I Think You Should Leave‘s Third Season Is Increasingly Formulaic, and Without a Hit

Here’s a new experience for me: I’m writing a review of a TV show, but even as I’m writing it, I have this nagging sense that there’s a decent-to-good chance I’ll disagree with my own opinion in roughly one month. The fact is that the third season of I Think You Should Leave left me a little cold, and my instant take—I’ve watched it twice—is that by comparison to the first two seasons it feels repetitive, and that the formula established by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, which felt revolutionary in its first season, is now so familiar that it has become almost rote, and definitely predictable. Nothing here feels quite as fresh, and the quintessential weirdness of their comedy, while weird as ever, is never quite as funny.

Here’s my problem, though…I felt the exact same way about the second season when I first watched it. And while I still believe Season 1 is the standout historical gem that outshines the rest, I absolutely love Season 2. I can’t think of another TV show that ever grew on me in the same way, and I can only chalk that up to the uniqueness and strangeness of the comedy, which is so off-the-wall and even subtle that it takes time to sink in.

For a Season 2 refresher, I looked at a ranking of all 28 sketches from that season, and the one ranked dead last, “Credit Card Roulette,” is one I just specifically sought out two weeks ago because somebody brought up credit card roulette at a group dinner and I wanted to go back and watch the reaction of John Early’s character when his card got selected (spoiler: still extremely funny). And the best of the best, like “Calico Cut Pants” and “Sloppy Steaks,” are among my favorites of the entire series. But if I had written a review of Season 2 when it came out, after watching each sketch the first time? Well, now I’d feel like an idiot because that review would still be out there and I wouldn’t agree with it at all, so I’m glad it never happened.

The bad news for me is that I am writing a review of Season 3. Douglas Adams, a massive Beatles fan, once wrote that each new Beatles album left him feeling confused and disappointed on his first and even second listens, and it was only after a week or more that the genius would become apparent to him, and he’d end up loving it more than anything before. If that phenomenon is happening with me and I Think You Should Leave, well…I’m kinda fucked, because I have to write the review now.

But since I’m here, I’ll stick to my guns and let history bury me in rubble if it must: the deal with this season is that the first two episodes at least strive for this show’s previous heights, mostly falling short, and then it gets worse. I’m realizing as I get to this point in the review that it’s been all preamble so far, and it seems tricky to review sketch comedy once you get past the point of “I did or did not find this funny,” but I’ll do my best: The beats that felt novel in the first season, and that eventually appealed to me in the second season, now feel like they are being plugged into a formula that has grown boring. There’s that old phrase that artistic genius only has itself to imitate, and maybe that’s happening here, but it’s also true that the entire season contains less than 100 minutes of new material, and if it feels stale I pretty much have to say that it feels stale.

Don’t get me wrong: There are still plot surprises here. There will be plenty of one-liners that quote-happy fans of the show can throw back and forth. It’s just that all the plots and characters and lines seem to fit into a shape that I’ve seen before, and in comparison to a director like Wes Anderson, where I personally can watch him do his same inimitable thing over and over in movie after movie, in sketch comedy it seems to lose its bite pretty quickly. Maybe it’s a limitation of the genre—I felt the same watching new Aunty Donna sketches recently, and there aren’t a ton of recent sketch groups known for their longevity. Maybe, in shorter-form written comedy, there’s just not a ton of room to maneuver or to stay surprising even with a novel aesthetic.

That’s really all I’m saying: This season of ITYSL is formulaic, and the writing isn’t strong enough to jolt it out of the familiar patterns. At this point in a TV review, I’d give examples, but that seems somehow cheap in sketch comedy, where even the smallest details are spoilers. But you can bank on a lot of sketches in familiar arenas like workplaces where a mundane detail of human interaction is blown way out of proportion by the main character, usually Robinson but also sometimes one of the stand-ins who dutifully play the Robinson-type character (awkward, then unsettling, then angry, then hurt, and back again), and this creates heightening social tension up until the point where he gets called out and isolated or the other people inexplicably take his side or the sketch ends abruptly.

I’m not shitting on that formula, by the way; it’s worked really, really well in creating some of the most unique American sketch comedy ever made through two seasons, and if you go broad enough it’s the description of pretty much any good sketch or improv comedy ever made.

It’s just that with the same guy in most sketches, and the same two writers leading the charge, it feels less exciting now. It doesn’t help that there are no instant classics here, nothing like “Coffin Flops” from Season 2 or any number of Season 1 classics like “Focus Group,” “Baby of the Year,” “Hot Dog Man,” “Old Man on a Plane,” “Has this ever happened to you?”, and even the criminally underrated Instagram sketch. Even writing out that list of early hits makes the contrast with Season 3 so stark; to take the music comparison possibly too far, this feels like an album without a single. More than that, I Think You Should Leave feels like one of those bands who played together for a really long time before releasing their first album, and rocked the world because they had about a decade’s worth of hits to unleash. From there, it’s been a story of diminishing returns. Season 2 was a little bit worse, but still had some of the same juice, and Season 3 continues the trajectory.

This is not bad, and I’m glad it’s here. But it’s not the same, and maybe the price these guys have to pay for their talent is that when you make something so singular, there’s nothing to compare it to but itself. By those standards, this one feels like a miss…but seriously, ask me again in a month.

I Think You Should Leave Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.

Shane Ryan is a writer and editor. You can find more of his writing and podcasting at Apocalypse Sports, and follow him on Twitter here.