4) You’re The Worst – Sunday Funday
Half-hour romantic comedy sitcoms are a dime a dozen these days, popping into and out of existence as fast as you can say “Perfect Couples,” so preoccupied with hitting the least-common-denominator jokes they forget that any average viewer can smell a dud a mile away. FX’s You’re The Worst could literally not care less whether you like it or not. Case in point: the opening scene where we see Jimmy, our protagonist, filling up piles of disposable cameras with shots of his junk. The cameras were provided in goodie bags. He’s at a wedding. His ex-girlfriend is the bride. And he’s about to go home with one of her best friends.
But it’s not all showy oh-look-at-how-risqué-we-are humor here. You’re The Worst, the cynical masterpiece it is, doesn’t hate its two leads as much as its two leads hate one another, it revels in it. It’s a loving, endearing portrayal of two disastrous twentysomethings falling for one another. And after a sex-a-thon worthy of Cinemax on a Saturday night, Jimmy and Gretchen discover they maybe, kind of, not really, but might as well try it out anyway, sort of like one another.
It’s halfway through the season, in the episode “Sunday Funday,” that all of the show’s various moving parts click together unexpectedly. It’s the show finally admitting that its two side characters, Lindsey and Edgar, are actually worth spending time with, getting equal screen time as the two leads for the first episode in the season. And it sees the central relationship of Jimmy and Gretchen at an intriguing crossroads. The central conflict is at once hilariously byzantine and immaturely dunderheaded – Jimmy wants Gretchen to ask him if he wants her to stay in town; Gretchen wants Jimmy to say that he wants her to stay – which is perhaps the best phrase to use to describe the show as a whole.
Combine this with out-of-left-field observations such as the comparison of Daniel Craig to “an upset baby,” and the results are one of the season’s zippiest, crowd-pleasing episodes. There’s an evil hipster gang subplot that’s admittedly undercooked, and Lindsey still doesn’t get her full time to shine yet, but with gems like this, “You can not have a job and still hate Mondays, like Garfield,” “Sunday Funday” is undeniably You’re The Worst at its best.