‘You’re the Worst’ Creator on Season 4’s ‘Gross’ Sex, Jimmy and Gretchen’s ‘Temporary Breakup’

“You’re the Worst” is proving that there are consequences to abandoning someone immediately after she accepts your marriage proposal.

Stephen Falk, creator of the FXX comedy that airs its Season 4 premiere Wednesday, told TheWrap that Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) are apart in the premiere episode that picks up three months after he hopped in the car and left her in the dust.

“There was a betrayal, so this is the detailing the fallout of that betrayal, and we’ll see them apart for a good while, circling around each other, in each other’s orbits but not together,” Falk said. 

He also discussed the “gross” upcoming sex scenes, how this season’s tone compares with that of previous ones and how much longer he sees the show lasting.

TheWrap: The tone of this season harkens back a bit to that of the first season. Was that intentional?

Stephen Falk: I think that’s an interesting observation. We are aware of calibrating the seasons tonally and how they exist in the greater novel of the story, if you will, but I don’t think there was any effort to go back to any feel,” Falk said. “Having a nostalgic desire to reclaim some past glory is a recipe for bad storytelling. But I think having them be apart for at least the beginning of the season — I won’t say if that continues — may bring about some of that feeling.

It sounds like this season won’t be as dark as, say, the second season. Is it a challenge to strike the right balance for the show, and to keep the characters likable?

It’s certainly a challenge, but I think it’s more akin to being a chef – sometimes you’re making a dessert, and sometimes you’re making something hot and spicy. We’re always trying to calibrate the viewer experience and make sure the story we’re telling has wide tonal range but also the courses, the scenes, flow into each other that makes to your palate. This season has some wild sex scenes, per usual.

This season has some wild sex scenes. How do you find new directions to take these scenes, and do you ever get pushback from the network?

No, the network just has their normal rules in which they don’t want to be fined by the FCC or parental watch groups. But we don’t necessarily get mandates. I think the sex scenes we’ve come up with are really in collaboration with the director — what’s going to look good, but also what story we’re telling.

Is the sex scene supposed to be hot-and-dirty and fast-and-furious, or is it supposed to be gentle lovemaking? But also the general sex that we all have is inherently gross and explicit. The things that we do, the way that biology works –it’s gross, and things come out of us. We’re trying to portray, in not an X-rated way, how people actually bone.

Do you have a sense of how you want the show to end, and do you know when that might happen?

We’re always trying to follow the quote-unquote normal path of a relationship and a romance, and this is just one more phase of that — the temporary breakup. We’re following those signposts, like moving in together, saying I love you, now the temporary breakup. So I do have a path in mind. I do know where it’s going to end, but I don’t want it to happen anytime soon.

“You’re the Worst” returns Wednesday at 10/9c on FXX.