★★★★☆
In a move of marketing brilliance entirely at odds with its surface-level stupidity, in I Think You Should Leave Tim Robinson and co. have created a sketch show which might just be entirely immune to critical failure.
Combining the breed of anti-comedy popularized by Eric Andre with genuinely well-constructed bits, it really is a sketch show for the 21st century. Thanks to a bizarre and dedicated online following, even if I Think You Should Leave fails, that failure becomes all part of the fun. When the premise of your show is, loosely, an assortment of people taking things too far, the fact that Tim Robinson’s comedy lovechild has made it to a third season at all – when sketch shows are at their lowest cultural ebb in decades – feels like a bizarrely meta joke at Netflix executives’ expense.
As a result, even when season three threatens to get caught up in its own mythology, when a rant about a pig in a Richard Nixon mask slipping through a doggy door turns makes a forced turn into a lament about middle-age stagnation, it’s hard to hold anything against it for long. After spending what is now four-and-a-half hours of on more-or-less the same theme I Think You Should Leave inevitably ends up repeating itself in its latest iteration, but there’s still more than enough new and inventive spins on the formula to keep fans of the show happy. For newcomers, though, it’s hard to imagine whether the show’s popularity makes any sense at all.
On a technical level I Think You Should Leave remains as impressive as ever. Frustratingly rare amongst modern sketch shows, Robinson and the team make liberal use of cinematic language to add nuance to alternately brilliant and genuinely stupid scripts. Original and impeccably well-observed pop songs add surprising mock-emotional depth to sketches about two men wearing the same shirt to a school concert, or to a watch exploding into a woman’s soup. Delightfully sincere emotional beats make the most of the who’s-who of established and upcoming US comedy actors, lending the show a sort of manufactured depth which only makes bits about a man pretending to suck a cigar as he drives a colleague home from a bar more entertaining.
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All that is to say that on first viewing I Think You Should Leave season 3 might be the weakest to date. Few sketches reach the same heights as season 2’s Detective Crashmore, which saw Santa Clause take on a new job as an action movie star spouting eighth-grade-level swear words as he blows villains away with a shotgun. Often, it feels like the show leans too heavily on Robinson’s familiarly shouty central character, and the scripts don’t capture the sorts of endlessly quotable one-liners that turned the first two seasons into an internet phenomenon.
But the second season went through similar struggles on its initial drop, and now might even be considered superior to the first. In an internet age which favours nihilism over traditional comedy, I Think You Should Leave has developed a shelf-life far beyond the confines of the Netflix app. In isolation, it’s a show impossible to judge on its own merit. All I can say for sure, is that I loved it.
