‘I’m lovingly making fun of everyone I’ve ever met’: on the set of Leo Reich’s gen Z sitcom

The comedy wunderkind shot to fame with his show Literally, Who Cares?! and a role in Lena Dunham’s Too Much. Now he’s bringing his take on self-involved zoomers to the TV screen. Just don’t call him the voice of a generation

L eo Reich’s new Channel 4 sitcom is “Girls meets Peep Show. That’s always my favourite part of pitching anything: choose two really good things and say it’s a mix of those!” says the comedian with a slight smirk. Still, it’s a fair summary: It Gets Worse is a bracingly candid, occasionally provocative hangout comedy about twentysomethings floundering professionally and personally in the big city that comes accompanied by a strong stench of British bleakness (see: the title, for a start). Yet it does fail to flag one key aspect. While Girls and Peep Show covered the travails of millennials and gen X respectively, It Gets Worse is happening now, making it the UK’s first true gen Z sitcom.

Or not. “I’m sceptical of the idea that generations have any real unifying features across the board, so I don’t want it to be like: this is a gen Z sitcom!” says the 28-year-old. In fact, it soon becomes clear that It Gets Worse is deliberately USP-less. We first meet Reich’s Ethan, “a middle-class loser gay guy”, and his pals Sam and Abi as they’re packing up their London flatshare, having been forced out because of a rent hike. But this isn’t the start of a meditation on the cost of living crisis, or anything else. “The point isn’t there’s some big concept where everyone’s a superhero, it’s: these are some people dot dot dot.” When I ask how closely the final show resembles his original idea, Reich looks askance. “The idea, I would say, was quite broad …”

I’d wager that the real idea, the main idea, the only idea, was to give a sitcom (any sitcom) to Reich, who since the pandemic has established himself as the future of comedy with remarkable ease. Following a stint in Footlights at Cambridge and a lockdown that birthed a few cleverly mordant TikToks (“for us, there were no rules! Apart from obviously don’t go outside,” he quips in one clip captioned “telling my kids about my wild 20s”), Reich took his debut standup show to the Edinburgh fringe in 2022. Literally, Who Cares?! saw him pose as a heightened parody of a stereotypical zoomer: “a deliriously self-involved, fragmentarily informed, habitually self-pitying, comprehensively cynical member of Generation Z”, as a celebratory New Yorker profile put it the following year. (A British reviewer likened his character to a 21st-century Rick from The Young Ones.) Reich performed his ingenious script, which merged pastiche with drolly accurate observations about the modern world, looking like a pre-Raphaelite club kid: dramatic eye shadow, short shorts, mop of curls. It was an immediate hit, and swiftly picked up for a HBO special, unheard of for a fledgling British comedian. No wonder he’s been given carte blanche to bring his sensibility to TV.

It’s an autumn day when I visit the set of It Gets Worse in south-east London, where a former spice warehouse is doubling as the squat Sam has moved into. Reich is in this scene, an awkward sex party, but still finds time to swing by the monitors to see how things are looking and, I quickly realise from the script in my hand, ad lib half of Ethan’s ludicrous small talk (there’s nothing on the page about Tutankhamun or the idea that as a society “we need to get back to the land”).

Reich may shrug off any voice of a generation label, but It Gets Worse does feel distinctly of the moment. That’s partly thanks to the protagonists: “a campy gay guy, uptight northern girl and mixed-race artist” have typically been restricted to “side character” status on screen in the past, he says. But it also has a lot to do with that depressing title. While gen Z isn’t a monolith, its members do all have something significant in common: they are coming of age during the permacrisis, the omnipresent financial, political and ecological precarity that is making the future feel hopeless for many. “Trying to say this without being cringe, but it’s a very specific time to be looking down the barrel of the rest of your life,” says Reich. “All of these traditional institutions like marriage and climbing the career ladder don’t really exist, or if they do exist you can’t trust them. There’s a vague sense of massive anxiety.”

Reich is, presumably, not feeling the fear to quite the same degree. Since his breakthrough he has appeared in Lena Dunham’s Netflix comeback Too Much (she returns the favour here by playing Abi’s boss, one of a host of big-name cameos including Andrew Scott and Zadie Smith) and now, obviously, has his own sitcom. But that doesn’t mean he can’t identify with his characters. It Gets Worse isn’t an issue-led drama but an attempt “to recreate a mood or feeling of helplessness, which isn’t about success in a brutal material way. It’s an existential feeling of being lost and stupid and not knowing what to do.”

In the show, all three leads have “radically different responses to the broader existential anxiety”, says Reich. Ethan sees himself as “a charming clown” whose philosophy is “fuck it, let’s just have a laugh, live in the moment so you don’t have to plan your future”. He is easily the luckiest of the trio, his living situation is solved when he moves back in with his London-based mum (a sublimely irritable Vicki Pepperdine), but far from aspirational. There’s an arch Fleabagian nihilism to his humiliating sexual experiences (including one with a therapist played by Scott), which dovetails with the sense that Ethan is “being fucked by life but kind of enjoying it”, says Reich, who tends to think of sex as inherently hilarious (“it’s such an insane thing to do!”).

Meanwhile, Abi, played by Emily Fairn (The Responder, House of Guinness), takes the good girl route, chasing the hallmarks of an Instagrammable lifestyle via industrious perfectionism. Sam (Olive Gray) is a tutor and wannabe writer who pursues the same meaning and control by building her “own kind of life and rejecting social norms”, says Reich. Her cynicism has also led to a kind of radical independence. “I think,” says Gray, “that she’s the type of person who believes no one owes anyone anything and everyone is responsible for themselves, to her own detriment and the detriment of the people around her, unfortunately.”

Unlike many messy millennial dramedies, It Gets Worse clearly aims to replace myopia with multiplicity. Fairn appreciated the show’s acknowledgment of class dynamics, like how “Ethan makes fun of Abi for working so hard, but that’s how she affords her rent”. She was encouraged to keep her native Liverpool accent and channel her own experiences as a “working-class northerner” into Abi, who leans into or plays down her accent depending on the situation, and occasionally slips in some scouse slang. (It was Fairn’s suggestion for Abi to call Sam a “jarg writer. Leo was like: I don’t even need to know what that means, that sounds hilarious!”)

Even so, Ethan is quite obviously the comic engine. Like Reich himself, he is winningly self-deprecating, disarmingly frank, hyper-articulate and endlessly amusing company. There is naturally some crossover between him and Reich’s chronically narcissistic persona in Literally, Who Cares?! (he’s another “quite irritating gay guy because I can’t really do anything else”), but Ethan is aware of his own ridiculousness and can laugh at himself. And whereas the standup show was a precision-tooled piece of satire, It Gets Worse is a heartfelt paean to friendship and, in a weird way, a bit of “wish fulfilment” for its creator: he’s never lived in a grotty flat with friends, moving straight from his parents’ home to his own place.

That said, any sentimentality is countered by a fierce joke rate, plus Reich’s aversion to cosy earnestness: he is still trying to send up his peers, just in a slightly more subtle way. “Sometimes I want to be made fun of by TV and I think the point of this is really lovingly making fun of everyone I’ve ever met.” Despite the real difficulties faced by gen Z, this is ultimately a show about “people who don’t have really, really serious problems complaining all the time”. For that reason, he’s anticipating at least some intergenerational pushback. “I don’t know if everyone’s always in the mood to hear a fine 27-year-old going: actually, being kind of scared of the future is really hard! It’s like: well, it’s not!”

It Gets Worse begins 14 October on Channel 4 in the UK and Binge in Australia on 23 October.