An early episode of the acerbic sitcom You’re the Worst, which follows the misadventures of four thirtysomethings living on the east side of Los Angeles, begins with a close-up of a mimosa in a champagne flute. When the camera pans out, we see Lindsay (Kether Donohue) saving a table at a crowded restaurant. She grimaces as she looks around, taking in a panorama of hipster nonsense: a man with a handlebar mustache, wearing a shearling vest; another in a tiny fedora; a girl with oversize jewelry laughing with her mouth wide open.

Shortly, her best friend, Gretchen (Aya Cash), ambles up to the table and proclaims “Sunday Funday!” Over five seasons and four years, the show has devoted several episodes to this tradition. The four friends—Lindsay; Gretchen; Gretchen’s narcissistic boyfriend, Jimmy (Chris Geere); and his roommate, Edgar (Desmin Borges)—get together, drink themselves dizzy, and try to maximize the fun they can have before the realities of the workweek set in. It does not matter that in the first season, only one of the foursome has a full-time office job. Or as Lindsay puts it, “You cannot have a job and still hate Mondays … like Garfield.” Their ritual celebrates carelessness, a refusal to commit.

Now, in the show’s fifth and final season, Sunday Funday takes on more weight. After a long series of breakups and breakdowns and betrayals and reunions, Gretchen and Jimmy have decided to get married. This should be a joyous occasion, and on any other sitcom, it would be played for a sentimental ratings boost—like the moment when Sam and Diane finally kiss on Cheers, or Ross and Rachel welcome their baby on Friends. But You’re the Worst doesn’t conform to classic television tropes. Instead, it plunges viewers into depths of human behavior: Lindsay and Edgar kidnap Gretchen and Jimmy for a bachelor/bachelorette bonanza; Gretchen gets drunk and fights with Jimmy over whether or not they want children; Paul (Allan McLeod), Lindsay’s long-suffering, milquetoast ex-husband, confesses that he has impregnated her sister Becca (Janet Varney).

The entire party explodes into a mélange of resentments and misunderstandings—and somehow the comedian Paul F. Tompkins shows up. It ends with Gretchen shooting a gun and Jimmy offering to go on the lam with her. Without spoiling the twist, it’s enough to say that Edgar and Lindsay staged the entire mess to push Gretchen and Jimmy to a psychological breaking point. In the world of You’re the Worst, this is the closest the characters come to an act of love.



You’re The Worst premiered on FX in 2014, a year that saw plenty of television shows about anxious urbanites who spilled fast-paced dialogue about their own emotional complexities. Jill Soloway’s Transparent gave us a family drama about a transgender woman and her aimless, self-centered adult children in moneyed Los Angeles. Silicon Valley poked fun at San Francisco’s start-up culture, and Broad City followed two best friends in New York City, as they faced gross smells on the subway and the humiliations of working at an exclusive gym. These strains carried over into the animal kingdom, where Bojack Horseman, then just beginning to stream on Netflix, examined the depressive episodes and cocaine binges of a cartoon horse who’d once been a Hollywood star. For all these shows’ different strengths, one theme ran through them: Being young was hard, and being privileged was harder.