When the series began, “You’re the Worst” had an anarchic, subversive streak. Sure, music publicist Gretchen (Aya Cash) and novelist Jimmy (Chris Geere) were wildly self-absorbed and willing to use the people around them, particularly Edgar (Desmin Borges), the combat veteran with a heavy case of post-traumatic stress disorder who’d taken up residence in Jimmy’s house. But they, and the show around them, were so charming, and the show was so visually lovely and so densely packed with good jokes that you wanted to spend time with them anyway. The people who were supposed to be “the worst” had in fact become the core of one of the best comedies about a youngish group of friends anywhere on television, a show that also happened to be sharp about depression, veterans’ issues, sexual compulsion and professional failure.

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But in its fourth season, something’s flipped. “You’re the Worst” has acquired a moralistic streak, and not for the better. Now, rather than luring us into what would be the actual hell of being friends with this crew, “You’re the Worst” seems determined to punish our characters to the fullest extent possible — and to punish us for the sin of liking them.

Gretchen is in the process of sabotaging two relationships at once in the most emotionally damaging fashion possible. Jimmy has his career back on track, but in a form that makes him feel diminished, and is seeking validation from what has turned into a series of soul-destroying sexual encounters with women who either immediately regret him or relentlessly mock him. Gretchen’s best friend Lindsay (Kether Donohue) has jettisoned her old, miserable marriage with Paul and found an actual job, but she is surrounded by co-workers who hate her and is cut off from the emotional validation that served as both delusion and buoy. Paul (Allan McLeod) has found salvation — or damnation — in online men’s rights activist forums, while Lindsay’s sister Becca (Janet Varney) is marinating in alcoholism and contempt. And Edgar, most heartbreakingly, has become a vacant, viciously unpleasant person who is chasing affirmation from his idiot of a writing partner, and is apparently capable of humiliating another veteran who served with him in Iraq and is now working a service job.

It’s hard not to see disaster, whether in the form of a major depressive episode (or even legal trouble) for a boundary-crossing Gretchen, some sort of breakdown for Jimmy and Lindsay, or penury, humiliation and a spiral back into addiction for Edgar.

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I feel slightly guilty saying that this wasn’t exactly what I signed up for with “You’re the Worst.” The premise is obvious. And part of what took “You’re the Worst” from an extremely funny, emotionally sharp comedy to a genuinely impressive artistic experiment was the show’s willingness to be unfunny and to experiment with episodes that dived deep into its characters’ pathologies.

But I do think there’s a distinction between a show that’s not particularly funny — a lot of half-hour shows can no longer really be accurately described as comedies — and a show that no longer feels fun to watch. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” a show I lionized earlier in the week, can be as caustic and scary as “You’re the Worst,” but it also continues to make me snort with laughter and to replay the musical numbers over and over. Even as “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” appears to be sending heroine Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) toward the same sort of disaster and reckoning that the characters on “You’re the Worst” are approaching, it remains fully committed to being a pleasurable show in a way that “You’re the Worst” seems to have lost touch with.