‘You’re the Worst’ showrunner looks beyond rom-com format
For four seasons, Stephen Falk set out to “subvert but still service” the romantic comedy genre with his FX half-hour series “You’re the Worst.” Therefore, in setting out to craft the fifth and final season, in which the central couple Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) are planning their wedding, Falk had some clear tent poles for the story in mind but also wanted to make sure the “event” element didn’t completely take over and change the tone of the show.
“We wanted to keep the momentum of the wedding planning going so as to make it always the gravitational force that was propelling the season,” Falk tells Variety. But, he adds, “when you’ve had a show that has really delved into clinical depression and PTSD and the way we treat our veterans in this country, then planning a wedding seems a little lightweight.”
That made Falk most mindful of making the moments on “You’re The Worst” always tie into the deeper internal conflict of his characters.
“Jimmy and Gretchen have slightly different attitudes as the season goes on, but also there’s the idea that when a couple gets married, the party’s over and it can put into stark relief the absolute singleness of your life or the fact that you’re probably going to die alone and are not necessarily going to be able to be a fifth wheel to the couple,” Falk says. “So it sends everyone off to reexamine their lives.”
For Lindsay (Kether Donohue) and Edgar (Desmin Borges), that means assessing where they are in their own relationship as well as where they are professionally. But it also expands out even further to characters including Becca (Janet Varney), Vernon (Todd Robert Anderson) and Paul (Allan McLeod).
“One of the central tenants of what I’ve tried to do in the rom-com is make sure that I’m always keeping alive the idea that we were all central to our own story and no one merely functions as a sidekick,” Falk says.
Following the formatbreaking episodes from earlier seasons (such as Season 2’s “LCD Soundsystem” and “Spooky Sunday Funday”), Falk also wanted to play with storytelling style in the final season, to go all-in on a “straight-up romantic comedy” moment.
“Jimmy and Gretchen are really kicking off their seasonlong story of planning a wedding in a way that’s very them — having fun with the very traditional step of finding a wedding planner (and) basically just lying and taking the piss out of this woman that they’ve written off within the first minute of sitting down. And in doing that, we get to tell a different story that is still part of our main characters’ story,” Falk says.
He continues: “In the five years we’ve been doing this show, television has changed a lot. … Now there’s more experimentation just because there’s 500 scripted shows and you have to stand out. We have an opportunity with 13 episodes and with a supportive network like FX and having done this for five seasons, now we’re like, ‘OK where can we afford to just take a pause and do a fun episode about X?’”
Since the show is a romcom at its heart, Falk knew he could never end the series with any of his characters “miserable” or it would be unsatisfying for the audience. However, he shares that the show is “keeping the question that is always at the heart of rom-coms — Will they or won’t they? — alive” in the final season.
Some of the central questions of the final season, Falk says, are: “Is this wedding going to happen or are they going to crash and burn before we get there? And then digging in even deeper, what does ‘getting there’ even mean? If you say ‘I do,’ does that actually mean a commitment that is greater than if you don’t?”