Don't be fooled by the binge-drinking, brutal putdowns, inventive sex slang, foul-mouth rappers, and free-floating hostility. There's no programming on television at the moment that believes more deeply in the redemptive power of love than You're the Worst. The L.A.-based FXX comedy, which returns tonight for its third season, tells the story of Jimmy Shive-Overly (Chris Geere), a narcissistic and struggling English writer, and his relationship with Gretchen Cutler, a self-destructive music publicist for the scene-stealing rapper Sam (Brandon Mychal Smith). Also in the mix are Gretchen's equally terrible best friend Lindsay Jillian (Kether Donohue) and Edgar Quintero (Desmin Borges), the most sweet-natured character and an Iraq War veteran that lives with Jimmy and thus constantly puts up with his verbal abuse.

But as terrible as the characters can be, You're the Worst stays focused on what makes them human and relatable, never more so than a plot line last season that found Gretchen suffering from clinical depression and Jimmy refusing to accept that he can't make her snap out of it. That You're the Worst manages to be one of caustically funny shows around while also being one of the most romantic (without spoiling things for those who are still catching up, the last scene of the second season is stunning in its unguarded sincerity) is a testament to creator Stephen Falk, a veteran of the Weeds and Orange Is the New Black's writer's room.

Based on the episodes made available to the press, the third season looks to get just as weighty as ever, with Gretchen beginning therapy and Edgar's struggles with PTSD intensifying. But while his show is as unflinching as ever, Falk tells Esquire that he remains a hopeless romantic at heart.

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So you start this season off with a bang, literally. By which I mean the most graphic sex scene you've done yet. Why waste time, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Look, everyone likes watching good-looking people do it. But more to the point, I think that... we had a serious second half to the season last year, and I think it was appropriate and nice and necessary to do something like that, starting off Season Three.

So this is your third season. Do those sex scenes get any less awkward for the actors to shoot and for you to be on set for?

I think the actors are a little more comfortable with each other. They're all really, really good friends. They have text chains constantly going and they visit each other. And the spouses are all happy and they all like each other, so I think for them it's a little easier. People always talk about the awkwardness of having a crew, a bunch of dudes and ladies, standing around watching you do it, but for me, the worst part is... sex is not very precise, and I kind of like precision in my blocking and choreography and where I'm putting the camera. For me it's less exciting in that way, not so much the sexuality of it. Though I do see myself in dailies looking away if I'm on camera, or adjusting the pillow. I'm very uncomfortable on behalf of everyone. They're probably more comfortable with it than I am.

FX Networks

You mentioned that last season you delved into some heavy topics, as Gretchen started dealing with clinical depression. There were parts, including much of the "LCD Soundsystem" episode, where it didn't even seem like you were going for laughs at all. As a person whose show is billed as a comedy, do you feel like you're getting away with something when you put trying to be funny aside? And what was the idea behind these storylines?

Am I getting away with something? Probably, in a way. I think television is heading towards a place where the lines between comedy and drama are blurred. And really, they are already. M*A*S*H was very dramatic. There were episodes that were not funny at all. I think there's a lot of really good examples of that from the '80s as well. I think nowadays the lines are becoming even more blurred. The half-hour shows should be competing in dramas, and a lot of the hour shows are competing in comedies for awards. I think the walls are starting to come down. So for me, it just feels like I'm a beneficiary of the work a lot of other showrunners have done to break down those barriers. Those labels are less interesting than the space they occupy on a schedule. That is starting to erode now. There is no schedule, particularly with Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, and really even with cable and basic cable shows. I don't know when anything is on. And I'm 44. We just had a 13-year-old niece visit, and I was grilling her on her TV habits. She was at one point watching Big Brother on her phone, and I was like, "Do you even know when that's on, or what network?" and she had no fucking idea. All those labels are going away on their own whether we want them to or not, and you can ride the wave or try to resist.

I have such goddamn good actors that to not utilize the full range of their capabilities would be just stupid on my part.

And then, in terms of why I did it, a lot of reasons. One, I have such goddamn good actors that to not utilize the full range of their capabilities would be just stupid on my part. And then moreover, it's a story we really wanted to tell. We wanted to tell the origins of this broken character. If not her full origin, at least a version of an exploration into why, and to have the ability on FX to do a stylistic experiment—and that episode very much was—I directed it and we used handheld camera, which we rarely do, it featured actors we had never seen before for the first four minutes of the episode. It was very exciting, and it felt like something that would keep us all interested and further the breadth of storytelling on our show.

The idea that we need to talk more about mental health has been going around for the last couple of years, but yours is the first show that I can think of that really addressed it head on in this way. What has the response been? Were people mostly happy, or did you have a contingent online pointing out what they thought was wrong?

I would say overwhelmingly, probably 99 percent of either messages I've gotten—I have a dumb little website where people can leave me messages—or just reading Twitter messages has been really positive. I remember reading maybe a handful of "that's not it at all, you're making it seem like depression makes you crazy and steal puppies and children," and that is going to be expected. If you're not pissing someone off, you're not trying. But moreover, for a touchy subject like this, we deal with mental illness, we deal with PTSD, there's no way to represent everyone's experience. That's impossible, and it would be a foolish attempt.

FX Networks

It's funny with Edgar. I've described the show to people and said, "...and there's a character that has PTSD and used to be homeless," and people ask, "This is a comedy?" "Yeah, you just have to watch it." How do you make a subject that should be terrible and make it funny?

I don't think his struggle is particularly hilarious. And this season we're going to go different places with it. This season what we're shining a light on in a satiric way is, by having two narcissistic characters—or really three—completely dismiss and not be interested at all in his struggle and find it weak, and weird, and uncomfortable... To me that's just a mirror in which culture, and particularly popular culture, really, really has a blind spot to the plight of veterans, particularly young veterans, in this country. I think it is fun to be able to derive laughs out of this, but I think at the end of the day, I hope that people take a closer look and go, "Oh my God, I'm laughing at this, but there's something very wrong here." And we go further than just the jokes. We continually show his struggles with the VA, and medication, and with having a relationship with someone who hasn't been there and doesn't understand. We're exploring that a lot this season, and hopefully showing that although we are a comedy, we take this shit very seriously. It's a struggle and a cause that I care a lot about.

At the end of the day, I hope that people take a closer look and go, "Oh my God, I'm laughing at this, but there's something very wrong here."

So backing up a little bit: You left Orange Is the New Black to do this. What made you decide to leave one of the most popular shows around to do your own thing, and had this idea been percolating in your mind for a while?

I worked with Jenji Kohan, the creator of Orange Is the New Black, for four seasons on Weeds, and in-between Weeds and Orange, I had a failed NBC mid-season show. So she graciously offered me a job on this new lady prison show from those red envelope people. It hadn't really been a thing yet as a streaming service. I kind of resisted, because I'd had my own show for a brief moment and it felt like going backward. And I didn't know what Orange was going to be, but I trusted Jenji, and I love Jenji. So I did that, so I went to work on second season of Orange before the first season had aired, and before it became this massive, massive, international hit. During that time I had a pitch for You're the Worst to FX, and they ordered the pilot, so while I was working on Orange, I was writing and ultimately shooting the pilot of You're the Worst at the same time. It wasn't a real decision to leave. She was renting me for a season. And it would had been more if You're the Worst hadn't gone forward.

As for the idea itself, it had been percolating for a long time. It was sort of on my list, as just one line on my voluminous list of TV ideas. Most of them really, really half-baked and crappy. This wasn't crappy, but it was half-baked. I really liked the show Mad About You when I was in high school, and I was a big fan of British sitcoms. They get away with having unpleasant characters. They do away with this idea of likability, that the minute you show your character doing something human that the audience is going to turn off from them. So it was really this idea of doing an English-y, boozy version of Mad About You about a couple of shitheads.

It was really this idea of doing an English-y, boozy version of 'Mad About You' about a couple of shitheads.

At its core, it really is a sweet, romantic show about two characters that would probably gag at that sort of description. Do you feel that to get the modern, cynical audience to enjoy an earnest love story, you have to pile on disgusting sex jokes in order to make it palatable to people?

Good question. I don't think so, but you may only reach a Nicholas Sparks-ian audience. I guess I would say that I feel like the cyclical nature of film storytelling is such that there was an end point to the rom-com as we knew it. It was not something I hastened. Well, maybe I hastened it in TV. But it was something I was aware of. As a big fan of romantic comedies and a big softie by nature, nothing had moved me in years in the movies or on TV. How I Met Your Mother had its romantic moments. It just felt like we had gone past it as a culture, I guess.

This was the next logical iteration, I think, but I honestly think it's less about crudeness, and more about honesty. I don't treat my character's behavior as good or laudable. I think they're dicks, in a lot of ways. If I was in a movie theater, which I am often, and people were eating food and talking loud and drinking beers right next to me, I would be completely frustrated, and I would try to get them kicked out immediately. I don't think any of this is cool. I don't think that letting someone live with you and then treating them like shit is a nice thing to do. I think it's human, and I think particularly the way we engage in romantic relationships, and the way that we meet and have sex immediately because we're drunk or bored or cynical in that moment about love or desperate and then the way that we get scared and run away and run into the arms of other people and don't like their choice of restaurants and question the whole thing and are secretly still seeing some guy on the side... We do all this. I just don't think that the companies that paid for these things allowed that to happen, and I don't think the creators were strong enough to stand up to them and say, "Trust me, the audience will see themselves in this." I think all those things go into this.

So I'm friends with everyone at Stereogum, and I wanted to let you know they appreciated the shout-out last season. I was wondering if you've gotten any response from the various musicians you name check on the show, such as Sufjan Stevens or Young Thug? You have a character based on Tyler, The Creator and you named an episode "LCD Soundsystem." What's the reaction been?

I've heard that Tyler, The Creator was aware of the show and was tickled at the idea of a character based on him. Or partially based on him. I don't know specifically if he's watched it, or what he feels about it. We do get music industry people who like our show. Our make-up artist just did a Tegan and Sara video, and they're massive fans. I had Ben Folds on this year, and he was incredibly lovely and wonderful. As a big music nerd, my hidden agenda by making a character a music publicist is to get to meet some of my heroes. And I'm psyched that the Stereogum people liked the shoutout. That's great.

Michael Tedder Michael Tedder has written for Esquire, Stereogum, The Village Voice, and Playboy, and is the founder of the podcast and reading series Words and Guitars.

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