Review: 'You're the Worst' - 'Spooky Sunday Funday': The fix is in? 

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Review: 'You're the Worst' - 'Spooky Sunday Funday': The fix is in?

The gang goes to a Halloween horror house as part of Jimmy's plan to cheer up Gretchen

"You\'re the Worst" coming up just as soon as I recognize this building from the opening credits of "Better Off Ted"...

The original "Sunday Funday" was arguably the funniest episode of "You\'re the Worst" season 1, but also the show\'s most atypical installment, collecting lots of funny jokes ("Daniel Craig?!?! He looks like an upset baby!") and situations but keeping the dysfunction of Jimmy and Gretchen\'s relationship to a minimum. Given the episode\'s popularity, I wouldn\'t have blamed Stephen Falk and company if they had just stuck to the basics for it, like the "Bar Wars" episodes of "Cheers," or the annual Halloween contest on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine."

But "Spooky Sunday Funday" is something else entirely, not only combining the original concept with Halloween costumes and tons of horror movie tropes, but something that stays deep inside the tough emotional territory the show\'s been exploring lately.

Jimmy inevitably breaks his promise to Gretchen to not try to fix her, and is so smugly naive that he actually tells her what his plan is. Worse, his behavior at the bar — where he seems very much on the verge of hooking up with the bar owner who also knows about "Buckle Your Shoes"(*) and seems much less emotionally complicated — confirms for us every fear Gretchen has about her depression chasing him away.

(*) Not a real show, but it might as well be. British sitcoms were/are weird.

Lindsay, meanwhile, somehow winds up in her underwear doing a riff on the "It puts the lotion in the basket" scene from "Silence of the Lambs," only here with a super-helpful horror house employee(**) who talks her through the process of getting her power back on. It\'s a small triumph in the grand scheme of things — as we can see from the wreckage of the house, even with its power — but it was still a fun inversion of slasher film cliches about the girl trapped in the pit, and this was as vulnerable as we\'d seen Lindsay before faux-Jame Gumb talked her out of it.

(**) I briefly wondered if Buffalo Bill was really Paul following her around to help her out (having ditched the Stephen Hawking costume — and its troublesome text to voice software — that so confused Lindsay), but it was a different actor.

The Edgar/Dorothy plot, while mainly an excuse to show The Situation having sex with Steven Spielberg, didn\'t flinch in continuing to deal with Edgar\'s PTSD, even as it layered in something the others could more comfortably (and amusingly) mock him for in his three-year sex drought. The only worry I have is that Dorothy is becoming perhaps too awesome, and unless the plan is to make Collette Wolfe a regular, something ugly is going to have to happen to break them up.

Then again, ugliness in romantic comedy is what "You\'re the Worst" does best.

What did everybody else think? Was this a worthy follow-up to both the original "Sunday Funday" and last week\'s emotional episode?

Related Searches: You're the Worst, Chris Geere, Aya Cash, Desmin Borges, Kether Donohue, Stephen Falk

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Alan Sepinwall has been reviewing television since the mid-\'90s, first for Tony Soprano\'s hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, and now for HitFix. His new book, "The Revolution Was Televised," about the last 15 years of TV drama, is for sale at Amazon. He can be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

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This was the best episode of the season and exactly what the show does best. Last week at times felt like a very special episode, whereas this week took all of the overt angst and pain and subtlety dropped it throughout while tweaking last year\'s most mainstream episode in a fun very Hollywood way. This was masterful writing, directing, producing, editing and performing(also everything else.)

Another fun episode. I enjoyed Dorothy\'s guesses of Jimmy\'s costume (Gay Wolverine!); it was probably the hat that made me think it was supposed to reference a scene from Clockwork Orange that I wasn\'t remembering instead of a made-up TV show.

Not quite sure how I feel about the introduction of the bar owner - Tessa Ferrer was a regular on Grey\'s for a while and that was a bit of a brief role for just a guest spot, so I\'m thinking she\'ll be back?

I just hope nothing traumatic happens to Edgar with Dorothy. It will make me legitimately sad if something horrible happens; I\'d also like to see her hang around long enough to interact more with the others, given how hilariously things went last week on that front.

This is the second episode in a row I\'ve caught and I\'m still baffled...is this show supposed to be a comedy?

I gather it was something different during the first season, but now it just seems like an unfunny Friends clone.

Also: Why does the British guy hang out with these losers?

It is a rather strange comedy; possibly unique in my experience. I love it. For one thing, it weaves, seamlessly, a few different styles of humor One, Jimmy delivering a scathing critique of a piece of art -- then teh camera shows us the artist, a nine-year-old. A different style is clueless Lindsay (a woman, mind) ranting about people who complain that she doesn\'t put the toilet seat down when she urinates (it hurts to picture it).

I usually lose sight of the fact that Gretchen and Jimmy are supposed to be unpleasant -- I\'m just so fond of them.

No, they didn\'t save his life. Jimmy, the British guy, and Gretchen met at a wedding. And Jimmy is just as much a "loser" as the others. He\'s an inconsiderate narcissist. The show is about the odd mismatch -- or oddly perfect match -- of Gretchen and Jimmy.

But it strikes me as a British comedy without the wicked humor.

I watch a British comedy like "Peep Show," which features characters far more obnoxious and f*ed up than the ones on this show, and I laugh so hard I sometimes worry i\'m gonna die.

I just can\'t tell where this show is gonna go.

This is a show where you really do have to start from the beginning and watch it in sequence for it to work out. I think a lot of the character beats in this episode are payoffs to things that happened previously, which are in turn payoffs to things that happened before that, etc. As the last episode indicated, all the people who participated in this episode\'s Sunday Funday but for Lindsay are for whatever reason staying at Jimmy\'s place (and you see how they end up at Jimmy\'s place over the course of the first season, except for Dorothy who\'s a new character), and Lindsay is Gretchen\'s friend.

It\'s not a British comedy and shouldn\'t be viewed in that vein. Things don\'t blow up to farcical proportions in that Fawlty Towers way, nor does its humor necessarily lie in making everyone cringe in that Office UK way. It\'s a show about a relationship, and all the things that happen because of that relationship.

...okay, in that way, maybe it\'s kind of like Gavin and Stacey. Gavin and Stacey filled mostly with assholes.

My point is that even if this show had a zany! start, it\'s *now* just a cookie cutter Friends/HIMYM clone without the jokes.

But it hasn\'t HAD a zany! start. It is what it is, and I\'m still not quite sure what makes this a Friends clone aside from the fact that it has men and women in the lead cast.

Friends clone = A group of thirty something actors playing twenty something characters who are navigating the difficult transition between fun loving party kids to responsible adults.

Ponce - Is it a British comedy or a Friends/HIMYM clone? You don\'t get it both ways if you want to be taken seriously.

Assuming you\'re not just trolling, I fall in with the people suggesting you take it from the top.

This show reminds me of Friends because of the setup.

It reminds me of a British comedy because the characters are such arseholes.

Here\'s an episode of my favorite British comedy, "Peep Show," obnoxious *and* funny(NSFW):

Like everyone else, I believe it’s important to start You’re the Worst from the beginning. And it’s not just for plot setup, or even character establishment.

You’re the Worst should not be compared to Friends or HIMYM because, tonally, the humor comes from a very different place than those shows, and watching it with the mindset that it doesn’t messes with what you take away from it.

Consider how Seinfeld centered on a bunch of awful people doing terrible things that made countless other people (and at times, themselves) suffer the consequences. On Seinfeld, the consequences were treated with full humorous intent – when a network executive throws his career away to join Greenpeace out of a misguided sense that Elaine is in love with him, we the audience are meant to laugh at this guy, the victim, for being a clueless schmuck.

You’re the Worst does not do that. On this show, consequences – no matter how bizarre or screwy – are treated with full seriousness, so that there’s an underlying sense of pathos to the proceedings, running directly alongside the humor. There are plenty of opportunities to laugh at the characters, and the realism of the drama both intensifies the potency of the humor, but it also makes us wonder if this is something we should be comfortable laughing at.

Why, then, does it work? Well, this is why it’s crucial to start from Episode 1. The first season is a ten-part romantic tragicomedy, with the early episodes setting up the characters as comically exaggerated people, the middle episodes experimenting with them and giving them layers, and the last few episodes delivering the big dramatic/comedic punch. By the time Season One is over, you go from hating these characters to loving them, and you’re in the perfect mindset for the darker (and often even funnier) stories of Season Two.

It may take a bit of time – even Alan admits he initially quit after the pilot, and only returned to the show after others convinced him it got better – but it’s definitely worth it.

Maybe that\'s why this show has such a tiny audience.

It\'s asking a lot of a TV audience to start a show from the beginning.

Maybe the opening credits should have a little recap instead?

Well, plot-wise, the episodes are pretty standalone, so recaps wouldn\'t make much of a difference. Starting from the beginning of this show means you\'re able to connect with it emotionally over time (which, as I said, is where the importance lies).

And it\'s not really a huge deal to start from the beginning, since the running time of the first season is just 3.5 hours.

Weren\'t you wondering the same thing in last week\'s review?

Well, IMHO, this show is in the spirit of the recent trend of having "comedies" about unpleasant people or ugly situations, or both, like Togetherness, Transparent, Unreal.

But I think "You are the worst" is the funnier and the closest to comedy than the rest.

Never seen Unreal, can\'t stand Togetherness, thought Jeffery Tambor\'s performance in Transparent was amazing, but thought his monstrous children(both the characters and the bad acting) ruined the show.

I don\'t think having bad people at the center of comedies is new.

Having "comedies" that have no jokes in them is, though.

Guys, FYI this is the house troll. This is his shtick. You can try to engage and explain, but he\'ll never stop. He\'s tenacious. He shows up in most of Alan\'s comments, always the same tack and formula.

We\'re supposed to avoid personal attacks in Alan\'s comment section.

Not sure how suggesting that this show would benefit from a Gilligan\'s Island style opening credits sequence is trolling.

You sure have a lot of suggestions and critiques about specific details of the show (it\'s zany start that never happened, or its character setup which is not even remote.y close to the comp you are trying to force). Pretty amazing you were able to deduce all that after watching 2 episodes out of 1.5 seasons!

How many episodes of Friends do you think an average person would need to watch to "get" it?

I\'d love to debate my opinions of this show with you if want to offer up a rational critique of them, but you\'ll have to refrain from making ad hominem attacks.

@Ponce - Me and a few of my friends are big fans of \'Peep Show\' and we also find \'You\'re the Worst\' very funny. Why you don\'t is a mystery to me (although I\'d like to believe that the reason isn\'t simply to be contrary).

One thing I do know is that quite a lot of the more subtle humor involving Jez and Mark (and Super Hans) will be lost if you don\'t watch \'Peep Show\' from the first series onward, since much of what happens to them in the later series (and many of the jokes) are built-upon what came before. If you have any real desire to see if this show appeals to you, I would suggest first watching season one.

Granted, it isn\'t as funny as \'Peep Show\' - but \'Peep Show\' is one of the funniest TV shows ever made - so it\'s a tough standard to compare it to. If you want something closer in tone to \'Peep Show\', you might check out \'Fresh Meat\', the followup comedy created by \'Peep Show\' co-creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain (Jesse Armstrong was also the writer of the fantastic \'Black Mirror\' episode: \'The Entire History of You\').

No problem, Ponce. I think you\'ll like \'Fresh Meat\'. Just goes to show that we can find common ground sometimes - even if it\'s about UK shows ;)

Tupal better run now. Diddy will be looking for payback.

I was thinking the same thing. Are we sure he didn\'t say "Better of Dead" the movie with John Cusack?

I really enjoy this show, but not sure it can sustain itself without some major plot movement. For the most part, the episodes are pretty repetitive with each character doing and saying basically the same thing. That can get tiresome after awhile.

I suppose It\'s Always Sunny keeps on with the same characters doing he same things but in a slightly different situation each episode, but since I mostly look forward to Gretchen\'s brief interactions with her music group clients on this show, I think the writers may need to expand a bit.

So long as the variations are clever, funny, and well-rendered (and this one\'s as good as I\'ve seen on all those scores), experience shows that audiences do not, in fact, find it tiresome. I doubt I will, either. I don\'t watch this for complex plotting or fresh, unexplored themes.

Lindsay wet and in her underwear. Good thing my wife was not in the room.

Yes, the further the episode went.... the better, and Better, and BETTER Lindsay looked ... at the breaks, they kept warning that "nudity" was in the show. If only we were so LUCKY ....

One thing I thought you might mention was that when Jimmy heard the voice coming through the hedges talking to him about "Buckle Your Shoes" that both he and I would suspect the writers wanted the audience to think it was Gretchen speaking prior to him discovering it was someone else. I rewound it a couple times and either it was Aya Cash dubbing the voice or the actress was doing a dead on impression of Gretchens voice. I found that a very interesting sub plot to the show and wonder if it will be re visited this season.

I also first thought that was Gretchen talking to him - also due to the fact that this scene was right after the cut from Gretchen talking with Lindsay about the whole situation. The voices sounded very similar, I\'d have to rewatch it again to hear if the bar owner talked with a different voice in the rest of the conversation.

That\'s a standard LA woman voice. Could\'ve been any of dozens of actresses.

I wonder how the "Big Bang Theory" would be if it had the same creators as "Your are the worse". Especially Sheldon.

He was so funny in this episode. His glee at vomiting was great.

I didn\'t really buy into the "Jimmy thinks depression can be cured by a fun day" thing - Jimmy seems a little too clever for this. Otherwise: my favourite show at the moment!

'You're the Worst' is at its absolute best in 'There Is Not Currently A Problem'

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