It Gets Worse review – Leo Reich is a rare star and the future of TV comedy

In his 2023 standup special Literally Who Cares?!, Leo Reich bemoaned the fact that his life wasn’t more like a TV comedy. “All 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,” he groaned. “And a lot less Googling the words ‘death toll’.” Reich was playing a caricature of a self-absorbed zoomer, who had taken up smoking during the pandemic because “some part of me decided it might be worth cutting 20 years off my life”. Behind this performance there was, of course, a rather big dollop of truth: life for gen Z has – for the most part – been less sitcom, more doom-filled rolling news bulletin.

Reich – now 28 – 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’s 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 – we are told at the outset – has had “one of the easiest lives in recorded human history”. There are hints of Fresh Meat, too, and traces of Reich’s comedy hero Simon Amstell in its dry neuroticism and Jewish-themed LOLs. Sometimes, it verges on the satirical – 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’t “lived through Aids” – Scott’s character, Brian, snaps back: “How old do you think I am?!”)

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’re all moving out and need their deposits back, except Ethan has somehow made a ginormous hole in the wall with a drill, and doesn’t 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 “my last therapist rimmed me”, but seeing someone play fast and loose with their household’s 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’ house to go back to. Except that he doesn’t want to go home, so decides to inflict himself on an ex (as moving home, he reckons, would mean “[paying] rent in bad vibes and homophobia”).

Meanwhile, Sam – artsy and queer like Ethan – ends up in an anarchist warehouse with a shared Mubi account, while Abi – northern, conformist, seemingly hiding all kinds of stress behind her rictus grin – moves in with her normie boyfriend Tom (Sean Delaney), and the cracks between the friends begin to deepen. “You want to pretend like you’re an adult!” Sam snaps at Abi. “Better than pretending I’m a child,” says Abi. Sick burn.

It Gets Worse is, in many ways, a classic sitcom about surviving your 20s, complete with intensely awkward sex scenes (“Pull out!” “I’m not even in!”) And yet there’s a lot more going on here. Zadie Smith – at first inexplicably; later somewhat explicably – 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 “fellow badass white woman with zero fucks left to give”. Amelia Dimoldenberg pops up as a university frequaintance who sparks Abi’s jealousy. Every episode is named after the characters it features, except when they aren’t (see: a chapter set at a funeral with the Auden-parodying title “Stop all the Cocks”). There’s 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 “incel” culture, Andrew Tate and ChatGPT seem more like period-appropriate window-dressing than anything deeper.

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