Lena Dunham sits behind a desk in the glassy, millennial-pink offices of a tech startup, monologuing away like someone who has just devoured all of Lean In in a single sitting. “You need to advocate for yourself,” her character insists. “Women need to stop apologizing, especially at work.” A few minutes later, she’s quizzing a co-worker about her sexual practices.  

This is not a scene from the recently announced Girls revival, though it certainly looks like it could be. Dunham is not the star of this British comedy, It Gets Worse, premiering Nov. 6 in the U.S. on Paramount+. She’s in just a handful of scenes as the casually inappropriate CEO of a girly-branded data broker. Her guest appearance functions as both a self-aware gesture from the quintessential millennial and an implicit passing of the messy-young-adult torch. We watch her offer an entry-level position on her company’s “people team” (which she describes as “a lot like HR, only you don’t need any training”) to an intern, Abi (Emily Fairn). This is no dream job. It’s not even the job you endure in hopes of working your way up to something remunerative and fulfilling. But for Abi, one of the bleakly humorous series’ main characters, it’s an achievement worth celebrating—because she is an overeducated young London transplant in 2026. Welcome to contemporary 20-something life, as seen through the already weary eyes of an actual 20-something: creator and star Leo Reich. The latest in a flood of Gen Z hangout comedies, it’s TV’s sharpest portrait of the generation yet. 

The series spends half of its six-episode first season introducing each of its three leads in turn, best friends from college who are being evicted from their shared flat and must scatter to temporary lodgings for the few weeks it will take to get their new place ready. Reich’s Ethan is a lightly spoiled, reflexively self-deprecating gay man whose search for love and direction is hampered by his aversion to seriousness and the fact that he has no idea what he wants. The voiceover narration—from Zadie Smith, what a flex—that frames the characters’ misadventures in ruminative yet unsparing fashion notes that he has “one of the easiest lives in recorded human history.” Abi is the conventional one, diligently striving in the white-collar world for mundane material comforts. A big part of that image is her boyfriend, Tom (Sean Delaney), a possessive, friendless but well-meaning guy in his 30s who musters more enthusiasm for cooking miso lamb chops than for sex. Finally, there’s Sam (Olive Gray). An aspiring writer who tutors rich kids to pay the bills, she radiates maturity. But when she takes a makeshift room at the anarchist coop where her ex-girlfriend (India Mullen) lives, the proximity tests her cool.

It Gets Worse shares some late-coming-of-age storylines with its counterparts from the Girls era and earlier. There are relationships stuck in gray areas, career paths that feel like pyramid schemes, nights out that turn into existential crises, parents who just don’t understand. (“I would pay rent in bad vibes and homophobia,” says Ethan, by way of explaining why he doesn’t want to spend the next couple of weeks with his judgmental mum. When pressed, he admits that she is not especially homophobic.) But as its title—an apparent swipe at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, whose promise to LGBTQ youth looks a bit shortsighted in retrospect—suggests, the show harbors none of the optimism that Gen Z depressingly attributes to millennials. Its rejoinder to Friends’ cheery refrain that early adulthood is the time when your friends are your family is that your friends only become your family because your actual family sucks, dating is a nightmare, you can’t afford to live on your own, and no one else takes you seriously. Also: None of this is a phase. For Reich, a comedian and actor who had a small role in Dunham’s underappreciated Too Much, the liminal period doesn’t end when you achieve your goals, because that’s never going to happen. It goes on until the world ends, and that might be soon.

Yet for all that it channels a generation’s sense of creeping, banal doom, this isn’t Backrooms: The Series. Nor does Reich invoke the climate crisis or AI’s impact on the job market every two minutes. His roasts of older cohorts, like Dunham’s good-sport performance, don’t announce themselves as such. (Another funny millennial jab is the scowl that crosses a younger character’s face when they spot Tom’s framed photo of Anthony Bourdain.) It Gets Worse is a comedy of lowered expectations—a topic that’s ripe for gallows humor. Sending up his elders’ impotent offerings of pity for people his age, Reich has Ethan pass on the sentiment to someone even younger: “This is the worst time ever to be seven.”

It’s this delicate balance of humor and insight that differentiates the show from the barrage of other Gen Z hangout comedies (many of which owe a similar debt to Dunham and Girls) that have emerged in the past two years. With cultural references so vague it’s hard to tell when the series is supposed to take place, Benito Skinner’s higher-ed sitcom Overcompensating plays like a throwback. Even more dated is Mindy Kaling’s Not Suitable for Work, which is ahistorical enough to pretend that being a new grad in New York hasn’t changed since the Must See TV era. Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA feels current and might make you laugh, but it’s allergic to introspection. The only worthy competition, so far, is Adults, a zanier, higher-energy show in the tradition of Broad City and Happy Endings—and one that gained some depth in this year’s great second season. It’s probably funnier, scene for scene, than It Gets Worse. But it isn’t even aiming for the level of realism that the latter so convincingly achieves. 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.