A quick review of tonight's “You're the Worst” coming up just as soon as I burn Charles Dickens…
Okay, so I was wrong last week in assuming that Gretchen was bailing on Jimmy and the relationship altogether. Instead, it appears she's regularly disappearing into the night, for reasons we're not yet privy to, and now Jimmy has observed her comings and goings. So it's a mystery. Hmm…
As for the rest of “We Can Do Better Than This,” it had a nice balance of material for all four leads, particularly Jimmy again grappling with the limitations of his own talent, before realizing that the erotica(*) he wrote when he was 11 was the way out of his creative rut. But Gretchen and Lindsay's struggle to find something meaningful to discuss (while making the poor fro-yo shop cashier's life miserable) was amusing, and the introduction of Collette Wolfe as Edgar's improv teacher and potential love interest makes the ongoing Edgar/Lindsay tensions a bit less sad on his part.
(*) A funny coincidence (which I confirmed with Stephen Falk), especially since both shows employ Stephen Schneider in a recurring role: the special brand of lube that Jimmy orders for his night of self-pleasure is Shinjo, which was the same brand name for the strap-on that Jeremy gave Abbi last season on “Broad City.” (Go enjoy Ilana's reaction to this news. I'll wait.)
I like how the show is having its cake and eating it too with all the improv material, which on the one hand is (like the “BoJack Horseman” arc from season 2) making fun of some of the more easily mocked aspects of improv culture (starting with the name of the group: Hey, Put That Down, Brian), even as Jimmy realizes these guys are much more talented than he is, to the point where they happily agree to punch up his list of written heckles. (Which was itself a nice callback to last season's Sandra Bernhard episode.)
Add in a bit of meta mockery about Falk's past life as a Television Without Pity recapper, a cascade of frighteningly real corporate doubletalk in Jimmy's meeting with the novelization executives, and Lindsay (complete with eyeglasses and a scarf) struggling to reconcile right- and left-wing news coverage of current political issues, and you've got a winner.
What did everybody else think?