is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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you're the worst / catastrophe ... is this a theme?
If you want to watch a really funny half-hour show that is smart and does a good job skewering what you think a relationship-based sitcom can do, definitely watch Catastrophe (streaming on Amazon). It is well-written and really funny. You’re the Worst (series on FX) may not be as perfect, but I flat-out love it anyway, especially season 1. The show has so many things I love, all combined into one little weekly half-hour burst of made-for-Jill viewing time. When it comes to television programs, there are some things that will get me every time: a story that is predominantly about friendships rather than or in addition to romance; a non-heteronormative story or at the very least a story that isn’t about the parent-child unit; jokes that build up over time through repetition that isn’t totally obvious; jokes that really push the boundaries of what we’re allowed to find funny; stories where human people build worlds with what they’ve got. You’re the Worst does each of those things in different quirky ways. (If you're looking for some other shows that hit all these notes well, I recommend Happy Endings, Perfect Couples and, to a certain extent, New Girl.)
Each of the four main characters on the show is a disaster, on the border of unlikable, or simply an asshole. So it’s a kind of magic how likable the story ends up being, and how the show doesn’t try to soften the hard edges of any given jerk moment. The characters aren’t exactly good to each other all of the time, and yet it is still clear that they care about each other (at least part of the time) and that they form for each other a kind of support system. But they’re also, each of them, messed up in their own singular ways, most of them not very mindful of that, and so they can’t help but impose bad outcomes on each other. And that’s life. The show makes it all watchable by building certain joke-tropes (built up over time) into the worst moments, so the laughter makes it easier to think about human horribleness.
Like Catastrophe, You’re the Worst is about relationships that aren’t perfect between people who aren’t prepared to have them, but Catastrophe ’s characters have more self-knowledge, or maybe are just older/wiser, so the source of the laughs is different. Perhaps they worked through some of the shit that the You’re the Worst people are living out back when they were in their 20s. Catastrophe doesn’t play with genre as much as You’re the Worst does, because it is still at heart a show about a romantic relationship, whereas You’re the Worst is a show about trying to figure out how to care about people at all, and there are different and interesting relationships between many different characters on the show.
One of the other characters (in You’re the Worst) is an Iraq war veteran with PTSD, and the show makes fun of that. I kind of couldn’t believe it at first. I can’t say they are particularly sensitive about it, or even that it is done well, and I suppose that could be worrisome. But I also kind of appreciate how it is incorporated into the story as just a part of daily life. Given how many veterans and other people with PTSD are walking around in the daily lives of various people and how much your average US citizen never thinks about that, perhaps it’s good to just treat it as normal. Or even funny. Also, even if the characters in the show are assholes about it, many of the people watching are probably horrified, and thinking about what ought to be funny—and that strikes me as interesting. (This is one aspect of the show that could have been much more interesting than it actually is, but perhaps they will develop it later. For instance, in the most recent episode in season 2, the veteran says of his performance in his improv class that it is the first thing he has been proud of in his life. His girlfriend responds, what about Iraq? He gets a typical movie-haunted look and starts to talk about encountering civilians one evening… and she says, ooooh, OK, and changes the subject. Funny, insensitive, potentially interesting.)
Various back-up characters are great, too. There’s a rap band managed by one of the main characters, and one of them always steals the scene. In a recent episode the manager was telling him she was doing her best (very badly) and he rapid-fire responded, “I need you to do someone else’s best, like Hillary Clinton or Tori Amos circa Little Earthquakes!” He throws a tantrum almost every time he is on screen, and sometimes they are silly and sometimes they are smart but they are always hilarious.
Season two I had to learn to love. It started to descend into the realness of some of the problems of the messed-up characters, and it also got a tiny bit lazy in some of its story elements. One of the main characters is a woman who is gorgeous and not a size 2 and they have started to make food too thematic to her character, as if one would have to explain why someone would wear a size 8 or 16 and still be gorgeous. Oh my god, she eats ACTUAL FOOD. That’s disappointing because it’s stupid. I would have expected the show to thematize instead how two of the main characters drink booze instead of eating most of the time.
The show has also started to explore a resurgence of deep clinical depression in one of the characters. It got pretty dark and I actually didn’t watch for 2 weeks because I just wanted to laugh (are they pushing me on this on purpose? or is it just a really odd show?) and was afraid the writers couldn’t handle it. But once I caught up again I discovered that they turned it around by refusing to simplify how devastating it is for her and for anyone trying to live alongside her—the closest we get to laughing about it is occurs in a really crazy episode where she gets obsessed with the life of two strangers (this episode goes so far into the obsession that for the first 2-5 minutes of the show you think you may be watching the wrong show--I thought that Comcast On Demand had delivered the wrong show to me--because none of the show’s characters are in it. They have been evacuated by depression.). The final episode is this week, so I’m not sure how they’ll leave it, but I’m happy the show has been renewed for a third season. If you haven’t watched it and you’re looking for some basic and some non-basic laughs, I recommend!
5:51 p.m. - December 07, 2015
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