Stephen Falk Reveals Favorite "You're the Worst" Moment

[JamesG]

I wrote the end scene to my pilot for "You’re the Worst" on a train from San Diego (where I’d gone to hole up in a hotel and write the pilot) to Los Angeles. As the climax of this burgeoning love story between two damaged narcissists, it needed to thread a very fine needle in order to make the audience root for our heroes while avoiding the pitfalls of rom-com cliché.

The scene is a split-screen phone call between Jimmy (Chris Geere), who cannot find the correct porn video he needs to masturbate himself to sleep to, and Gretchen (Aya Cash), who has just slept with the A-list director she’s in love with but who, in turn, treats her like crap, and now finds herself pathetically sitting in his bathtub doing cocaine, wondering what her life has come to.





After admitting she stole his car earlier that day after their first fight, the climatic moment of the scene comes when Gretchen blurts out to Jimmy a potentially shameful admission from her past — that she set fire to her high school to get out of a math test.

The admission is a bit of a test itself, and indeed she expects disapproval. Instead, Jimmy giggles and says, “That’s genius,” and then moves on, as narcissists do, to talking about himself.





In that moment, Gretchen hears that her dark parts are not judged by this dude, nay, they are accepted. And it is that fear of being judged that, to me, is the scariest part of giving yourself to another. And in Jimmy laughing at the confession which minutes earlier her director bedmate found horrifying, he reveals himself to be Gretchen’s soul mate — though she’d punch you if you said that to her.

The scene ends with Gretchen similarly not judging Jimmy (for having a foot fetish), but indeed helping him awkwardly through a fantasy, proving that phone sex can be romantic, if the heart, no matter how cynical, dark, and damaged, is in the right place.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwiesel...uff#.mfgXNnGBY