A quick review of tonight's “You're the Worst” coming up just as soon as GQ calls my style “courageously headachey”…
The writers and Aya Cash have done a wonderful and nuanced job of exploring Gretchen's clinical depression, but I also don't exactly blame some fans for feeling like commenter K21 on last week's review, who admitted, “I kinda miss the days when You're the Worst was 'just' a hilarious comedy about a bunch of horrible people.”
“A Right Proper Story” tries to shift back into comedy mode without undermining the darkness and sincerity of the Gretchen story arc. It succeeds at this in part because Gretchen spends much of the episode hiding under a blanket, with Cash somehow hitting the sweet spot where Gretchen's various Leave Me Alone faces are funny but not making her condition seem any less dire. With her on the sidelines, the focus is more on Jimmy coming to grips with the tacky, obnoxious father and sisters – as Lindsay puts it, “Alabama English people – who helped make him the preening, pathologically needy human who stands before us today. And even that story eventually merges with the Gretchen arc, when Jimmy's father reveals that Jimmy's mother was very much like Gretchen, and encourages him to seek happiness with someone else, like perhaps Nina the friendly bar owner, who's already acting like Jimmy's girlfriend when she eagerly listens to the family stories Gretchen couldn't handle.
Both Edgar's time with Jimmy's sister Lily and Lindsay's stint as Sam's muse and featured singer got a bit short-changed, since the episode had to spend so much time establishing the awfulness of Jimmy's other sisters. (I particularly enjoyed Fiona's meltdown at realizing how much better a Whole Foods-type grocery store is to the one where she works.) But any chance to hear Kether Donohue sing – here turning “New phone who dis?” into the perfect hook for Sam's new diss track – is welcome, and I was glad that the Edgar story didn't steer into Lily throwing herself at him and causing problems with Dorothy.
But Chris Geere was wonderful, first at portraying Jimmy's exasperation at having to be around these terrible people, then his more profound emotional reaction to his dad's relative praise of his novel. Cash has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting of late, but we saw last year that Geere could also pivot well from broad comedy to more complex emotion.
What did everybody else think?