In a 2015 episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls, a flustered Shoshanna stropped into a New York bar to tell her sort-of friends Marnie and Jessa about her nightmare week trying to find a job. “I just don’t understand why nobody tells you how bad it’s gonna be in the real world,” she whined. Marnie, already peeved that no one is taking her terrible attempts at a music career seriously, is having none of it. “Yeah, they do,” she deadpans. “It’s pretty much all they ever tell you.”
Channel 4’s It Gets Worse, a fitfully funny Channel 4 sitcom about professional Gen-Z crash-outs, is like that Girls scene but without the Marnie of it all. Instead of reflecting and subverting twentysomething clichés in the same instant – and hilariously, and by incredibly charismatic actors – it just lets them play out. Bad sex is had, shoddy flatshares are lived in, contemporary pop culture references are made. Lena Dunham herself makes a cameo, as if to suggest the passing of a torch. But it’s an unhelpful, and unflattering, comparison. It Gets Worse sometimes feels like a dozen Vogue relationship essays in a trench coat, or a series of loose gripes and observations in search of a TV show.
Comedian Leo Reich is its writer and star, and a bit of a middle-aged television executive’s dream: he’s 28, has a handsome face, solid industry connections (the Cambridge Footlights; a producer dad for DNA Films, and so forth), and a “Gen-Z, what arrrrre we like?” approach to comedy that makes It Gets Worse ideal for newspaper comment pieces and TikTok clip-farming. A scene in which Andrew Scott spits in Reich’s mouth has been doing the rounds for weeks already. The crux of his series, declared by a nature documentary-style narration courtesy of Zadie Smith, is that Reich’s Ethan is lazy, bored, sexually dysfunctional and anxious while at the same time leading “one of the easiest lives in recorded human history”.
That apparent contradiction – of relative privilege but also a stark lack of prospects – fuels the six episodes of It Gets Worse, as Ethan and his two besties leap from one miserable personal or professional entanglement to the next. Abi (Emily Fairn) is unhappily coupled-up with a boyfriend who owns a Fleshlight but won’t have sex with her. Frustrated Sam (a sharp and apathetic Olive Gray, the show’s real discovery) wants to write for a living, but is stuck in a series of go-nowhere romances and gig jobs.
Reich makes for a likeable and nicely unabashed leading man, and there are occasional flashes of dramatic intrigue and some solid jokes, but It Gets Worse is often shaggy and ill-defined to a fault. Perhaps that’s the point, as if to mirror the lives of its aimless leads, but Reich rests too heavily on wanting to create a feeling of vague relatability rather than any real ideas or characters that transcend their various neuroses. “That is so me!” seems to be the desired response here, as our heroes traipse around Dalston night clubs, tussle between sexual emancipation and sexual degradation, and doom-scroll with the lights off. We get mentions of Buzzballs, Substacks, Film Studies MAs, and negroni sbagliatos. “If you do want to crash here,” Sam says at one point, “then you’re gonna need to be financially contributing to the shared Mubi account.” It’s both over-written and over-familiar, paling in comparison to the shows that inspired it.
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