{"id":810982,"date":"2026-10-23T02:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T02:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/810982\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T02:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T02:16:09","slug":"it-gets-worse-review-leo-reich-is-a-rare-star-and-the-future-of-tv-comedy-television-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/810982\/","title":{"rendered":"It Gets Worse review \u2013 Leo Reich is a rare star and the future of TV comedy | Television & radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his 2023 standup special Literally Who Cares?!, Leo Reich bemoaned the fact that his life wasn\u2019t more like a TV comedy<\/a>. \u201cAll the sitcoms I watched as a teenager really made me imagine that being in my early 20s would involve a lot more navigating the dating scene in the big city,\u201d he groaned. \u201cAnd a lot less Googling the words \u2018death toll\u2019.\u201d Reich was playing a caricature of a self-absorbed zoomer, who had taken up smoking during the pandemic because \u201csome part of me decided it might be worth cutting 20 years off my life\u201d. Behind this performance there was, of course, a rather big dollop of truth: life for gen Z has \u2013 for the most part \u2013 been less sitcom, more doom-filled rolling news bulletin.<\/p>\n

Reich \u2013 now 28 \u2013 is a rare comic to land an HBO special, and now an A24\/Channel 4 series, putting him in the ideal position to redress the balance with his very own sitcom. Like HBO\u2019s I Love LA (spiritually gen Z, if written by a millennial, Rachel Sennott), it juxtaposes grossness with aspiration. And like Girls before it, it is helmed by a perfectly un-self-aware protagonist, Ethan (Reich), whom \u2013 we are told at the outset \u2013 has had \u201cone of the easiest lives in recorded human history\u201d. There are hints of Fresh Meat, too, and traces of Reich\u2019s comedy hero Simon Amstell in its dry neuroticism and Jewish-themed LOLs. Sometimes, it verges on the satirical \u2013 as when Andrew Scott cameos as a hookup who offers Ethan free therapy as foreplay. (Ethan tempers his complaints by saying that at least he hasn\u2019t \u201clived through Aids\u201d \u2013 Scott\u2019s character, Brian, snaps back: \u201cHow old do you think I am?!\u201d)<\/p>\n

As well as Ethan, we follow his uni pals Sam (Olive Gray) and Abi (Emily Fairn), who have been living with him in a London houseshare. They\u2019re all moving out and need their deposits back, except Ethan has somehow made a ginormous hole in the wall with a drill, and doesn\u2019t seem fussed about fixing it. As someone who has lived in more houseshares than I can remember, this feels particularly triggering. Reich might have been trying to shock the audience with lines like \u201cmy last therapist rimmed me\u201d, but seeing someone play fast and loose with their household\u2019s finances is more likely to solicit an emotional response from Generation Rent. Despite being chronically unemployed, Ethan will be fine, his friends say, because he has his parents\u2019 house to go back to. Except that he doesn\u2019t want to go home, so decides to inflict himself on an ex (as moving home, he reckons, would mean \u201c[paying] rent in bad vibes and homophobia\u201d).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Sam \u2013 artsy and queer like Ethan \u2013 ends up in an anarchist warehouse with a shared Mubi account, while Abi \u2013 northern, conformist, seemingly hiding all kinds of stress behind her rictus grin \u2013 moves in with her normie boyfriend Tom (Sean Delaney), and the cracks between the friends begin to deepen. \u201cYou want to pretend like you\u2019re an adult!\u201d Sam snaps at Abi. \u201cBetter than pretending I\u2019m a child,\u201d says Abi. Sick burn.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It Gets Worse is, in many ways, a classic sitcom about surviving your 20s, complete with intensely awkward sex scenes (\u201cPull out!\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not even in!\u201d) And yet there\u2019s a lot more going on here. Zadie Smith \u2013 at first inexplicably; later somewhat explicably \u2013 is our narrator. As well as Scott, Lena Dunham makes an appearance as the horrifying girlboss CEO of the data-mining startup where Abi works, and \u201cfellow badass white woman with zero fucks left to give\u201d. Amelia Dimoldenberg pops up as a university frequaintance who sparks Abi\u2019s jealousy. Every episode is named after the characters it features, except when they aren\u2019t (see: a chapter set at a funeral with the Auden-parodying title \u201cStop all the Cocks\u201d). There\u2019s an episode about a rather sexless sex party, which ends up feeling like a plot device for more beef between the characters, while references to \u201cincel\u201d culture, Andrew Tate and ChatGPT seem more like period-appropriate window-dressing than anything deeper.<\/p>\n

But, gladly, It Gets Worse is truly funny, propelled along by Reich\u2019s zinger-filled, often profound script. The cast are solid, too, not least Vicki Pepperdine as Ethan\u2019s highly-strung mum, plotting a move from the London suburbs to the Kent countryside because \u201calmost everyone we know has been stabbed\u201d. At the end of the second episode, Tom inadvertently calls Ethan a flop, to which he says: \u201cWe\u2019re too young to be failures \u2013 in 10 years, then we\u2019ll have failed.\u201d In 10 years, Reich will probably be running British television \u2013 and, you imagine, breathing a sigh of relief to have his 20s far behind him.<\/p>\n

It Gets Worse is on Channel 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his 2023 standup special Literally Who Cares?!, Leo Reich bemoaned the fact that his life wasn\u2019t more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":810983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-810982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}