It Gets Worse review: You’ll laugh, a lot – when you don’t wince – at Gen Z comedy series ★★★★★

Back in the Nineties, Friends was the embodiment of the wide-eyed aspirational yuppie dream.

Fleabag and its star and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge last decade gave us an altogether more embittered vision of modern living for a more cynical age.

Now It Gets Worse arrives, and the showcase for the seemingly effortless brilliance of fast-rising Jewish comedy star Leo Reich is – at least on the face of it – light years still further from the comfortable milieu of Friends.

Be warned: almost right from the start, this tale of three twentysomethings sharing a down-at-heel flat is decidedly not family viewing, with something to offend almost everyone somewhere along the way.

That’s thanks especially to the inability of Ethan (Reich) to exert even the slightest modicum of self-control when it comes to sex with any willing man who comes along.

Nor does this ineffably narcissistic overgrown baby know how to rein in the salvoes of his cruel whiplash tongue (with the targets including suburban Edgware, where his family have their home).

The scabrous narrator voice-over carries distinct echoes of Fleabag, and doesn’t entirely spare Ethan as it observes that the forebears of this utterly irresponsible happy-go-lucky jobless 24-year-old were refugees or victims of now forgotten diseases at the same age.

Then there’s altogether sweeter Abi (Emily Fairn), who longs only for a prematurely middle-aged domesticity with her awkward, painfully dull boyfriend Tom (Sean Delaney).

And artsy Sam (Olive Gray) isn’t quite the free spirit her sexually liberated lifestyle seems to proclaim, harbouring the vulnerability of an irredeemable romantic just below the surface.

In other words – absent the X-rated sex scenes and grimly accurate depiction of the current employment prospects for Generation Z, the mixture of laughs and – gulp – heartwarming moments isn’t entirely unrecognisable from the saga of the flatmates in Friends.

Writer and star Reich has talent to spare and an easy manner that allows his Ethan to dance between laughing-at and laughing-with moments, demonstrating shamelessness that knows no bounds in between dishing out cruel but often deserved barbs.

The cameos are extraordinary and suggest the word is out on Reich as a young man going places fast: look out for Andrew Scott as a therapist who is apparently entirely oblivious to his profession’s ethical code of practice, while Lena Dunham plays a distinctively hipster variant on the boss from hell for Abi (and yes, there is an unmistakable touch of Girls here too).

But the ultimate casting coup is the narrator: that’s the voice of novelist Zadie Smith. You can’t get cooler than that.

You’ll laugh – a lot – when you don’t wince at the more outre gags.

And underneath it all, there’s a compelling sense of credibility.

“Ethan had one of the easiest lives in recorded human history,” Smith’s narration tells us, and it’s easy to mock, but that’s not the full story for any of these lost souls in an uncertain world.