“It Gets Worse” is streaming now on Paramount Plus. All six episodes of Leo Reich’s A24 comedy landed at once on Friday, Nov. 6, as Paramount announced in October, and the Showtime original streams “only on the Premium Plan in the U.S.,” the release said.
Reich, who created and executive produces the show, plays Ethan. He described it to Entertainment Weekly as “the young person chaos of Girls meets the grotty, non-aspirational mundanity and British-ness of Peep Show.”
The show follows three university friends flailing in London, and Channel 4 premiered it in the U.K. on Oct. 22. Its synopsis calls Ethan, Abi (Emily Fairn) and Sam (Olive Gray) “Best friends from uni, soulmates for life, and dysfunctional roommates,” and then their landlord sells the flat out from under them.
How to Watch ‘It Gets Worse’ on Paramount Plus Premium
Premium costs $13.99 a month on Paramount’s site and “comes with Showtime titles and live CBS,” Decider noted, so the $8.99 Essential plan won’t get you in. The show’s Paramount Plus page lists each episode at 23 or 24 minutes and sums up the premiere in one line: “Newly evicted Ethan, Abi, and Sam hit a London gay club.”
Canada got the whole season two weeks early. “All six episodes are available for streaming on Oct. 22,” Bell Media said of Crave, where it’s a Crave Original. The Guardian’s review lists it on Binge in Australia from Oct. 29. Paramount’s release adds, “The series will also be available to stream on Paramount+ in Latin America, Brazil and Italy.”
“I’m over the moon to be working with the amazing teams at A24 and Channel 4 on It Gets Worse,” Reich said when Channel 4 ordered the series in February 2025. It’s also on Gayety’s November watch list of new gay movies and shows.
Who’s Who: Ethan, Abi, Sam and a Two-Minute Andrew Scott
Scott opens Episode 1 as Brian, “a hookup who offers Ethan free therapy,” in Decider’s words. (Yes, that clip.) In it, Scott’s therapist calls Ethan “just a hole for daddy” and spits in his mouth, and EW reported that the promo team released it for the show’s world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival.
“It felt like a bit of a twist on the Fleabag-Hot Priest dynamic, but in a really gay way,” Reich told EW. Of Scott’s screen time, he said, “He’s truly only in it for two minutes, but it was cool.”
Scott, whose Ian Charleson drama “Elsinore” opens in select U.S. theaters Nov. 20, has voiced no qualms about the scene, Gayety reported in October.
Lena Dunham, who cast Reich in her Netflix series “Too Much,” plays Greta, Abi’s boss at a data-mining startup, according to Decider. “A high millennial girl boss!” Reich told i-D, laughing. Her scene flips one of her own. “Lena’s cameo in the second episode is a bit of an inversion of one of the scenes in the first episode of Girls,” Reich told EW.
Author Zadie Smith narrates, and “Chicken Shop Date” host Amelia Dimoldenberg guest-stars. Blake Harrison turns up as a character written “as if his character in The Inbetweeners had grown up,” Reich said. “The cast also includes Sean Delaney as Tom, India Mullen as Zara, Dane Williams as Aaron and John Tothill as Leon,” Decider reported.
Mounia Akl directed, according to Channel 4, which added that “Emmy winner Matthew Lewis (Adolescence) is the Director of Photography.”
Critics Call Leo Reich a ‘Generational Talent’
As of Friday morning, the show held a 90% score from 10 critics on Rotten Tomatoes and an 80 from six reviews on Metacritic. Judy Berman, Time magazine’s TV critic, called it “TV’s sharpest portrait of the generation yet” in her premiere-day review.
Berman takes the show’s title as a jab at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project. “I would never say as much to Reich for fear of bringing about the millennial cringepocalypse, but we might have another voice of a generation on our hands,” she wrote.
“And if this is not a generational series, it is the first project of a generational talent,” Nicholas Harris wrote in the New Statesman.
The Guardian’s Hannah J Davies guessed Reich will be in charge of British TV within a decade, and in her review she called the show “truly funny.”
Metacritic quotes John Anderson’s Wall Street Journal review: “For all the surface cynicism, fatalism and nihilism, there’s a soulful core to the six-part series that feels very real.”
Adam White of The Independent was cooler. He gave it three stars and found it “often shaggy and ill-defined to a fault.”
Leo Reich on Being Gay at 12 and Writing Ethan
Reich told i-D he had a realization around age 12: “Oh god, I’m gay. I have to be a star.”
He didn’t build his characters around labels. “The identity thing [in the show] is quite flippant at surface level,” he said. “Between the three friends, class, race, gender, and sexuality all come up in conversation, and a lot of the difficulties they have with each other are because of those gaps in experience.”
The Guardian’s review describes Sam as artsy and queer, like Ethan. Reich told EW the show runs on “this tension between wanting to heal and get better, wanting to take control of your sexuality and your personality and wanting to be self-aware and self-critical, but also being too young, delusional, self-involved, narcissistic, horny, and insane to really be able to do those things in any kind of structured or sensible way.”
He came to TV from stand-up, and “Too Much” was his first screen acting job. “I’d never acted on screen before,” he told EW.
A24’s own show page ends its pitch with, “It has to get better than this. Right? Spoiler alert! It doesn’t.”
