Review: It Gets Worse Puts Girls’ Brutally Honest Gen Z Spin to the Test, With Mixed Results
A house share falls apart
A year after moving to London, Ethan, Abi and Sam learn their landlord wants them out of their first shared home. With a new contract approaching, they need to find another place to live.
Their housing search soon becomes only one of several problems. The friends drift apart, enter toxic relationships and face increasingly questionable situations before moving back in together.
A bleaker Girls comparison
The series recalls Girls, Lena Dunham’s 2012 HBO show, which was praised for portraying young women navigating adulthood. Dunham’s involvement in It Gets Worse is described as a kind of passing of the baton to a new generation.
But Reich’s series takes a more pessimistic view. Its characters question whether their humiliations will end, while the show’s answer, as its title suggests, is no.
Freedom and its costs
The story examines the difficulty of making friends as a young adult, especially when social life centers on sex, partying and proximity. Moving to London promises jobs, money and independence, but the series dwells on what that freedom can feel like after university.
Ethan, Abi and Sam struggle with depression, dread and a diminished sense of their own worth. Their lives leave them feeling at the mercy of people and circumstances rather than in control of what comes next.
Sharp jokes, unusual narration
Reich’s writing is wry and willing to shock, using generational stereotypes and self-awareness for comedy without losing sight of the people caught up in them. The show embraces a messy, anti-perfectionist sensibility, with references to MUBI, Monzo, Hinge, ChatGPT, negroni sbagliatos and turmeric shots.
Novelist Zadie Smith narrates the abstract, poetic writing of Sam, played by Olive Gray. The review says those passages gradually recede once it becomes clear they do not necessarily explain the friends’ behavior.
Key points
- It Gets Worse follows Ethan, Abi and Sam as their London house share and friendships unravel.
- The series echoes Girls while presenting a markedly bleaker take on young adulthood.
- Wry writing and a Gen Z sensibility stand alongside characters the review finds hard to sympathize with.