Try Real Hard: The Enduring, Heartbreaking Brilliance of You’re The Worst, My Favorite TV Show Ever

The two defining episodes of FX’s romantic comedy series You’re The Worst are mirrors of one another.

First, in Season 2, there’s LCD Soundsystem, a heart-rending portrait of fighting a losing battle against depression. Then there’s season five’s Zero Eggplants, a topsy-turvy romp about inclusion, forgiveness and the inherent selfishness built into chasing happiness. 

At the center of both episodes, there’s a couple we’ve never met before. In LCD Soundsystem, it’s a pair of hip, young parents named Lexi and Rob. On the surface, they appear to be an idealized version of what our protagonists, Gretchen and Jimmy, could be at their best. They’re still fiercely independent. They haven’t succumbed to the life of the “sweater people.” But they also have responsibilities. They have a dog. They have a child. They have jobs they don’t seem to hate. They’re still artsy and adventurous. But they’re grown-ups. Gretchen yearns for their guidance.

In Zero Eggplants, we meet Rachel and Quinn. At this point, Jimmy and Gretchen are engaged. Rachel and Quinn serve the role of “couple friends” that Gretchen is so eager to fill. Like Lexi and Rob before them, Rachel and Quinn are cool in all the ways Jimmy and Gretchen are afraid they aren’t. They like to scam wedding vendors for free swag. Rachel is confident and accepting. Quinn is a sardonic realist. Gretchen yearns for their approval.

In both episodes, Gretchen’s preconceived notions about the couple she’s putting on a pedestal (or, in LCD Soundsystem, stalking) prove to be facades. Rob is bored and unfulfilled by his domestic life. He misses his party days and wants to get a divorce. Rob’s sadness validates Gretchen’s depression and the episode ends on an excruciatingly beautiful shot of Gretchen’s breakdown as directed by series creator Stephen Falk.

Three years later, plenty has changed. Gretchen and Jimmy have won the acceptance of Rachel and Quinn, seemingly breaking the cycle. But now Gretchen fears that very acceptance and sabotages the friendship. (The way she does it involves gaslighting Quinn into believing Jimmy may have raped him. It’s one of the hardest sitcom moments I’ve ever forced myself to endure multiple times.) Then we get a final shot of Gretchen raiding roommate and friend Edgar’s medicine cabinet to steal his prescribed PTSD medication.

Where in LCD Soundsystem, Gretchen was triggered into tears by her depression, in Zero Eggplants she fought to mask it by any and all means necessary.

Constant Horror and Bone-Deep Dissatisfaction

You’re The Worst isn’t just my favorite sitcom of the decade. It’s my favorite television show ever made. Falk’s masterful web of a series seamlessly blended dark humor, high drama, relationship subversions, absurdist diversions and heaping loads of nihilism to create what’s often mislabeled as the quintessential “un-romantic comedy.”

The truth is this show is incredibly romantic. Assuming you’re using the word romantic to mean idyllic. Because at the center of this show, there are two true questions: Do broken people deserve love? And can broken people overcome their flaws to find that love?

If those are the two main questions at the center of the show, the two answers come in thesis statements spoken by our protagonists. The first comes from Gretchen in my favorite episode of the show, the Season 3 premiere episode Try Real Hard. Near the end of the episode, Gretchen synopsizes the show’s purpose in two sentences.

“If ‘I love you’ is like a promise,” Gretchen says to Jimmy in the episode’s climactic scene, “it’s just a promise to try real hard. It doesn’t mean you can’t fail.” 

The other thesis statement comes from Jimmy in the series finale, Pancakes. Sitting at a diner dressed in the vestigial reminder of the wedding they’ve abandoned, Jimmy outlines his future with Gretchen. It’s as gentle and sweet as it is discomforting and challenging. 

“Every day, we choose,” Jimmy says. “I don’t want to be with you because I made a promise to be with you. I want to be with you because I want to be with you. So every day we wake up, we look at each other and say ‘Today, again, I choose you. Until maybe one day we don’t.”

There, in two quotes, is the distillation of why I think You’re The Worst is the perfect sitcom for this era. The 2010s were rife with shows about relationships that probably shouldn’t work. In an era where the romantic comedy movie industry bottomed out, TV romantic comedies peaked with shows like Love, Catastrophe, Casual, New Girl and, to a weird extent, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. 

But none of those shows captured the messiness of relationships quite like You’re The Worst did. Gretchen and Jimmy’s love story is one of the messiest ever filmed. Their love story is one that resulted in multiple fires, a stolen cat, a best-selling novel, a cliff-top abandonment, multiple affairs and enough jealous rage to make Ross Geller look like an enlightened Buddhist monk. Calling You’re The Worst realistic seems like a stretch. It’s also a show that paints Ben Folds to be an alcoholic menace to society and Paul F. Thompkins as an emotionally abusive boss who seeks gratification by forcing his proteges to over-gorge themselves on office snacks.

At its core, though, You’re The Worst is a show that idealizes and advocates for a different type of commitment. People like Gretchen and Jimmy aren’t built to conform to modern standards of love and romance. But they still deserve love. In each other, they’ve found it. Messiness and all.

Fix me, dummy

I have a functioning theory that the five seasons of You’re The Worst can be viewed through the prism of the five stages of grief. That’s not to say the show is about grief. If anything, the show is about a depressive and a narcissist trying to find common ground in each other. But each season of the show mirrors one of the proverbial five stages in theme.

Season 1 functions as a clinic in denial. The whole first season consists of people telling Jimmy and Gretchen that they’re wrong for each other while Jimmy and Gretchen ignore them. In fact, Jimmy and Gretchen’s first date is to a restaurant called “Insouciance,” which is a fancy word for unconcerned indifference. The second Gretchen thinks Jimmy is looking for a commitment, she bails. The season can only end when Jimmy and Gretchen stop denying their magnetism and move in together. 

Season 2 transitions into anger. Given the season’s very explicitly written depression arc, it feels like this stage should be sadness. But we’ll get there. Because I think there’s an underlying anger to the second season. One of the first trigger’s for Gretchen’s depressive episode comes in Born Dead when she lashes out at her old posse for leaving the party life behind. But the main manifestation of anger is Jimmy, who spends the back half of the season festering in a pool of frustration over not being able to “fix” Gretchen. The two can’t move onto the next stage of their relationship until Jimmy abandons his anger and simply acts altruistically, inadvertently “fixing” Gretchen. For the time being.

Season 3 leads to bargaining. In addition to being my favorite season of the series, this one is also the most experimental and layered. The season begins with Gretchen’s negotiation in Try Real Hard and progresses through every main and secondary character making sacrifices for their own happiness. Edgar gives up his medication to be with Dorothy. Lindsay cuckholds Paul for the sake of their marriage. Vernon tries to convince Paul to run away from their families to avoid obligation. And Jimmy and Gretchen? They make every excuse possible to justify their relationship and nearly break up because of it, but the season ends with a proposal. Well, not ends. Unfortunately, there’s another two minutes of the season that ends with Jimmy abandoning Gretchen with no warning or explanation.

Season 4. Now we’re at depression. This season is just downright sad. Jimmy is broken and defeated by the realization that he’s not as elite as he thought he was. Gretchen’s depression becomes an escapist nightmare in the episode Not A Great Bet, where she overdoses on manic enthusiasm, nearly commits statutory rape and sulks away from her hometown without meeting her brother’s child. And the relationships keep taking hits. In Worldstar!, Jimmy and Gretchen both want to reconcile but the episode ends with Jimmy having sex with another woman while Gretchen watches and self-pleasures. One episode later, Gretchen has sex with her boyfriend’s ex-wife. It’s only when Jimmy finally fights for Gretchen instead of letting circumstances dictate their sadness that their relationship is rekindled.

Season 5, finally, is about acceptance. Not accepting grief, mind you. Accepting yourself and accepting those around you. Gretchen has a great monologue in the penultimate episode We Were Having Such A Nice Day where she confirms this theory, telling Jimmy unconditional acceptance is all she ever wanted. But it’s more than that. The season is about Edgar accepting himself and finally gaining Jimmy’s respect. It’s about Lindsay and Paul growing separately until they reach a point where they can accept their love for one another. It’s about Becca accepting her love for Vernon and her need to be maternal. And most importantly, it’s about Jimmy and Gretchen accepting that they’ll never have a normal relationship. Their relationship only reaches the point it’s supposed to when they finally accept that they can’t conform to the normal constraints society expects.

On Intransigence

The first episode of Season 5 is titled “The Intransigence of Love.” Like standout one-off episodes Twenty-Two, The Seventh Layer and the aforementioned Not A Great Bet before it, The Intransigence of Love is a character episode that contributes virtually nothing to the plot of the show. It’s a spoof of 90s rom-coms that centers on Jimmy and Gretchen telling elaborate lies about their love story to avoid confronting the true messiness of their relationship.

But there’s also something uniquely satisfying about beginning the final season with an episode that describes love as intransigent. Intransigence means inflexible, uncompromising, disagreeable. And so too is Jimmy and Gretchen’s love story for most of the series. The two keep running into walls because their love was intransigent. 

Where the show ends, that intransigence becomes an asset. Jimmy is incapable of change, a fact Gretchen calls him out for in Bachelor/Bachelorette Party Sunday Funday. Gretchen is famously resistant to love and support, a fact her mother calls her out on in We Were Having Such A Nice Day. Jimmy’s rigidity and Gretchen’s fear mix into a cocktail for a hopeless relationship.

That’s not what happens though. They answer the central question of the show by continuing to choose one another. In our glimpse into their future, we see this doesn’t go perfectly. Gretchen still continues to cry uncontrollably in bed even when she and Jimmy’s child is crying right next to her. And in her final moments of the series, Gretchen lets Jimmy know she’ll always be a risk to walk in front of a moving train without warning.

Jimmy says he’ll move on quick.

I didn’t. I don’t think I’ll ever move on from this show. It’s whip-smart and devastatingly modern and just so darn funny. If loving this show is like a promise, it’s just a promise to try real hard. It doesn’t mean I can’t miss it forever.