Writer brings best to 'You're the Worst'

* YOU'RE THE WORST. 10:30 tonight, FXX.

A romantic comedy about two people who don't necessarily believe in romance, FXX's "You're the Worst" may not be as modern as it sometimes feels.

"I was always a big softy, always liked romantic comedies and John Hughes' stuff," "Worst" creator Stephen Falk said in an interview last month.

But "when I first sort of discovered screwball comedies, I was really taken aback by how much we had regressed in writing female characters" since the 1930s and 1940s.

"You're the Worst" returns for a second season tonight (moving from FX to FXX), with an episode in which a publicist named Gretchen (Aya Cash) and a British writer named Jimmy (Chris Geere) nearly kill themselves trying not to look like a conventional couple.

No worries.

Jimmy and Gretchen together may be slightly scary - Falk laughed when I said I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see them launch a killing spree - but they're not conventional.

For one thing, while neither's a grownup, it's probably Gretchen who has further to go, and Jimmy who may eventually help her get there. (Or not.)

"That's the nice thing about what's changing in our culture is that we used to want our women to be the idealistic woman and the sweet woman who tames the crazy guy and it's love that brings him down," Cash said in an interview.

"And now we're seeing the other way, with [Comedy Central's] 'Broad City,' with 'Trainwreck,' all these cultural references in our media that allow women to also be disasters," she said.

"You're the Worst" "came out of my sort of feminist desire to write strong female characters that didn't feel sort of typical and certainly didn't have the same kind of regressive romantic fantasies and dreams that I sort of grew up on, unfortunately, in a lot of the movies I watched," said Falk.

"I was a big fan of 'Mad About You,' back in the day . . . I just appreciated that there was a relationship I was watching that didn't look boring. That they actually seemed to like each other and had a good time together."

It didn't hurt that Falk was brought up on British comedies.

"My parents were big Anglophiles, so I grew up being force-fed shows that I thought were pretty boring at the time. But then some were brilliant," he said.

He said he was "watching jealously, as I created a lot of TV shows that never made it to air . . . watching those [British] characters get to behave in the worst possible way and then me constantly being given network notes, 'Make him more likable, don't do that, that makes him unlikable. Unlikable, unlikable, unlikable.' So it was really my desire to do sort of a boozy, British, cable version of 'Mad About You.' "

Falk, whose credits include "Weeds," "Orange Is the New Black" and an NBC sitcom starring Dane Cook that was canceled before it ever aired (see "unlikable," above), once worked as a recapper on Television Without Pity, one of the earliest websites to discuss TV shows episode by episode.

Story structure was "hammered in my head, absolutely. Having to sort of dissect television absolutely taught me how to do it. And moreover just having to pound out so many words" helped, too, said Falk, who wrote seven of the first season's 10 episodes and eight of this season's 13.

"I'd probably be a little saner if I outsourced a little more. And I probably will eventually . . . but I had a really bad experience at another network and I really wanted to make sure it was going to be done right."

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