Craig Robinson’s Killing It Returns in August; Here’s a Trailer

Killing It was one of Paste‘s favorite surprises of 2022. As I wrote last year, I didn’t really expect a sitcom about Craig Robinson and Claudia O’Doherty killing snakes in Florida to be one of TV’s most pointed and direct criticisms of our current economic disparity. I figured the subtext would be there, but Killing It made it unmistakable: the game is rigged against the lower and working classes, and it’s almost impossible to work your way out of the holes our society and financial system try to toss us all into. And it did all that while remaining hilarious, with Robinson and O’Doherty’s distinctive comic styles complementing each other almost perfectly.

Season 2 is out on Peacock next month, on August 17, and, uh, it’s an interesting time for it to come out, with both the writer and actor unions on strike. WGA and SAG-AFTRA are trying to address the entertainment industry’s economic inequality, where media company CEOs make tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars a year, while increasingly short-changing the people who make the shows and movies they profit from. It’s the kind of action that more (most?) industries need, as CEO pay has risen almost 1500% over the last 45 years while worker wages have largely remained stagnant.

So here we are with NBC Universal promoting a show about how broken our economy is, while it and its owner Comcast are trying to keep that system broken within its own industry. Unless something changes and the strike somehow ends in the next few weeks, Robinson, O’Doherty, and the rest of the show’s cast and creators won’t be doing any promotional work for it, forcing NBC Universal to find other ways to publicize a show that implicitly criticizes corporations like them and their executives. Again, it’s an interesting time for Killing It‘s return.

Joining Robinson and O’Doherty once again will be Rell Battle, who’s the only other full-time cast member for season 2. Former cast members Scott McArthur and Stephanie Nogueras are now billed as guest stars; maybe that’s an artistic decision, but that’s also become a cost-cutting trend over the last year or so, with actors being bumped down from regulars to recurring so that studios can save money. Other guest stars in season 2 include Tim Heidecker, Jet Miller, Wyatt Walter, Dot-Marie Jones, Katie Kershaw, Joe Massingill, Melanie Field, Tim Simons, Fatimah Taliah, Beck Bennett, and Kyle Mooney. Co-creators Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici return as writers and showrunners. It starts streaming on Peacock on August 17, 2023, and here’s that trailer.