’creation, scenarist who has also contributed on Weeds and Orange is the New Black, arrived in 2014 on tiptoe on the prestigious FX (before being aired on FXX for the season 2). Through a timeless word-of-mouth, Stephen Falk’s series has, over the years, built a solid reputation and took full advantage of rave reviews.
We might wonder if this serie did not recreates the romantic comedy while the business is in a commercial and creative impasse that seems to be insoluble. We note that the situation is improving since Netflix, and other platforms invested in this genre. However, the series aligns almost all the elements of the classic romentic comedy : an uninterrupted continuation of “Follow me I run away/ Run away from me I follow you, sidekick-confidants bringing a comic value, an immoderate taste for contemplative soundtrack… and a slew of sociological incongruities that the spectator accepts without flinching on conventions. As in a film with Hugh Grant, Jimmy lives in a luxurious home far above his means as an old-fashioned writer. Gretchen, manages a rap group whose popularity will never be measured…
It is precisely because Stephen Falk and his team of writers master perfectly the code of the genre that You’re the Worst works. It never deviated or tried to tell something else. Even his trashy appearance, made of sex, alcohol and nihilism, turns out to be a facade. You’re the Worst is above all a great melancholic series on the fear of commitment in the contemporary world. Is it still possible to live a stable relationship when you are concerned by insecurity ?
Love, aired on Netflix was also auscultating this lovingly confused generation. But the diagnosis of You’re the Worst is deeper. It accapets the idea that we can hate a couple and evenmore the loneliness rather than arbitrate in favor of one or another. As falsely cynical as his characters, Stephen Falk’s creation makes everyone laugh, annoys sometimes and moves often. The series points out the deep unease of a generation that ends up rejecting the world in which it does not feel accepted.
