FXX’s You’re the Worst has pulled one of the best switch acts on television, which probably explains why its reward at the impending end of its second season is that it will get a third season.

The switch, meanwhile, is this.

You could count the needles on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and still not match the number of TV sitcoms in recent years whose allegedly normal characters behaved so outlandishly that they quickly turned into caricatures.

Mostly unfunny caricatures.

The whole initial premise of You’re the Worst, on the other hand, was that its characters would behave badly. Worse than badly.

So imagine our surprise and delight when, son of a gun, they went the other way and didn’t turn into caricatures at all.

Aya Cash and Chris Geere, who star as the depressed Gretchen and the self-absorbed Jimmy, said as much back when the show started. At its heart, You’re the Worst is a rom-com, they said, even though the characters have the social graces of feral warthogs.

People in shows say things like that all the time, of course. Who knew Cash and Geere would be telling the truth?

But You’re the Worst will have finished 23 episodes when it reaches the end of its second season Dec. 9 (10:30 p.m. ET), and in its own weird, sometimes demented way, that’s exactly the path it has followed.

The show’s ratings have dropped in its second season, for which there’s a reason. It moved from the established FX to the new spinoff FXX channel, which isn’t on everyone’s radar yet. In fact, one reason several established FX shows were shifted to FXX, including It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, was to raise the new channel’s profile.

Happily, the smaller You’re The Worst audience still includes a good number of younger viewers, which is presumably a big part of the reason FXX has green-lit the third season to air next year.

You’re the Worst has done several things well, starting with characters who can seem boorish and clueless, but whom we recognize have beating hearts and bushel baskets full of insecurities.

That doesn’t mean just Gretchen and Jimmy. They live in a world of characters who at first seem capable of everything except remorse. That includes, for instance, Gretchen’s best friend Lindsay (Kether Donohue), who married her husband for his money and then pretty much vivisected him.

So the early episodes established Gretchen, Jimmy and most of the others as people who would steal from each other, belittle each other in the cruelest terms possible and poison relationships as casually as they would set fire to someone’s house.

If that were all they ever did, of course, it would have been about as funny as The Walking Dead.

That meant we had to quickly start getting glimpses of the better people these characters all could be, and deep down really wanted to be.

They just couldn’t morph too fast or we’d lose a lot of the show’s original charm, and certainly a lot of its comedy.

They haven’t. One step forward has often triggered two steps back. Over the last few weeks, some of Gretchen’s progress has come in self-realization, which hasn’t always translated to progress in behavior.

That is to say, the pacing has worked.

You’re the Worst isn’t a perfect show. Language and sexual content also pretty much rule it out as a family show. But it does a good job of suggesting that outrageous lives can camouflage familiar instincts – or maybe that, contrary to what your mother said, two wrongs can make a right.