In Which You're The Worst Is Just The Best

Why Don't You Take It?

by ETHAN PETERSON

You're the Worst
creator Stephen Falk
FXX

There is a moment during the tumultuous second season of the brilliant comedy You're the Worst where Jimmy (Chris Geere) is about to cheat on his girlfriend with the woman who owns the bar closest to his home, Nina (Tessa Ferrer). He mounts her on the bar's counter and politely asks if he can suck on her toes while he's inside her. She presents ten bruised and battered digits, casualties of her bronze-medal winning run as an Olympic skier. He is aghast, but attempts to forge forward. Noticing his reaction, she demurs. "A second ago," she explains, "I was going to let you raw dog me on my own bar."

Jimmy is very far from the worst, which makes the unconscionable title of Stephen Falk's series about unhappiness inaccurate at best and wildly misleading at, um, worst. He doesn't end up cheating on his live-in paramour, Gretchen (Aya Cash).

Before I met my fiancee, I dated a charming woman. Once we were walking through a park near the Brooklyn Bridge and I stopped to take a picture. She had this judgmental smirk on her face, since undoubtedly many people had paused in this same space in order to record a similar moment. "I try not to be basic," she told me, and I immediately wondered why anyone would want to try not to enjoy something.

In season one of You're the Worst, Gretchen and Jimmy are increasingly similar to this woman I met. She was unhappy with the way others experienced the world: it had some kind of invisible, dehabilitating effect on how much she was able to enjoy Earth and mankind. I told her honestly that I never thought about anyone else unless I had a good reason to do so.

Geere and Cash make a very believable couple; and yet there is something vaguely wrong and substantially off about their relationship. You can see that while some aspects of being together come very naturally, others are clumsy and more than a little harmful to both of their egos. Ultimately they are not really a good match, but they have the unique compatibility of not being very palatable to others unlike themselves.

Cash's performance as the clinically depressed Gretchen is the emotional heart of You're the Worst. In comparison, Geere comes across as happy-go-lucky when he complains about the direction of his career as a novelist or his interpersonal failures. Gretchen's sadder journey resulted in an astonishing scene this past season where she broke up a fight outside a radio station by whipping out a handgun. "I felt nothing," she tells her friend Lindsey (Kether Donaghue) after the frightening moment.

Lindsey is divorced from her husband Paul, and endlessly pursued by Jimmy's roommate Edgar (Desmin Borges). The subplots involving Jimmy and Gretchen's friends always seemed a bit atonal from the main thrust of the series, but this changed with the introduction of the show's best secondary character, Dorothy (Collette Wolfe). Edgar meets Dorothy when he takes an improv class at a local theater where she is an instructor. There is something so comforting about a relationship where one person has all the power, and uses it only for good.

In Jimmy and Gretchen's relationship, it becomes increasingly unclear who has command of the ship, or whether there is a captain at all. Jimmy's reaction to Gretchen's bizarrely delayed disclosure of her clinical depression is meant to be typical — misunderstanding her condition, he attempts to thinks of ways that he can snap her out of this funk. At times such a storyline could begin to approach the tenor of an afterschool special, but the intermitted emotional and nonemotional way these two brilliant actors exchange their affection transcends the awkwardness of the subject matter.

Season two of You're the Worst was such magnificent television that despite the show's niche audience Falk was given the go-ahead on a third season, which debuts on August 31st. Hopefully Netflix will pick this show up afterwards, since its genius eclipses the tired formulas of last two shows Falk worked on, Weeds and Orange is the New Black. (Some old episodes of You're the Worst can be streamed on Amazon Prime.) Whereas before the show seemed to belong to Jimmy and the immensely charismatic Geere, Gretchen's illness has allowed Aya Cash to make You're the Worst the stage for the best performance by a single woman since Mary Tyler Moore. Love is all around.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan.

In Which We Remain Your Devoted Preacher

Todd Solondz Memorial Show

by ETHAN PETERSON

Preacher
creator Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
AMC

It's not every day you see a show kill off every single character that made it worth watching, and leave all the offending portions for what will no doubt be a turgid second season. It would be like Pheobe Buffet walking around in a New York City razed by methane gas explosions, playing "Smelly Cat" for deer. Preacher did just what it promised, though, and destroyed something far more entertaining in the process.

Emily Woodruw (the enigmatic Lucy Griffiths) was the best of these deceased characters, a single mother of three who was dating the town of Annville's shrewish mayor, Miles (Ricky Mabe). "He pursued me like forever," she tells Tulip (Ruth Negga), before moments later deciding to murder him for what he has done to her life.

I don't fully know what happened to Todd Solondz' Hollywood career, but there are lots of things that never would have ever been made if he did not create now-forgotten classics like Welcome to Dollhouse and Happiness. Solondz sort of went off the rails and started producing the same movie over and over again, probably because no else was serious about advancing his formula.

The problem with Solondz is that the world caught up too quickly with his particular brand of satire. When you live in a society where Miss Teen USA addresses her friends with racial slurs and barely even apologizes for it, there's not a whole lot further you can push the self-loathing. The comic on which Preacher bases itself was never even satire at all. The larger-than-life figures that Preacher set up as antagonists for Jesse Custer in season two are the flattest and most boring part of the show adapted as they are so faithfully from the graphic novels.

Where Preacher really took off was when it hewed so much closer to reality than its source material. Really, this show was on the verge of becoming quite different, of answering the disturbing questions it poses to its residents. The mother with a daughter in a coma, the father with a son that had a suicide wish, even the love story of the man who ran the methane processing plant were all more real than the ostensible protagonist, Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper and his fantastic Texas accent).

Solondz depicted men and women in the throes of whatever passion allowed them to carry on the rest of thei turgid lives. These singular moments allowed them the grace to survive whatever else befall them, or whatever harm they carried out on others. Preacher's amazing character of Odin Quincannon (Jackie Earle Haley) was the epitome of this devilish philosophy, and the storyline of him being commanded to love God was the most amusing and meaningful part of the show.

Despite the fact that the role of Custer is a thankless one, Dominic Cooper did the best he could with it. The writing for his romantic counterpart Tulip O'Hare was pretty terrible throughout. An actress as subtle as Ruth Negga does so much more with an eyebrow raise or a look than the show's writers could accomplish by forcing her one-liners. In the end, however, there is not a whole lot of desire to watch Preacher as a love story. The show is rendered static by the lack of drama on that front.

It would have been better if Preacher had chucked its source material in the trash and written a completely different type of story. Nothing is really accomplished by seeing Jesse Custer's hometown levelled to the ground, along with all the people in it.

If Preacher focuses on the broader humor and characters that accomplished so much less, we will still have this bravura first season, which did so many things that television never attempted. At times Preacher was fully as disturbing as any Todd Solondz movie. It was maybe not the must-look-away cringeworthy of the films that inspired it, but it was also a lot more fun to watch Jesse play around with the Genesis power that allows him to tell people exactly what to do.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Communication Is Good For This Line Of Work

I Won't Give Up On Us

by ETHAN PETERSON

Mr. Robot
creator Sam Esmail
USA Network

With its low camera angles and unnatural-natural cinematography, Mr. Robot has never been the easiest show on television to watch. Eliot (Rami Malek) has a voice which reverberates at such low tones it can be hard to understand without subtitles. The Egyptian-American actor has a moment in the second season of the show, airing now on USA, where he explodes into an effluvium of natural speech, explaining his reaction to Seinfeld in a bubbly excitement. It is very funny to see him break out of the darkness, but it doesn't last for long enough. 

This is by way of answering the question of why no one is watching Mr. Robot. The explanation from the show's fans after a promising first season have been enlightening, though perhaps more revealing of themselves than the show's flaws. The truth is that the dark and merciless world Eliot operates in remains wildly pessimistic and optimistic, but in both ways it echoes the worst tendencies of our own.

The news on television is already bad. Mr. Robot tells people that simply by going to work they are feeding into this vicious cycle. Maybe it was like reading the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, the fun part before fully realizing the gravity of what was implied — control, fear, violence and deprivation. The hacker group Eliot founded in the first season of the show, fsociety, seems more and more like a terrorist group. In the season's first episode, the group messes with the home security system of a corporate lawyer, who is forced to move out to her house in Greenwich for the evening.

One of the best parts of Mr. Robot was the story of Angela (Portia Doubleday), a security analyst for the evil bank that is the focus of fsociety's hacking efforts. Despite whatever they accomplished in season 1, the financial industry seems to be moving on roughly as usual. Angela's mother was killed by corporate malfeasance relating to a toxic gas leak, and yet we still find her working for this company directly under its CEO, Philip Price (Michael Cristofer), even after she has spearheaded a lawsuit against them. It doesn't make much sense.

The additions to the cast are generally welcome, but their exact place in the winding narrative that Esmail has created will only become clear after six or seven hours of television. It is a long time to wait to identify with someone. FBI agent Dominique DiPierro (Grace Gummer) is the main addition to the cast, and she quickly becomes basically the main star of Mr. Robot as a masturbating loner insomniac who reads people as well as Eliot doesn't.

Craig Robinson and Joey Badass have come aboard as Eliot's new compadres. Both are excellent at playing off of Malek, but so much mystery surrounds them and every other aspect of the show that I understand why even informed fans of Mr. Robot might be confused. "Maybe truth don't even exist," Robinson bleats at one point in a park, stroking his dog.

The best part of last season was the rise and fall of Eliot's primary antagonist, Tyrone Wellick. He has yet to show up on this season in any meaningful way, and it has substantially hurt the show. Christian Slater's performance as the titular character is as awful as ever, and the machinations occurring within Eliot's disturbed mind are no longer the novelty they were. None of this directly answers the primary question of why no one is watching Mr. Robot. I guess it's because at the end of a long day, they probably don't want to feel like cogs in a corporate machine.

Esmail has been writing much of this second season himself, and directing it as well. He is immensely talented at both tasks. Watching Mr. Robot, you can feel his singular vision for this world. That is what makes the show so completely different from anything out there. Because it hasn't been focus-tested and revamped a million times, plenty of moments are rough around the edges, and performances and scenes play a lot more like theater than we are used to in this medium. Despite all its problems, you sense that Mr. Robot has something absolutely terrible to say. By the time it says it, we will all be watching Westworld or some shit.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.