Flavorwire: How did you pitch You’re the Worst? The marketing was very,
“Watch two people be awful to each other,” but that’s not what the show is
really about.
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Stephen Falk: I’ve always liked romantic
comedies and always wanted to do something in that area, but it always
felt
like you were at the throes of the cycle of old romantic comedies. I really
admire British comedies because they get away with more. They can show characters
who have some bad attributes, or bad behavior, and it didn’t feel like there’s
this need that American television had, to focus on likability — even if
characters are flawed, they’re flawed in very benign ways, like the girl is
clumsy or the guy forgets to clean up after himself. In American romantic
comedies you didn’t get to see genuine bad behavior, and so I took those two
ideas together and came up with this idea to do an updated Mad About You with characters that are a little more
reprehensible — or, I wouldn’t say reprehensible, but who exhibited actual bad
characteristics at times. But, at its heart, I stressed that I really did want
to make a very typical romantic comedy but in sort of new clothes.
There’s always discussion about how you can’t like or relate
to a show if the characters aren’t likable, which I think is false, but were
you wary of this going in? That maybe people wouldn’t connect because they
didn’t like the two characters?
I wasn’t
wary of it because I had started working in TV on Weeds, and that
was never a thing we thought about. Then I did a TV show that didn’t air, that
was a network show, so there was that
constant worry about likability. I found it difficult to do what I wanted and
to write the stuff that I think works best for my voice, which tends to be a
little edgier — I hate that word, “edgy,” but I guess that’s the way to say it
— and it was sanding the rough edges down.
