This past week two shows indulged in one of the most bizarre modern TV tropes, "I need to get my kid into a super-expensive, super-exclusive preschool." It's an LA thing that the other 300 million Americans have no concept of, outside of seeing it appear over and over on TV. TV executives fall into the weird category of rich-enough-to-spend-thousands-of-dollars-on-preschoool-but-not-rich-enough-to-guarantee-a-spot, and so the fraught drama of getting a kid into preschool keeps popping up endlessly because it keeps popping up in their lives.
Both Grandfathered and You're the Worst utilized this trope in starkly different ways, revealing why one of those sitcoms is among the best shows on TV and the other is, well, not.
Grandfathered embraced the trope in the most conventional sense possible. Due to implausible circumstances, main character Jimmy (John Stamos) has to take his granddaughter to a preschool open house. Yes, a preschool open house. Already the plot has gone off the rails in under two minutes. Unwilling to openly admit he's a grandfather, Jimmy lies and says Edie is his daughter. Naturally his son Gerald (Josh Peck) shows up and the kind of wacky shenanigans this plot always involves kicks in, Jimmy and Gerald have to pretend to be a gay couple because the super-exclusive preschool wants more gay families.
It's groan inducing. In fact, two straight people pretend to be a gay couple to get their child into preschool has been done at least twice in recent memory, Baby Daddy and Cougar Town. And Two and a Half Men just dedicated its entire final season to two straight men pretending to be a gay couple, so there's that. To the show's benefit it at least has someone point out that it is an episode about straight people trying to benefit from the advances of gay rights without going through the struggle and oppression. But really it just is an incredibly lazy version of terrible plot.
Normally in these plots some outside complication arises that eventually causes the charade to fall. In Grandfathered a single day of pretending to raise a child is so psychologically traumatizing to Jimmy, that he makes out with the very female admissions officer of the preschool who randomly shows up at his restaurant. And by pretending, I mean that some people came over and put up fake photographs, brought some toys over and did a little rudimentary baby proofing in his apartment. Everything falls apart in the interview because the admissions officer does her job instead of lying for the sake of someone she barely knows.
Meanwhile there is a subplot about Gerald's mother, Sara (Paget Brester), trying to convince the family that a normal daycare is good enough. She discovers that the daycare she used for Gerald is extremely dangerous and completely dilapidated.
In the end what the show chose to reveal about its characters in this episode is that Jimmy is so vain he compulsively lies, he cares more about even just the perception of his swinging single life than his granddaughter's well being, and that Sara was a bad mother. Obviously no one learns anything. The gravitational pull of that terrible idea for a plot dragged all the characters into the worst possible characterizations, with no reward for going there.
You're the Worst normally starts out with characters the show labels as awful in its own title. That's part of its charm. But "LCD Soundsystem" breaks the format from the beginning of the episode. It introduces two characters, Lexi and Rob (Tara Summers and Justin Kirk), that have never existed in the show's universe before. The first act of the episode is just a little slice of their day, with only the most minimal acknowledgement that they exist within the neighborhood of You're the Worst's main characters Jimmy and Gretchen.
Lexi and Rob are presented as having very successfully negotiated the transition from wild 20s to adulthood (and parenthood) while never losing their innate coolness. They have everything that Gretchen wants from life without losing the aspects of her personality she most likes.
Almost immediately in the episode Lexi and Rob discover that they have one of those big preschool interviews coming up. Lexi bemoans that they've become a cliche which artfully foreshadows just how much of a cliche every aspect of their lives will be revealed to be as the episode unfolds. It's critically symbolic as the upcoming interview is the only naturally occurring motivation they have in the episode (Gretchen's intervention into their lives by taking their dog being decidedly unnatural). It keeps reinserting itself into the narrative in unexpected ways.
No matter how much Lexi might state resistance to the interview, she barrels forward with grim determination. The episode regularly undermines Lexi's statements with her actions. As just one example, she first dismisses Rob's concerns about pot smoking, but then forbids drinking that night, only to wind up drinking herself before the night is over. Lexi's mild hypocrisy throughout the episode underlines her statement 'To be a slave to an idea of coolness is why some of your friends never grow and in the end are actually less themselves, and counter intuitively live less authentic lives than the buyers-in.' It's exactly what Gretchen wants to hear. She already made a similar statement, almost word for word. But Lexi, who lives it, ultimately reveals the idea to be nothing more than a self-justifying platitude.
The preschool interview ultimately symbolizes all the unstated problems in the relationship. Lexi is buying in, and her cool-girl persona is nothing more than a superficial shell. She's driving their relationship to a normalcy where who they used to be is a cosmetic shell. Rob, meanwhile, is not buying in. He's just there out of inertia. There are all sorts of indicators showing Rob's dissatisfaction. He plays a Gameboy and discusses how fun it is. He is very eager to talk about how he and Lexi met by a quick hookup in a rock club bathroom. The fact that he cares much, much more about the missing dog than the preschool interview.
Rob's primary reaction to the interview is initially just not to care about it, and then to only care about how it will impact his life. Specifically he wants to smoke pot, and then later in the episode drink. And he utilizes it to comment on how Lexi has changed (she isn't smoking pot much anymore). It's small comment, but one that starts to crack open how they have changed and are starting to become incompatible. When Rob suggests postponing the interview, she looks at him as if he just asked her to murder someone before asking "why would we do that?" Rob doesn't care about the interview, he only cares about the dog he has had since before he met her. It's an intractable issue that only fails to become a full fight only because Gretchen shows up with the dog.
Gretchen and Jimmy spend some time at their house, where Gretchen gets an even closer look at everything she thinks she wants. She sees this perfect life as social conscious, cool, aging hipsters living an upper class life without all socially-oppressive bullshit such a life is supposed to entail. And then she is blindsided by the out poring Rob's own dissatisfaction. An out poring where one of his prime concerns is, "Lexi's always like, 'school, Harper's school' and it's like 'fine,' but on the other hand, I don't want to be having that conversation." As far as the episode is concerned, that's a concern that has materialized in the span of a day, and will be over after the interview. But it symbolizes everything wrong with their relationship. The perfect upper class lifestyle can't fix a rotten core. The failings of the American Dream can't be fixed by putting posters of indie rock bands on it. No matter how hard you can try to only buy-in to the hyper-specific aspects of American life that you think will make you the most happy, you can't keep the rest of it out. The ennui, the dissatisfaction, the depression keeps seeping in compelling you to buy-in to just one more aspect and it will vanish. In Gretchen's case that one more aspect was Rob and Lexi's life, in Lexi's case it was the preschool.
The use of that trope in You're the Worst was because it was so unrealistic and ridiculous. It's a couple whose main problem is an interview at preschool, that is to Gretchen. and by extension the audience, a perfect life. The kind of life she'd love to live for 90 years. But it becomes the metaphor for all the deep emotional problems within that relationship causing it to fail. And that's the primary difference between You're the Worst and Grandfathered. The former intentionally used the trope to reveal the real existential despair of its characters, the latter used it to accidentally reveal it's characters are awful people.
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