Leo Reich’s last one laughing halloween moment comes wrapped in It Gets Worse, a new A24 and Channel 4 sitcom that gives him a sharper TV platform after his 2023 standup special. At 28, he is no longer just the comic onstage; he is the lead face of a series built around Gen Z drift, London houseshare misery, and very public awkwardness.
The show puts Ethan, Sam, and Abi in motion as they leave a London houseshare, and the first comic image is physical damage: Ethan has put a ginormous hole in the wall with a drill. That kind of setup gives the series a clean business proposition for TV comedy viewers — a small, character-led premise with enough room for social humiliation, romantic failure, and the kind of dialogue Reich has already made his brand.
Leo Reich and 2023
Jack Dee Delivers in Last One Laughing Halloween Special Cast Debut may be a different title entirely, but the comparison is useful: Reich is now moving from standup specificity into longer-form TV, where a joke can breathe across an episode instead of landing in a single set-up and punchline. His 2023 special Literally Who Cares?! already framed early adulthood as a scramble between dating fantasy and modern panic, and that same voice now has a sitcom structure behind it.
The review puts the show in the orbit of Girls, Fresh Meat, and I Love LA, which is another way of saying Reich is being measured against a narrow but commercially legible lane: Gen Z comedy with cultural specificity. That matters because the series is not playing as broad nostalgia television; it is being sold as a current version of sitcom life, with houshare chaos doing the heavy lifting instead of plot mechanics.
Andrew Scott as Brian
Andrew Scott appears as Brian, a hookup who offers Ethan free therapy as foreplay, and the exchange immediately tilts the show from ordinary rom-com awkwardness into something stranger. When Ethan says he has not “lived through Aids,” Brian snaps back, “How old do you think I am?!” which gives the cameo a precise comic function: it punctures Ethan’s self-serious misery with a line that lands because it is so blunt.
Zadie Smith narrates the series, which turns the show into a guided tour rather than a straight-through sketch of youth confusion. Reich’s script can swing between the house-share argument — “You want to pretend like you’re an adult!” / “Better than pretending I’m a child,” — and the more barbed confession that he is “paying rent in bad vibes and homophobia,” while the narration keeps the whole thing from feeling like a string of disconnected bits.
One of the easiest lives
The review’s sharpest correction is that Ethan has had “one of the easiest lives in recorded human history,” even as he presents himself as trapped by modern misery. That contradiction is the show’s real engine: it lets the script mock millennial-style self-pity while still finding enough social damage in the houseshare, the awkward sex scenes, and the move-out spiral to keep the comedy pointed.
Reich’s life was not more like a TV comedy in his early 20s, which is why this series works best when it stops pretending hardship is the same as suffering. The best read on It Gets Worse is simple: Reich has taken the raw material of his stage persona, stripped it into a scripted character, and given it a cast and narration that can carry the joke farther than a standup set ever could.
