I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson season 2 review

Our relationship to resolutions in society is, in the tamest terms possible, in flux. A seemingly vast part of consuming media in this day and age sustains itself on the potency of half-measured, tepid conclusions that keep the door open for as many new installments as you desire. Be it every TV show and movie in the MCU that comes out post-Endgame, each new season of The Walking Dead or Stranger Things (y’know, for example), or even the “endless scroll” baked into TikTok and cable news tickers, we rarely take a purported conclusion at face value. This jet ski still has some gas in it, and people are tweeting that they want to see The Fonz jump over a couple more sharks.

The second season of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, out on Netflix yesterday, understands this societal mind-numbing ill better than most recent content. Instead of trying to fix our relationship to the ever-daunting conclusion (it is a second season of a Netflix show, after all), it cuts out the latter altogether, constructing a universe where conflicts are never rectified and every character must ride out the subsequent discomfort for as long as they can stand it. In doing so, I Think You Should Leave season 2 satirizes the way we have grown accustomed to viewing our lives with ever-building stakes and no resolution in sight, in just as hilarious fashion as the first season.

Is I Think You Should Leave season 2 funny?

I Think You Should Leave is a variety sketch show that released its premiere season in 2019. Season 1 was filled with off-the-wall scenarios and fantastical characters, all of which are, to this day, funnier than anything SNL has done in the past five years (which is saying something, as the titular Robinson was a Studio 8H cast member himself in 2013). The second season follows in the same absurdist, loud, squirming vein, containing a wide variety of guest stars playing genuinely weird people, pulled together by Robinson’s gloriously random, signature boundary-pushing talents.

From an ad for a show called Coffin Flop to a man attempting to alleviate a rough situation between friends with a reference to The Blues Brothers, high and low concepts abound in the episodes, all six of which clock in between 15-20 minutes each. It makes for a quick binge, but the show does not go down easy – Robinson does an exemplary job of making the audience member feel like they’re witnessing a left-of-center scene play out before their eyes in which every action taken, despite its best intentions, only exacerbate the frequently melodramatic tension in the room. I Think You Should Leave does host a few characters – some even played by Robinson himself – that are ostensibly level-headed, but the interests of the rollicking, surreal scenes forbid anyone and anything from ever righting the train back onto the tracks.

Endlessly quotable and deeply unique, the second season of I Think You Should Leave enlists plenty “that guy” comedic actors and actresses who are brilliantly used throughout. It must be said that mileage will vary as far as laughs go on each individual sketch – the hit-and-miss qualities of the show are undoubtedly what makes it so admirable and appealing. There are far more callback scenes this go-around, and one Sam Richardson is frankly not used nearly as much as last season, but the sensibilities of I Think You Should Leave are refreshing, never tiresome, and truly one-of-a-kind.

Going into the minutia of the scenes themselves detract from the immensely pleasurable viewing experience that is watching I Think You Should Leave. Co-produced by the Lonely Island guys, it’s just as wild as the first season, proving itself to not only be thoroughly rewatchable, but provide a crazed, necessary distance between yourself and the enveloping effect of the content cycle by positing whether submitting to its non concluding nature is really the best way forward.

Stay tuned for more news about I Think You Should Leave season 3!