Unlikeable characters spouting tired gags... this Gen-Z sitcom's just a mess: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Channel 4 comedy It Gets Worse

It Gets Worse (Channel 4) 

Rating:

No generation has ever faced such struggles as Gen Z... or so they love to think. 

Truth is, everything now is much the same as it's always been – including the jokes.

Workshy Ethan (Leo Reich, the writer and star of It Gets Worse) claims he's living on money left to him by his mother. 

When he gets caught out, he admits she's alive and adds, 'It just sounds way better than saying she gave it to me.'

That gag is at least a generation old. Steven Moffat used it in his comedy Coupling, more than 20 years ago, when geeky Oliver spun the same lie about an inheritance, and trotted out the same justification when the lie was discovered.

Coupling and It Gets Worse are versions of the same set-up, sitcoms about young people who have to grow up whether they like it or not. 

'All I want', whines Ethan to his therapist, 'is ten years of my life where I wouldn't have to worry about anything.

Is that too much to ask?'

Ethan shares a flat with two friends from uni, Abi (Emily Fairn) and Sam (Olive Gray). 

Each episode follows one character's viewpoint, so we don't yet know much about Sam. 

This is a blessing, because the opening double bill told us far more than anyone could ever want to know about the other two – particularly their sex lives.

Abi is an HR intern at a media start-up, which is a fancy way of saying she sits at the reception desk, counting the minutes till it's time to take a coffee to her obnoxious American boss (Lena Dunham).

Ethan has sex with anything in trousers, including that therapist (Andrew Scott). 

Channel 4 must imagine that Gen Z viewers are going to relate to these people, but all I can see is a derivative, aimless mess with delusions of relevance.

Since Phoebe Waller-Bridge had an unexpected hit with Fleabag ten years ago, it feels as though every new comedy has looked like this – a bunch of shallow, unlikeable, promiscuous characters, estranged from their families and cobbled together as friends. 

They're always broke, and they never stop complaining.

Each new series arrives with great fanfare, promising to break the mould of comedy when in fact they're all identikit flop-and-forget products.

It Gets Worse does feature star names in cameos, but a single scene is never enough to create more than a cardboard cutout with a few forced one-liners. 

You've just got time to say, 'Oh look, that's Vicki Pepperdine as Ethan's stereotypical, homophobic, fusspot mum,' and she's gone.

Novelist Zadie Smith supplies a voiceover that tries to be satirical, pointing out that Ethan has 'one of the easiest lives in recorded human history'.

But Zadie is the archetypal Millennial. It's not so long ago that her generation thought they were the special ones.