Leo Reich’s gets worse is now headed to Channel 4 as a London hangout comedy about twentysomethings floundering professionally and personally. The 28-year-old creator-star is putting the show on television after building momentum from standup, a fringe run and a special. He still talks about it like a sketch of people, not a lecture on a generation.
Reich and the flatshare fallout
Reich first met Ethan, Sam and Abi when they were packing up a London flatshare after a rent hike forced them out. That setup became the engine of It Gets Worse, with Reich playing Ethan, described as a middle-class loser gay guy, and the story moving into the friction of shared adulthood rather than a neat premise. On set in south-east London, he still had time to swing by the monitors and ad-lib half of Ethan’s small talk during an awkward sex party scene.
“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!” Reich said. “The point isn’t there’s some big concept where everyone’s a superhero, it’s: these are some people dot dot dot.”
2022 to HBO special
In 2022, Reich took his debut standup show Literally, Who Cares?! to the Edinburgh fringe, and that show later led to a HBO special. Before television, he had already found a following through Cambridge Footlights and lockdown TikToks, which gave Channel 4 a creator with a built-in comic rhythm and a clear point of view. The move to a sitcom turns that stage persona into a longer-form lead role.
Reich also described the series as “the UK’s first true gen Z sitcom,” while resisting the label in the same breath. “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!” he said. That contradiction is the most interesting thing about the project: the marketing needs a generation tag, but the creator wants the comedy to survive without one.
Channel 4’s 28-year-old lead
The show’s broad idea stayed broad, Reich said, and that may be the smartest route. “The idea, I would say, was quite broad …” he said. In practice, that leaves It Gets Worse with room to lean into character business instead of locking itself into a thesis about Gen Z, which is usually where these projects go thin.
What matters now is the shape of the series, not a slogan. Channel 4 has Reich in a lead role, the set is built, and the show is already being sold as a London comedy about people stuck between ambition and embarrassment. The only missing piece is the broadcast date, which is the detail viewers will be waiting for next.
