It Gets Worse Review: A Messy, Funny Gen Z Comedy About Growing Up

Editorial note: This review assesses the series’ official premise, released episodes as described in public materials, and published critical responses. It does not claim a personal screening.

For three twenty-somethings in London, growing up was supposed to bring a little stability. In It Gets Worse, it brings a landlord selling the flat, work that fails to become a career, relationships that disappoint, and a city that seems to charge extra for every mistake. Created, written by and starring comedian Leo Reich, the six-part Channel 4 comedy follows Ethan, Abi and Sam as their shared home and carefully maintained excuses begin to collapse at once. The title is both the punchline and the show’s promise: if life is already embarrassing, the next step is probably more embarrassing.

The premise places the series in a familiar television lane: a group of young friends trying to become adults while living in a city that makes ordinary life feel financially and emotionally impossible. That territory has been explored by shows such as Girls, Big Mood and Chewing Gum, so the challenge is not simply to make the characters awkward or the dialogue fast. It Gets Worse has to explain why these particular friends matter to one another, and why their failures feel more revealing than a string of jokes about rent, bad dates and dead-end jobs.

Early responses suggest a deliberately divided effect. Some critics have praised the writing’s sharpness and Reich’s comic presence; others have found its portrait of Gen Z angst repetitive or too keen to observe itself. That tension is part of the show’s appeal and its risk. A comedy about self-awareness can use it to expose how people hide from their own choices, but it can also get trapped in commentary, leaving little room for characters to surprise themselves. This review looks at the series’ premise, ensemble and comic voice, and asks whether its bleak jokes add up to something emotionally generous.

For viewers interested in comedies about friendship and the uneasy transition into adulthood, this is a promising new British sitcom with a strong cast and a clear point of view. It is not designed as a glossy success story. Its central pleasure is watching three people fail together, occasionally help each other, and discover that survival may be the closest thing they have to a plan. Fans of messy, character-led television can also browse our guide to British comedy shows.

That mix makes the show a useful test of how contemporary comedy handles economic anxiety. It can acknowledge that precarious work and expensive housing are structural pressures while still allowing its characters to make choices, hurt one another and change. The six-episode season gives the premise a contained shape, but the trio’s friendship provides a longer-running question: will they stay close once the flat no longer forces them together?

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What Is It Gets Worse About?

Leo Reich as Ethan, Olive Gray as Sam and Emily Fairn as Abi sharing pints at a pub table in It Gets Worse

The six-episode, half-hour comedy follows Ethan, Abi and Sam, university friends who have moved to London and expected the city to become the start of a bigger life. A year later, the group has little to show for the move. Their landlord is selling the flat, so the roommates face the prospect of being separated across a city that is already testing their money, confidence and friendships. The official Channel 4 description frames the show around the mismatch between the future these young adults expected and the frustrating reality they are living.

That setup gives the series a practical plot and an emotional one. The immediate question is where the friends will live. The deeper question is whether they have built a genuine shared life or simply used proximity to delay decisions. Living together lets them treat every disappointment as a group problem; moving out could force each person to confront the parts of adulthood they have avoided. Their friendship is at once a source of comfort and a shelter from change.

It is a story about work as much as housing. A job can consume the energy required to find a better job; a bad shift can make a night out feel like the only available reward. The series places those pressures beside love lives and social expectations, showing how each small frustration can feed the next. A humiliating date may be funny in isolation, but it is less funny when it follows an unpaid bill and an exhausting day. That accumulation is the emotional logic behind the title.

London functions as more than a backdrop. It offers possibilities, people and reinvention, but it also makes everyday life feel expensive and competitive. The city’s promise can intensify the sense of failure: if opportunity is everywhere, the characters may conclude that their lack of progress must be their fault. The comedy gains depth when it makes room for the structural pressures behind their bad choices, rather than treating every setback as a personal failing or a quirky anecdote.

The series comes from Leo Reich, whose stage persona and previous comedy work have built a voice around anxiety, ego and the gap between how a person performs confidence and how they feel inside. Here, that sensibility is stretched across a group of friends. The show’s central question is whether Reich’s observational comedy can become a durable ensemble story, one where characters change because of their relationships and not merely because the next joke requires another disaster.

Cast and Performances

Lena Dunham as Greta, a company CEO, sitting behind her office desk in It Gets Worse

Reich plays Ethan, the figure closest to the series’ comic centre. Ethan’s instinct to narrate, rationalise and perform his own life gives the show a natural source of friction. A person who can make a joke out of almost anything may seem resilient, but that ability can also keep other people from seeing when he is hurt. The part suits a performer whose comedy is built on fast turns of thought and the ability to make confidence look faintly unstable.

Emily Fairn’s Abi and Olive Gray’s Sam complete the core trio. The show works best when the friends do not feel like alternate versions of one comic voice. Their different reactions to the same crisis should create the energy: one person jokes, one gets practical, another tries to keep the group from acknowledging what is about to happen. A friendship becomes vivid through these minor mismatches, the habits and irritations accumulated by people who know one another too well to stay polite.

Fairn brings a grounded presence that can temper the show’s more elaborate comic observations. Abi’s perspective matters when the group’s self-absorption threatens to turn into a closed loop. A friend who refuses to accept the clever explanation can reveal how little work the others have done to solve a problem. That gives the comedy a useful counterweight: the characters can be articulate about their predicament and still need someone to tell them what they are avoiding.

Gray’s Sam adds another distinct angle to the flat’s chemistry. In a series about people who use humour to protect themselves, a quieter or more guarded response can carry as much comic force as an outburst. The writing needs to let Sam be more than the person who reacts to Ethan’s energy. When Sam has their own wants and contradictions, the friendship becomes reciprocal rather than a main character surrounded by supporting voices.

The supporting cast brings a notable mix of comic and dramatic performers. Sean Delaney, Dane Williams, India Mullen and John Tothill join the main group, while guest appearances include Lena Dunham, Andrew Scott, Blake Harrison, Amelia Dimoldenberg and Vicki Pepperdine. That lineup provides the show with opportunities to push the friends into different social settings: work, family, dates, parties and the increasingly complicated world beyond the flat. Guest roles are most effective when they reveal a new side of the central trio instead of functioning only as a familiar face in a cameo.

The challenge for a six-episode comedy is giving every performer enough room to make the characters distinct. A concise season can feel energetic, but it leaves little time for a large supporting ensemble to develop. The show’s chemistry rests primarily on its leads, and viewers will respond most strongly if the script allows their bond to shift. The jokes can establish that the friends are funny together; small acts of loyalty or selfishness establish why the friendship survives the jokes.

For more conversations about how TV comedies build their characters, visit the That Love Podcast episodes page. Our article on shows like Schitt’s Creek also explores series that balance comic dysfunction with real affection.

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What Works: A Strong, Specific Comic Voice

The series has a useful point of view. It understands that young-adult anxiety is often less cinematic than television makes it appear. A character may not be facing a dramatic career collapse; they may simply realise their job has no next step, their savings are disappearing, and the flat they complain about is the only place they can afford. It Gets Worse can turn those conditions into comedy without pretending that they are trivial. The jokes become sharper when they emerge from a recognisable problem rather than a generic character flaw.

Its title gives the show permission to escalate. A disappointing evening can become an argument, an argument can become a housing crisis, and a crisis can reveal that the friends have misunderstood what they owe one another. Escalation is a classic sitcom tool, but it feels fresh when the mess comes from character. The best disasters are not random bad luck; they are the inevitable result of a decision someone made for a reason they can explain.

The show’s generational perspective can also be more than a topical hook. Its characters exist in an era of endless self-description, where people have language for boundaries, healing, ambition and attachment, yet may not know how to act when those concepts become inconvenient. That gap is fertile ground for comedy. A character can be fluent in the vocabulary of personal growth while repeating the same behaviour. The joke lands because the language is not necessarily false; it has simply not yet become practice.

The comparison with Girls is inevitable because both shows focus on young adults negotiating friendship, sex, identity and work in a major city. It Gets Worse can make the comparison productive if it is aware of the different economic and cultural pressures shaping its characters. The point is not to prove that one generation is more tragic or more ridiculous than another. It is to show how the same broad transition into adulthood changes under different conditions, and how old sitcom formulas can be adapted for a world where even modest independence can feel out of reach.

There is also value in keeping the season compact. Six half-hour episodes give the story room to develop without requiring the characters to manufacture a fresh catastrophe indefinitely. The format can give a clear beginning and endpoint to the housing crisis while leaving the friendships open-ended. If each episode turns the central problem a little, the season can feel like one extended comic movement rather than a collection of loosely connected sketches.

Early positive notices highlight Reich’s writing and the script’s willingness to move between absurdity and uncomfortable observation. That range is a strength. A joke about a humiliating social exchange can be followed by a pause in which the characters realise how much the exchange exposed. Comedy becomes more human when it lets the laughter complicate our view of the person who caused it.

Where It Can Falter

A comedy about anxiety can repeat its own diagnosis. The characters feel stuck; they discuss feeling stuck; the next scene supplies another example of being stuck. That structure is recognisable, but it can make an audience feel as if it is watching a set of observations rather than a story. Some critical responses have found the show less successful when its jokes pile up without a meaningful change in the characters’ situation. Self-awareness does not automatically create development.

The comparison with Girls carries a similar risk. A new series can use a predecessor as a reference point, but if every aspect of its identity is described as a generational update, viewers may have difficulty seeing what belongs to the characters themselves. A series about young adults needs more than contemporary slang and current anxieties. It needs a specific emotional pattern: the thing each character wants, the way they sabotage it, and the people who have to live with the consequences.

There is a tonal risk in treating bleakness as a personality. The show’s title suggests that every attempt to improve matters will make them worse. That can be funny for a while, but an endless parade of humiliation may become numbing. The audience needs variations: a small success that feels undeserved, a moment of kindness that arrives at the wrong time, or a setback that changes how the friends see each other. Without such shifts, the comedy may mistake misery for complexity.

Character sympathy is another balancing act. These friends are meant to be messy and sometimes self-involved; making them perfectly likeable would blunt the premise. But a viewer needs to understand why they remain connected. The answer does not have to be noble. Shared history, a private joke, or a habit of showing up after an argument can be enough. If the series shows only irritation, it risks turning friendship into a setup for insults rather than a relationship worth protecting.

The London setting can also become too convenient if its pressures remain abstract. High rent, precarious work and social isolation are real conditions, but they need to affect what characters can do. A joke about money has more force when the story shows an actual trade-off. If every crisis is resolved by a fresh night out or a new guest character, the economic premise may feel like decoration. The show is strongest when its material constraints shape the options, not just the dialogue.

Finally, a six-episode season may leave viewers wanting more evidence of how the trio functions outside the immediate crisis. The flat gives the series a central location and a shared problem, but moving out is also an opportunity to widen the world. The characters should not need to remain physically together to prove that the friendship matters. How they react to distance, new routines and separate decisions may be the series’ most revealing next step.

Friendship, Romance and the Meaning of Growing Up

The show’s most promising subject is not simply the awkwardness of being twenty-four; it is the way friendship can become a substitute for adulthood and a rehearsal for it at the same time. Ethan, Abi and Sam have built an arrangement where they share space, worries and comic deflections. That closeness can be supportive, but it can also make every individual choice feel like a referendum on the group. The question of whether they can remain friends while being dispersed across London is therefore emotionally meaningful, not just a plot device.

Romance adds another kind of uncertainty. Dating is an arena where the characters can attempt to control their image while being judged by someone who does not share their history. A bad date can produce a set piece, but its longer value lies in what it reveals: how the character thinks they are perceived, what they are willing to admit, and how they treat the people who are not impressed. The comedy can puncture the fantasy of finding a partner who will instantly solve a life that the character has not yet begun to organise.

Growing up, in this story, does not have to mean becoming polished or financially secure. It can mean accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions, learning when a joke is protecting someone and when it is dismissing them, and recognising that intimacy requires more than being understood. Those are small forms of development, but they suit a comedy about people whose lives are not moving in neat arcs.

The series can also explore how a generation describes itself. Contemporary language gives people ways to identify harm and communicate needs, but vocabulary does not guarantee insight. A person can explain the source of a problem and still avoid changing their behaviour. That contradiction is both funny and poignant. If the writing treats it with curiosity rather than contempt, the show can make its Gen Z perspective feel specific without assuming that every viewer belongs to the same age group.

The best relationships in comedy are built from repeated acts, not declarations. A friend saves a place, lies badly on someone’s behalf, or tells the truth at the least convenient moment. These moments are not grand gestures, but they create a history the audience can feel. It Gets Worse has the core ingredients for that kind of affection: three people in close quarters, a shared future that is no longer guaranteed, and enough comic friction to keep them honest.

Style, Music and Atmosphere

The series builds its atmosphere through crowded rooms and shared routines: a kitchen can become an office, confessional or battleground. Quick edits suit anxious chatter, while a held silence lets embarrassment land. Music can sharpen the gap between an imagined night out and an ordinary morning after. These choices make the flat feel temporary and the friendship lived in.

Is It Gets Worse Worth Watching?

Yes, particularly for viewers who enjoy British comedy that is willing to let its characters be embarrassing, self-involved and difficult to advise. The series has a compelling central setup, a fresh comic voice in Reich, and an ensemble that can make the small humiliations of city life feel both funny and recognisable. Its focus on a shared home gives the story a clear pressure point: the friends cannot simply avoid each other when a problem gets uncomfortable.

It may be less satisfying for viewers who want a conventional sitcom with a stable group of likeable characters and a clear lesson at the end of each episode. The show’s comedy leans toward mess, anxiety and anticlimax. Some scenes may feel more like sharp observations than a traditional plot turn, and the self-conscious tone will not work for everyone. Its best audience is open to comedy that treats confusion as a stage of life rather than a puzzle solved by a speech.

Its six-episode length makes it an easy weekend watch, though the episodes are likely to land best with a little space between them. The situations build on the friends’ shared habits, and the tonal range benefits from noticing the change from one character’s joke to another’s quiet frustration. It is a good choice for viewers looking for a new Channel 4 comedy, a London-set friendship series, or a Gen Z sitcom that balances humour with the cost of growing up.

The critical split is worth keeping in mind. Some reviews celebrate the series’ writing and candidness; other critics find the same approach too bleak or repetitive. That is not necessarily a reason to skip it. It is a clue to the kind of comedy it is: personality-forward, conversational and willing to make discomfort part of the joke. The question is whether the characters’ relationships keep that discomfort from becoming monotonous.

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Where to Watch It Gets Worse

In the UK, It Gets Worse is available through Channel 4’s streaming service. The six-part, half-hour series is made by A24 for Channel 4; Canadian rights are with Crave. Paramount+ lists the show in territories where it is available, so check local listings. See Channel 4’s official announcement or the Paramount+ series page.

Final Verdict

It Gets Worse has an invitingly simple comic premise: three friends expect adulthood to begin, and instead the flat, the work and the love lives all start to fail at once. Its strongest qualities are its precise comic voice, the pressure-cooker setting of the shared home, and a cast capable of turning social embarrassment into character detail. The show’s best observations come from the distance between knowing the language of self-improvement and actually changing a habit.

The series can also overplay its own bleakness. If each scene only confirms that the characters are stuck, its humour risks becoming a catalogue of misfortune. The writing needs to let friendship alter the trajectory, however slightly, and make each crisis reveal something the previous one did not. The early critical split captures that gamble: what some viewers will value as unsparing honesty, others may experience as an overlong joke about failure.

As a short, character-led British comedy, it is worth trying for viewers who like awkward ensemble stories and jokes with a note of sadness beneath them. It does not need to solve the characters’ lives; it does need to make their attempts to help one another feel real. Editorial review score: 7/10. A sharp, messy sitcom with a distinctive voice and real promise, though its cynicism can sometimes crowd out its warmth.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is It Gets Worse about?

It follows Ethan, Abi and Sam, three university friends in London whose landlord is selling their flat. As they face being separated, they try to manage work, relationships and the direction of their lives.

2. Who created It Gets Worse?

Comedian Leo Reich created, wrote and stars in the series. A24 produces the comedy for Channel 4.

3. Who stars in the main cast?

Leo Reich, Emily Fairn and Olive Gray lead as Ethan, Abi and Sam. The ensemble includes Sean Delaney, Dane Williams, India Mullen and John Tothill.

4. How many episodes are in Season 1?

The first season consists of six half-hour episodes.

5. Where can I watch It Gets Worse in the UK?

It is available through Channel 4’s streaming service in the UK. Check the current Channel 4 listing for episode availability.

6. Is It Gets Worse on Paramount+?

Paramount+ has a series page for the show, but streaming rights vary by territory. Confirm that it is available in your region before planning to watch there.

7. Is the series similar to Girls?

Both are city-set comedies about young adults, friendship, work and relationships. It Gets Worse has a distinct contemporary British setting and focuses on three friends facing a shared housing crisis.

8. Is It Gets Worse a comedy or a drama?

It is a comedy series, but its humour draws on anxiety, economic pressure and disappointing relationships, giving some moments a more reflective tone.

9. Is It Gets Worse worth watching?

It is worth sampling if you enjoy awkward, character-led British comedies and stories about friendship in early adulthood. Its deliberately bleak humour may not suit viewers who prefer a warmer, more traditional sitcom.

10. What is the review score for It Gets Worse?

This editorial review gives the series 7/10 for its sharp comic voice, strong premise and ensemble potential, while recognising that its cynicism can become repetitive.

More places to find reliable information: Read Channel 4’s official series announcement, its cast announcement, and the Radio Times review. Listen to more That Love Podcast episodes.