"You're The Worst" is Sometimes The Best.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_the_Worst

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-youre-the-worst-explains-struggle-of-mental-illness-20151022-story.html

I wish I’d watched “You’re The Worst” ten years ago, but, while I always enjoyed a good hangout/ romantic comedy, I spent years fleeing my edgy side and wanting both my life and my shows to be sweet..Like everything needed to be “Friends”, both aspirational and wanting a group hug at the end. Sometimes these people are hard to watch, but you do end up rooting for Jimmy and Gretchen’s relationship in the end, even as they start out trying to shun every romantic symbol and trapping of commitment—a move I’ve come to appreciate with age and staying single while yet another friend gets sucked into the two-headed hydra that is “We”—I am surprised that liking both participants close-to-equally does not really make this suck less for the friend—maybe it’s because of the distance, too, sometimes, and the lack of spontaneity disability brings.

Although it is true that the characters on “You’re The Worst” live well based on the small amounts of work they put in, I wouldn’t say I’d swap places, exactly.(One way that they legitimately seem bad in the way a real acquaintance might, as opposed to TV flaws like “I care too damn much,” or “I’m an endearing klutz,”)

 

Gretchen, in particular is part red-haired powerhouse and part hot mess—if this were Seinfeld, she’s an Elaine in a world where at least some actions have consequences, but at first, it’s hard to see why the people in the pilot might warn anyone off of dating her, but as the episodes go on, her depression diagnosis makes perfect sense—that episode is why I took this show from “surprisingly fun’ to something I should write about, much like with roommate character Edgar and his PTSD following combat in Iraq.

 

  At first, it looks just like s crisis of confidence is keeping him from fully re-entering civilian life(and pining over Gretchen’s sister Lindsay without making much of a move on her, on most shows something of a fatal flaw in a male character at least) but as we get to know him, we get to see that, despite Jimmy’s insensitive joking, Edgar’s got real problems—As he tried to get help, but didn’t meet the criteria because of side effects from his medications, I both welled up and, thought as the doctor, I might have lied to get him something, both things I might not have admitted had I watched it when it aired a decade ago.(Of course, my superego shows up, as they do, to remind me about the Adult, responsible world that I’m just a sidenote to, where if something is weird about the doctor’s clinical trial, maybe a hundred other people don’t get help either.  But it still doesn’t seem right.)