James is 17 and pretty sure he is a psychopath. Alyssa is 17 and the cool, moody new girl at school. Together they steal a car and drive across England looking for her real father, and that is the whole engine of The End of the F***ing World, a Channel 4 series that ran for two seasons and 16 episodes between October 2017 and November 2019.
It is a comedy, a drama and a crime story at once, and it never quite lets you settle into any of them.
Trailer, via Bloody Disgusting Horror.
James and Alyssa Hit the Road
The setup is a road trip, and the road trip is a lie the show tells about itself. Alyssa persuades James to leave with her. He agrees because he thinks he wants to kill someone, and she looks like a good place to start. She wants to find her father. He wants to find out what he is.
Alex Lawther plays James. Jessica Barden plays Alyssa Foley. Both are playing teenagers who have decided that feeling nothing is a kind of power, and both are wrong about that in ways the show takes its time revealing.
The first season is the stronger one. It moves fast, it is funny in a dry and nasty way, and it keeps the two of them apart from the rest of the world long enough that the world starts to look like the strange thing.
Bonnie Arrives in Season 2
Naomi Ackie joins for the second season as Bonnie. Josh Dylan plays Todd Alan King. The show widens out, brings in a new point of view, and asks what happens to people who are left behind by the kind of ending the first season delivered.
That is a real question, and the second season is not a failure. But it is a slower thing, and the show’s best weapon — the flat, deadpan voice of a boy who thinks he is empty — works better when there is somewhere to point it.
The Tone Is the Whole Trick
The End of the F***ing World sits in a small space between comedy and crime, and it earns that space by refusing to wink. It does not ask you to find James charming. It does not ask you to forgive Alyssa. It asks you to watch two people who have confused numbness for adulthood, and it lets the consequences arrive on their own schedule.
- Comedy, drama and crime, held in the same frame without a laugh track or a moral
- Two seasons, 16 episodes, first aired 2017-10-24, last aired 2019-11-07
- Created by Jonathan Entwistle for Channel 4
- Alex Lawther as James, Jessica Barden as Alyssa Foley, Naomi Ackie as Bonnie, Josh Dylan as Todd Alan King
The show’s weakness is that it knows its own tone too well. Once you have heard James narrate his own emptiness a few times, the trick is visible, and the second season has to work harder for less.
A Road Trip With Nowhere Good to Go
The synopsis promises a darkly comedic road trip in search of a father. What the show actually delivers is a search for a self, and the father is mostly a destination that keeps the car moving.
That is fine. It is also thin. The End of the F***ing World gets a lot of mileage out of two performances and one idea, and by the end of 16 episodes the idea has been stretched about as far as it goes.
What the Score Says
The published critical score is 7.7 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 77 out of 100. That is the right neighborhood. This is a show with a real voice, a real pair of leads and a first season that lands, held back by a second season that has to justify its own existence and only mostly does.
James is 17 and is pretty sure he is a psychopath.
That line is the whole pitch, and it is a good one. The problem is that a pitch is not a series, and The End of the F***ing World spends a lot of its runtime circling the same joke about a boy who cannot feel anything.
Where It Lands
The first season is the part worth your time. It is short, it is sharp, and it understands that the funniest thing about two teenagers on the run is how certain they are that they have figured themselves out. Lawther and Barden make that certainty funny and then make it sad, and the show is smart enough not to explain which one it is.
The second season is the part worth arguing about. Ackie is a genuine addition, and the shift in perspective is the right instinct, but the show loses the pressure that made the first run work. When the road trip ends, so does most of the tension, and what is left is a mood looking for a plot.
This is a series that earns its place in the conversation about how television handles young people who are not okay. It does not earn a place at the top of it. The tone is the achievement, and the tone is also the ceiling.
The End of the F***ing World is worth watching for the first season alone, and worth finishing for the second, even if the second is the one you will forget.
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