A review of tonight's You're the Worst coming up just as soon as Uncle Nephew teaches me solar location…
It's great that You're the Worst is a show willing to experiment and do episodes where Gretchen and Jimmy become supporting characters on their own show, even at times yielding the spotlight to people we've never met before like the neighbors from “LCD Soundsystem.” But the thing about experiments is that sometimes, they're not going to work, as happened with most of “The Seventh Layer.”
As colorful characters on the margins of the story, Vernon and Paul have both added a lot to You're the Worst. (As I type this paragraph, I'm again laughing at Vernon warning everyone against seeing The Babadook.) Their respective enthusiasms for things that the regular characters (and Becca) despise offers a useful comic contrast, and they feel real enough in their limited screen time.
But building an entire episode in which they're the only two characters to appear (other than Lindsay's voice briefly popping up on speaker phone, much to her confusion) ultimately asked too much of a pair of characters who are more cartoonish than they're not. “The Seventh Layer” had its moments, like the two guys masturbating in front of the campfire in defiance of the awful sisters they were dumb enough to marry, but on the whole the episode felt like a joke stretched past its limits, and without quite enough dramatic meat (particularly for Vernon) to function like “Twenty-Two” and make you completely rethink how you feel about these guys.
I want the series to keep trying different things, and I'll admit to feeling sad in the brief window where it looked like Vernon was going to head for Mexico right away. If he vanished from the show altogether, I'd miss him. He and Paul both add value to the series. Just in smaller doses than “The Seventh Layer” provided.
What did everybody else think?