'You're the Worst,' TV's Finest Anti-Rom-Com, Wraps Perfectly

by Julian Spivey
“You’re the Worst,” television’s finest anti-rom-com rom-com, ended its run on Wednesday, April 3 after five seasons and 62 episodes with the series finale entitled “Pancakes.”
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The final season of the show was altogether frankly disappointing to me. I don’t know if at 31-years old I just don’t identify with these characters and their cynicism and hatred for things like I did when I started the series, but it just didn’t seem as fun anymore.

That being said, the series finale on Wednesday night was a perfect way to wrap up the series and relationship between Gretchen, played by Aya Cash, and Jimmy, played by Chris Geere. Gretchen and Jimmy have never had a normal relationship, especially as rom-coms typically go, which made “You’re the Worst” so enticing and exciting from the get-go. How were these two people who the show claims to be “the worst” ever going to make it? At no point during the show’s five seasons did we think there was a lock that these two would live happily ever after, which made the finale in which the leads are supposed to be married all the more interesting and exciting.

In the penultimate episode of the season after showing Jimmy a fantastic series of bachelor party events Edgar, played by Desmin Borges, who has been Jimmy’s best friend throughout the series but even more often his favorite punching bag, let Jimmy have it straight by telling him that he shouldn’t marry Gretchen because even though they clearly love each, they’re just not good for each other.

This leads to Edgar being replaced as Jimmy’s best man, but it’s something that obviously stays in Jimmy’s head throughout the finale. There have been snippets of flash-forwards sprinkled within the last few episodes of the season that hinted at the fact that Gretchen and Jimmy might not actually go through with tying the knot. Ultimately, when Jimmy realizes that Gretchen, who has done absolutely nothing to prepare for the big day, has farmed out her vows he blows up and realizes how right Edgar was. But it wasn’t so much that Gretchen and Jimmy didn’t belong together – they simply didn’t belong in a marriage.

Gretchen and Jimmy both blow off their wedding and go to a local restaurant for pancakes and beer where they come up with the perfect way to send “You’re the Worst” into the land of ex-television shows. They’re going to make the decision every day when they wake up whether or not they want to stay together without going through with some traditional way of life – it’s the perfect way for the show that never gave us a “normal” relationship.

Toward the end of the final episode is a montage that helps bring all of these previous flash forwards together and we find out that Lindsay, played by Kether Donohue, (always my least favorite character on the show, as she was often simply too much) is remarrying her ex-husband Paul, played by Allan McLeod, and the person who Jimmy has been dreading to see in the future is actually Edgar and not Gretchen, as many suspected. Edgar has moved on to New York where he’s prepping a television series about a popular crime podcast. Basically, in the future everybody is as happy as the universe in which this show exists is allowed to be – it’s fitting that Gretchen reminds Jimmy at the very end that she might one day leave everything behind and jump in front of a bus due to her clinical depression.

One final thing to touch on about “You’re the Worst” is that with the end of the series also comes the end of one of television’s best current theme songs, “7:30 AM” by Slothrust with its infectious “I’m gonna leave you anyway/I’m gonna leave you anyway/I’m gonna leave you anyway,” which was the absolute perfect pairing of theme song with the product the series gave us for five years. 

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