Aya Cash can make depression funny
Homegrown: Bay Area people and places on the screen
Aya Cash, a member of the talented ensemble on the edgy cult comedy “You’re the Worst” (10:30 p.m. Wednesday, FXX), has a theory about the viewing habits of TV fans: “I think we’re a little sick of watching perfection,” she insists.
That could be one reason Cash has received so many raves for her portrayal of Gretchen Cutler, who this season revealed to her livein boyfriend, Jimmy ShiveOverly (Chris Geere), that she has coped with clinical depression all her life.
Mental illness isn’t typical fodder for comedy, but “You’re the Worst,” now in its second season, has established itself as a show unafraid to get messy and take creative risks.
“It’s challenging and scary, but I want to do things that freak you out,” says Cash, a native of San Francisco who studied at the San Francisco School of the Arts. “I was definitely anxious when (the writers) started in on this arc. I wondered: Did we pull it off? Are people going to hate us?”
No worries. Cash has impressed critics and fans with a nuanced, awardworthy performance that has seen the character at first lash out at her friends and later tearfully sink into a shell as Jimmy struggles to “fix” her. Exasperated, he lately has found himself drawn to another woman.
“I feel like comedy and pain are related, and that comedy comes from pain of- ten,” Cash says. “Our show is trying to find the balance. So far, the feedback has been mostly supportive, and we feel like we’re getting it right.”
“You’re the Worst,” which concludes its season Dec. 9, was created and is executive produced by Berkeley native Stephen Falk, who told the Hollywood Reporter that he was drawn to the depression storyline as a way to convey the source of Gretchen’s personality flaws and explore how the disorder can complicate relationships.
“When we started thinking about depression, it clicked and made a lot of sense,” he said. “A lot of people in the creative community suffer from that, and we have a lot of experience with it. We decided to do something that immediately sounded like, ‘OK, that’s potentially boring and scary and something that would make the network immediately run screaming.’
“For all those reasons, it became something I couldn’t get out of my mind. We started running with it, trying to figure out how to make it visceral, interesting, at times funny and yet truly accurate for Gretchen’s journey, because clinical depression takes a lot of different forms.”
The storyline, Falk added, “will play out in a very satisfying way.”