That’s always my favourite part of pitching anything: choose two really good things and say it’s a mix of those!” says the comedian with a slight smirk. Still, it’s 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 – making it the UK’s first true gen Z sitcom. In fact, it soon becomes clear that It Gets Worse is deliberately USP-less. We first meet Reich’s Ethan – “a middle-class loser gay guy” – and his pals Sam and Abi as they’re packing up their London flatshare, having been forced out because of a rent hike.
But this isn’t the start of a meditation on the cost of living crisis – or anything else. Following a stint in Footlights at Cambridge and a lockdown that birthed a few cleverly mordant TikToks (“for us, there were no rules! Apart from obviously don’t go outside,” he quips in one clip captioned “telling my kids about my wild 20s”), 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: “a deliriously self-involved, fragmentarily informed, habitually self-pitying, comprehensively cynical member of Generation Z”, 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 – unheard of for a fledgling British comedian. No wonder he’s been given carte blanche to bring his sensibility to TV.
It’s 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 – an awkward sex party – but still finds time to swing by the monitors to see how things are looking and – I quickly realise from the script in my hand – ad lib half of Ethan’s ludicrous small talk (there’s nothing on the page about Tutankhamun or the idea that as a society “we need to get back to the land”). Afterwards, in a liminal space upstairs, Reich is vaping and sipping a canned coffee.
He encourages improvisation: the show “is about mess and people being fucking stupid and delusional, so I think it suits a level of roughness … thank God!” Yet as a longtime standup fanatic (as a teenager he’d 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 “a sort of joke warden”, who steps in when “the rhythm’s a little bit out” in his castmates’ delivery. I notice one particular line about a party guest – “Leon’s cousin from Tring” – is non-negotiable in terms of both syntax and cadence.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
