Last season saw You’re The Worst‘s Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash)’s whirlwind courtship culminate with them moving in together after Gretchen’s apartment burnt down in a freak vibrator accident. Now, season two picks up with these two misfits trying to fit together (and the destruction they leave in their path).
Rotten Tomatoes talked with stars Geere and Cash over the phone about what we can expect from season two from this anti-rom-com rom-com.
While season one made it clear that Jimmy and Gretchen have no problem with certain carnal aspects of adult life, these two still have a ways to go in terms of becoming full-fledged adults. Star Geere shared his thoughts on when adult life really starts.
“I think there’s a point where you go, ‘Things have to change here in order for you to progress individually.’ The battle for both [Gretchen and Jimmy] is that they have to progress individually, but also they want to progress as a couple and those two things are so different,” he said. “The first half of the series, really, is about them recognizing that they need to introduce compromise into their relationship now, which is something they’ve never had to do. I think when Gretchen has to do the simple task of just buying some towels, that’s the hardest thing ever because she’d never thought to have to do that before, but she wants to do it for many reasons, most of all, if she’ll ever admit it or not, because she wants the relationship to work as much as Jimmy does.”
“ I think that being an adult is being too tired to be young,” added Cash.
Aside from their appetite for each other, Jimmy and Gretchen also seem to have an insatiable appetite for food. Whether it’s cooked for them by Jimmy’s roommate Edgar (Desmin Borges) or ordered from Brite Spot in Echo Park, these two always seems to be stuffing their faces. “We ate every bite of everything you saw for six to ten hours a day. I ate waffles all day one day,” Cash said. “I had a heart attack worth of bacon in that diner scene,” Geere admitted.
This season there’ll be no shortage of food, but they’ve wised up about the “spit bucket.”
“Apparently props decided not to tell us about it last year,” explained Cash, who said that he and Geere still eat quite a lot. “But now if it gets too much, we spit.”
“It’s a lot of eating and drinking of brown water posing as whiskey and cigarettes which are just herbal, horrible things,” Geere added. “This isn’t a woe-is-us situation, but many, many takes later of all these things is a challenge that the spit bucket has helped us overcome.”
The highlight of last season for many was an episode called Sunday Funday (and not just for the line “Fun hipster s— is just poor Latino s— from ten years ago”), as Jimmy, Gretchen, Edgar and Gretchen’s BFF Lindsay set out to have more fun around Los Angeles than a bunch of hipsters they met at brunch.
“Sunday Funday comes back times 100. You’re gonna see Sunday Funday exponentially bigger this year,” Cash said.
Geere added that, production-wise, Funday Sunday is like a small movie. “We’re gonna struggle to beat it if we come back next year,” he said. “It was so much fun to do.”
Shot on location on the east side of Los Angeles allows the city to be as much a character as the main quartet. “I think L.A. has always been a character in this show and these people and their personalities exist in a very L.A. place,” Cash said. “That’s part of the fun of the show — that sort of micro-culture of L.A. hipsterdom. That continues and you’ll see more L.A. landmarks. We shoot all on location; there is nothing that’s shot on a set. So I think that helps bring an authenticity to L.A. — that we’re actually at these places. We’re actually at Brite Spot. We’re at Little Cave in Highland Park. We’re all over.”
The charm of a show like You’re The Worst comes from its ability to make you care about characters that you probably would probably never want to be stuck talking to at a party.
“Originally we were like these are terrible people and we need to play them as terrible people, but the genius of Stephen [Falk]’s writing is the fact that, in twenty-six minutes, he can take us from a place of kind of unforgivable things that they do and then turn it on its head in the end, with the real heart of the show.”
Geere thinks that the fact that the main characters are “terrible” is part of their appeal. “They’re terrible for a reason and what is that reason?” he posited. “I want to know why they behave that way. So we really explore those things this year. “
Jimmy and Gretchen are toxic people, but somehow aren’t a toxic couple. But in order to stay that way, the two of them will have let each other in and learn about each other. “You’re going to see them opening up and you’re going to learn new things about them as characters that you did not know in season one,” Cash said.
“And the impact of the knowledge of these things, the weight of the impact that that has on everyone individually — and then, therefore, in turn as a group — is something that we really tackle this year,” Geere teased. “By the end of the finale, I really hope people are like — rather than, ‘Oh, that was a different tone to last year’ — people will be like, ‘Wow. That’s so original that they’ve gone there with that,’ and hopefully they’ll be rooting for us even more.”
You’re With Worst season one is Certified Fresh at 80 percent. Season two airs on Wednesday, September 9, on FXX at 10:30 p.m.
