It’s difficult to explain why I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson works. It’s a sketch show, except each episode is made up of only three sketches, which for a 16-minute episode, is well below the usual quick-fire rate of sketch comedy. It also features no recurring sketches, characters, or catchphrases, and aside from Robinson himself, few returning actors. Robinson has been in all 12 episodes and is the star of the majority of them, but after that no actor has been in more than three, playing a new character each time. It’s atypical, but its unpredictability is what makes it one of this year’s best TV shows.
Cringe comedy is in, but we’ve rarely seen it used so well in sketch shows. The Office, The Mindy Project, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Arrested Development, Nathan For You, I’m Alan Partridge, and The Inbetweeners all employ various forms of cringe, but it lands because the characters are so well formed. We know how those characters think and react, we know their goals, and we know how they unintentionally sabotage themselves, so the jokes aren’t just about the jokes, they’re about the context around the jokes. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson doesn’t have that - it needs to set up the joke, the context, and deliver it all in a single sketch, and it hits the mark every time. Limmy’s Show is probably the closest thing to it, and even then, Limmy’s Show is far less cringe-based than I Think You Should Leave.
Take Corncob TV, the highlight of the new season. The premise is that it's a fake - or possibly real - TV channel about to be shut down due to the weird shows it runs. This is a deep well. Many sketch shows would make Corncob TV the flagpole sketch, constantly returning to it season after season with various different silly TV shows built around a familiar structure. I Think You Should Leave only uses it once, but it's genius. The show Corncob TV is in danger of being banned for is called Coffin Flop - a documentary where various cameras film funerals in the hope that the dead bodies fall out of them. For unexplained reasons, this happens so frequently that Coffin Flop can fill up its weekly shows, and as Robinson's character points out, "It's just hours and hours of real footage of people falling out of coffins at funerals. There's no explanation, just body after body dropping out of shit wood and hitting pavement." For some unexplained reason, several of the bodies are also nude.
This is where I Think You Should Leave's comedy genius shines. Where other sketch shows need to leave room to build so a character can be returned to over and over again, I Think You Should Leave is one and done. That means it can push each sketch to the max, and then keep pushing further. Usually, the show's ending sketch is the one that keeps going way past the limits a typical comedy show would pin them into, and I Think You Should Leave manages to break through these limits without resorting to gross out humour, shock value, or South Park-style offensiveness.
Take the crying baby sketch, for example. Robinson's character holds a baby, and it begins to cry. Robinson suggests this is because his character used to be "a piece of shit," and gives a long-winded description of how terrible he used to be, including eating 'sloppy steaks', which are steaks with a glass of water poured over them. There's then a long sequence where we see how much of a piece of shit Robinson used to be, before the baby is given to its grandpa and Robinson suggests the grandpa used to be a piece of shit because the baby begins to cry. The whole thing then repeats again. There's also a sketch that begins with a woman being possessive over where to hold an intervention, which turns into a sketch about owning a Garfield house where all the furniture is Garfield-related, which turns into a sketch about the man who tried to kill Garfield creator Jim Davis breaking in to kill them all. No sketch ever leaves anything in the tank, because it's never going to be used again.
In a lot of sketch shows, the joke comes from anticipation. We know when we see Catherine Tate in her schoolgirl character that we're going to get "am I bovvered though?", just like Little Britain's Vicky Pollard will always end a scene with "yeah but no but." Sometimes the shows play against these expectations, sure, but the fact they're there props up a lot of each sketch's setup. I Think You Should Leave doesn't have this framework, but that gives it so much more freedom.
It's a difficult sell, because there are no characters to get to know, nothing to tie the show together, and not even a guarantee that you'll like one sketch just because you liked another. But I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson is one of the best comedies of the year, and if you like cringe comedy even a little bit, this new take on it is not to be missed.