I don't know about you, but my 20s were pretty tough. You're thrust into adulthood with vanishingly little prep - life's many responsibilities hitting you like a speeding cement lorry, friendships falling apart, guillotine-ready landlords rinsing you of half your wages before you've bought the weekend's first White Claw. (Not that the first few months of my 30s have been all that different, but at least now I have a savings account.)

It's this chaotic post-uni energy that 28-year-old comic Leo Reich has hilariously captured in It Gets Worse, a new six-part Channel 4 and A24 series about three best mates in London: the exceedingly self-interested Ethan (played by Reich), wannabe grown-up Abi (Emily Fairn) and artsy writer Sam (Olive Gray). They're inseparable and constantly at war. The opening episode deals with the fallout of their decision to live apart for the first time since uni, and it all kind of spirals from there, each of them facing down everything from dodgy hookups to cuck boyfriends and bizarro Hackney polycules.

It's all extremely Gen Z, like a gayer Girls for Generation Rent. (Lena Dunham even has a part, having previously cast Reich in her Netflix show Too Much. As does Andrew Scott, whose character spits in Reich's mouth at the start of the first episode.) "That was really the main impetus, sitting down for a bit and going, 'What do I feel like I really wanna see on TV?'" Reich tells me over Zoom. "And it turns out it's really self-involved and quite objectionable 24-year-olds having minor arguments with each other, experiencing bad sex and drinking too much. So I don't know what that says about me."

With the show set to both premiere at the London Film Festival and hit TV screens on 14 October, Reich and I spoke about how he guilt-tripped Dunham into reading the script, why the show is anything but autobiographical, and shooting those Andrew Scott mouth-spitting scenes.

GQ: I found Ethan so reprehensible, which I think is the point. With all the messiness, and everyone being so flawed, Girls came to mind a lot - which I say in the most complimentary fashion. I'm not telling you you've ripped off Lena Dunham.

Leo Reich: I fucking hope not. [Laughs.] It's shows like Girls, but Peep Show was also a big one. Other stuff like Insecure, or Fresh Meat. I'm glad you found [Ethan] reprehensible. That is kind of the point, I suppose. I guess what I find funny is people just constantly following their worst instincts. I like the opportunities to push the small narcissisms and flaws I see in my friends, or myself, and push them to their absolute logical conclusions. Because I think it's funny!

I should say that as the show goes on, Ethan in particular becomes far more sympathetic. I love the little glimpses of sensitive, vulnerable humanity that come through.

I guess a big hope for [the show] is that people have the stamina, or interest, or that it's funny enough that they see it through to the end. It's not a story-of-the-week sitcom. I know how allergic some people will be to some of the things the characters say and do initially. But hopefully, by the end, there's something forgivable, and potentially likeable.

To come back to Girls and Dunham: she actually plays a character in It Gets Worse. I know you met her on Too Much. How did you feel showing her the script?

I actually sort of guilted her into reading a draft of the pilot because she was late for dinner. [Laughs.] She was like, "I'm so sorry, I'm sorry." And I pretended to be upset, and made her read the draft as [an apology] that I didn't need or deserve. But it was an early draft, and she was so kind and helpful with it, and gave the best notes in the world, obviously. What was so amazing is she was like, "Oh and also, if there's a bit in it, I'll do it."

Did you write the part for her?

Yeah. So a couple of months later, I'm going: "So, remember how you said you might wanna be in it..." I absolutely just jumped on a throwaway remark and then held her to it.

You've been pretty resoundingly clear that this show isn't autobiographical. So where did the character of Ethan come from?

It's not autobiographical in any way in terms of storylines, and none of the characters are specifically based on anyone. But when you're one person writing a whole thing, in all of the characters there's something I feel like I've seen in myself, probably.

Ethan is a real exaggeration of the parts of me that I think came out when I finally felt like I was an independent gay guy, that could be fully - I suppose, in inverted commas - "themselves." And [I] was leaning quite hard into the ability to just do whatever I wanted the whole time, and maybe leaned too hard into that. It was me thinking about [my] biggest errors, and the most self-interested decisions I made in my late teens and early 20s - as someone who, I think, on some level, felt the world owed me something because I had a hard time as a teenager. Which of course is not how anything works.

There's a scene from the show that has already caught a lot of attention after it was released early online: Ethan has a hookup with a therapist played by Andrew Scott.

Andrew and Lena were the first people to say yes. I sent him the scene, and I was like, "I would really love you to do it. Do you have any interest in coming in for a day?"

What I said in the text was, "I really thought of you while I was writing this." Which is obviously an absolutely bizarre thing to say. But I'd got so distant from what the actual scene was about by that point. And then as soon as I sent it, I was like, "Oh, that's literally the worst thing I could possibly say." But he was like, "Yeah, it sounds really fun, it's really funny, I'm so up for it."

He spits in your mouth. Was that scripted?

[Laughs.] The spitting was in the script, yeah. Obviously, in my head when I'm writing it, I'm thinking of the one shot that you actually use. [But] every single take I'm getting spat in the mouth.

How many takes?

I mean, a lot. A lot of takes.

How have people in your orbit reacted to that scene? You must've got a flurry of texts when it came out.

I'd say the headline is "horny," which has maybe been the word used the most online. It's been really nice! It came as a surprise to me that it's the first thing that we put out, because he's in it for about three minutes. And I hope people don't think they're gonna watch a show that's fully me and Andrew Scott. But it's also the beginning of the first episode, and it's how you get into the show anyway.

The reaction was so positive, which I guess is a little bit surprising, because that kind of sexual dynamic can often be picked apart and criticised: stuff about the age gap, or dominant and submissive roles. There were a couple of comments about the fact that he's a therapist, and I think they've slightly misunderstood what is ultimately the core joke of the scene, which is that's not the dynamic they have together.

The premiere is at the London Film Festival next week. How are you feeling?

I'm really excited. I'm obviously really nervous, but I'm mainly nervous about the reaction, which is so deeply out of my control. I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster, and I'm on the bit where it's going up really slowly, and you can see the drop. And you're like, "Well, I can't get off." I guess I'm on Stealth. I bought the fucking ticket. No one forced me to do it.

And what have you got planned next?

I'm slightly waiting to decide until after this has all happened. I'm gonna do a bit more stand-up. If Channel 4 were to give me a series two, that would be fucking amazing, and I'd love to do that.

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