Leo Reich\u2019s new Channel 4 sitcom is \u201cGirls meets Peep Show. That\u2019s always my favourite part of pitching anything: choose two really good things and say it\u2019s a mix of those!\u201d says the comedian with a slight smirk. Still, it\u2019s a fair summary: It Gets Worse is a bracingly candid, occasionally provocative hangout comedy about twentysomethings floundering professionally and personally in the big city that comes accompanied by a strong stench of British bleakness (see: the title, for a start). Yet it does fail to flag one key aspect. While Girls and Peep Show covered the travails of millennials and gen X respectively, It Gets Worse is happening now \u2013 making it the UK\u2019s first true gen Z sitcom.<\/p>\n
Or not. \u201cI\u2019m sceptical of the idea that generations have any real unifying features across the board, so I don\u2019t want it to be like: this is a gen Z sitcom!\u201d says the 28-year-old. In fact, it soon becomes clear that It Gets Worse is deliberately USP-less. We first meet Reich\u2019s Ethan \u2013 \u201ca middle-class loser gay guy\u201d \u2013 and his pals Sam and Abi as they\u2019re packing up their London flatshare, having been forced out because of a rent hike. But this isn\u2019t the start of a meditation on the cost of living crisis \u2013 or anything else. \u201cThe point isn\u2019t there\u2019s some big concept where everyone\u2019s a superhero, it\u2019s: these are some people dot dot dot.\u201d When I ask how closely the final show resembles his original idea, Reich looks askance. \u201cThe idea, I would say, was quite broad \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019d wager that the real idea \u2013 the main idea, the only idea \u2013 was to give a sitcom (any sitcom) to Reich, who since the pandemic has established himself as the future of comedy with remarkable ease. Following a stint in Footlights at Cambridge and a lockdown that birthed a few cleverly mordant TikToks (\u201cfor us, there were no rules! Apart from obviously don\u2019t go outside,\u201d he quips in one clip captioned \u201ctelling my kids about my wild 20s\u201d), Reich took his debut standup show to the Edinburgh fringe in 2022. Literally, Who Cares?! saw him pose as a heightened parody of a stereotypical zoomer: \u201ca deliriously self-involved, fragmentarily informed, habitually self-pitying, comprehensively cynical member of Generation Z\u201d, as a celebratory New Yorker profile put it the following year. (A British reviewer likened his character to a 21st-century Rick from The Young Ones.) Reich performed his ingenious script, which merged pastiche with drolly accurate observations about the modern world, looking like a pre-Raphaelite club kid: dramatic eye shadow, short shorts, mop of curls. It was an immediate hit, and swiftly picked up for a HBO special \u2013 unheard of for a fledgling British comedian. No wonder he\u2019s been given carte blanche to bring his sensibility to TV.<\/p>\n
Flat broke \u2026 Reich with Olive Gray (left) and Emily Fairn. Photograph: Jack Barnes<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an autumn day when I visit the set of It Gets Worse in south-east London, where a former spice warehouse is doubling as the squat Sam has moved into. Reich is in this scene \u2013 an awkward sex party \u2013 but still finds time to swing by the monitors to see how things are looking and \u2013 I quickly realise from the script in my hand \u2013 ad lib half of Ethan\u2019s ludicrous small talk (there\u2019s nothing on the page about Tutankhamun or the idea that as a society \u201cwe need to get back to the land\u201d).<\/p>\n
Afterwards, in a liminal space upstairs, Reich is vaping and sipping a canned coffee. He encourages improvisation: the show \u201cis about mess and people being fucking stupid and delusional, so I think it suits a level of roughness \u2026 thank God!\u201d Yet as a longtime standup fanatic (as a teenager he\u2019d make his mum take him to the now defunct alternative north London comedy club the Invisible Dot; his heroes included Simon Amstell and James Acaster), he remains serious about the art of comedy. He describes his on-set role as \u201ca sort of joke warden\u201d, who steps in when \u201cthe rhythm\u2019s a little bit out\u201d in his castmates\u2019 delivery. I notice one particular line about a party guest \u2013 \u201cLeon\u2019s cousin from Tring\u201d \u2013 is non-negotiable in terms of both syntax and cadence.<\/p>\n
double quotation markThis is a very specific time to be\u00a0looking down the\u00a0barrel of the rest\u00a0of your life<\/p>\n
Reich may shrug off any voice of a generation label, but It Gets Worse does feel distinctly of the moment. That\u2019s partly thanks to the protagonists: \u201ca campy gay guy, uptight northern girl and mixed-race artist\u201d have typically been restricted to \u201cside character\u201d status on screen in the past, he says. But it also has a lot to do with that depressing title. While gen Z isn\u2019t a monolith, its members do all have something significant in common: they are coming of age during the permacrisis, the omnipresent financial, political and ecological precarity that is making the future feel hopeless for many. \u201cTrying to say this without being cringe, but it\u2019s a very specific time to be looking down the barrel of the rest of your life,\u201d says Reich. \u201cAll of these traditional institutions like marriage and climbing the career ladder don\u2019t really exist, or if they do exist you can\u2019t trust them. There\u2019s a vague sense of massive anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reich is, presumably, not feeling the fear to quite the same degree. Since his breakthrough he has appeared in Lena Dunham\u2019s Netflix comeback Too Much (she returns the favour here by playing Abi\u2019s boss, one of a host of big-name cameos including Andrew Scott and Zadie Smith) and now, obviously, has his own sitcom. But that doesn\u2019t mean he can\u2019t identify with his characters. It Gets Worse isn\u2019t an issue-led drama but an attempt \u201cto recreate a mood or feeling of helplessness, which isn\u2019t about success in a brutal material way. It\u2019s an existential feeling of being lost and stupid and not knowing what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the show, all three leads have \u201cradically different responses to the broader existential anxiety\u201d, says Reich. Ethan sees himself as \u201ca charming clown\u201d whose philosophy is \u201cfuck it, let\u2019s just have a laugh, live in the moment so you don\u2019t have to plan your future\u201d. He is easily the luckiest of the trio \u2013 his living situation is solved when he moves back in with his London-based mum (a sublimely irritable Vicki Pepperdine) \u2013 but far from aspirational. There\u2019s an arch Fleabagian nihilism to his humiliating sexual experiences (including one with a therapist played by Scott), which dovetails with the sense that Ethan is \u201cbeing fucked by life but kind of enjoying it\u201d, says Reich, who tends to think of sex as inherently hilarious (\u201cit\u2019s such an insane thing to do!\u201d).<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Abi, played by Emily Fairn (The Responder, House of Guinness), takes the good girl route, chasing the hallmarks of an Instagrammable lifestyle via industrious perfectionism. Sam (Olive Gray) is a tutor and wannabe writer who pursues the same meaning and control by building her \u201cown kind of life and rejecting social norms\u201d, says Reich. Her cynicism has also led to a kind of radical independence. \u201cI think,\u201d says Gray, \u201cthat she\u2019s the type of person who believes no one owes anyone anything and everyone is responsible for themselves \u2013 to her own detriment and the detriment of the people around her, unfortunately.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike many messy millennial dramedies, It Gets Worse clearly aims to replace myopia with multiplicity. Fairn appreciated the show\u2019s acknowledgment of class dynamics, like how \u201cEthan makes fun of Abi for working so hard, but that\u2019s how she affords her rent\u201d. She was encouraged to keep her native Liverpool accent and channel her own experiences as a \u201cworking-class northerner\u201d into Abi, who leans into or plays down her accent depending on the situation \u2013 and occasionally slips in some scouse slang. (It was Fairn\u2019s suggestion for Abi to call Sam a \u201cjarg writer. Leo was like: I don\u2019t even need to know what that means, that sounds hilarious!\u201d)<\/p>\n
Even so, Ethan is quite obviously the comic engine. Like Reich himself, he is winningly self-deprecating, disarmingly frank, hyper-articulate and endlessly amusing company. There is naturally some crossover between him and Reich\u2019s chronically narcissistic persona in Literally, Who Cares?! (he\u2019s another \u201cquite irritating gay guy because I can\u2019t really do anything else\u201d), but Ethan is aware of his own ridiculousness and can laugh at himself. And whereas the standup show was a precision-tooled piece of satire, It Gets Worse is a heartfelt paean to friendship and, in a weird way, a bit of \u201cwish fulfilment\u201d for its creator: he\u2019s never lived in a grotty flat with friends, moving straight from his parents\u2019 home to his own place.<\/p>\n
That said, any sentimentality is countered by a fierce joke rate, plus Reich\u2019s aversion to cosy earnestness: he is still trying to send up his peers, just in a slightly more subtle way. \u201cSometimes I want to be made fun of by TV and I think the point of this is really lovingly making fun of everyone I\u2019ve ever met.\u201d Despite the real difficulties faced by gen Z, this is ultimately a show about \u201cpeople who don\u2019t have really, really serious problems complaining all the time\u201d. For that reason, he\u2019s anticipating at least some intergenerational pushback. \u201cI don\u2019t know if everyone\u2019s always in the mood to hear a fine 27-year-old going: actually, being kind of scared of the future is really hard! It\u2019s like: well, it\u2019s not!\u201d<\/p>\n
It Gets Worse begins 22 October on Channel 4 in the UK and Binge in Australia on 23 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leo Reich\u2019s new Channel 4 sitcom is \u201cGirls meets Peep Show. That\u2019s always my favourite part of pitching…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-625417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}