Pinning down why Tim Robinson is funny is very difficult. The closest I have come to deciphering the humour in Netflix’s sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave is that it follows the logic of dreams: no one in the sketches acts entirely human, with tiny slights and jealousies provoking mind-melting terror and rage, in scenarios and settings one step to the left of reality as we know it.
Take the baby of the year competition, which has been going for “a gruelling three months”. The infamous hotdog guy, who pretends he didn’t crash a hotdog-shaped car into a shop and is now internet shorthand for people trying to dodge blame. A driver’s ed class that gets derailed by an overly detailed backstory in an educational video. Or a personal favourite: an advert for an automatic dog door that quickly veers off track as Robinson’s character begins ranting about the time a pig burst into his house through a dog door, and ends with him having an existential meltdown about why, when he thought he was about to die, he only felt relief that he wouldn’t have to go to work the next day. It starts profoundly stupid, and ends up being stupidly profound.
If I Think You Should Leave follows something akin to dream logic (or something closer to a nightmare), Detroiters follows kid logic: two best friends who work together and live next door to each other, Tim Cramblin (Robinson) and Sam Duvet (Sam Richardson, great in Veep and I Think You Should Leave). The two men make low budget adverts for Detroit television through their mad scrabble ad agency, Cramblin-Duvet. They do everything together, frequently and loudly declare their love for one another, and end their days by talking through their windows before bed. It’s sweeter than I Think You Should Leave, and just as stupid.
Most of the plots revolve around Tim and Sam, strip mall Don Drapers, making ads for the likes of dodgy wig companies, mirror shops and Eddie Champagne the “hot tub king of Detroit”. They are dim and ambitious, a combination that gives the show an unrelenting optimistic streak as Cramblin-Duvet tries to secure big clients like Chrysler while making terrible ads for tiny businesses. Both Robinson and Richardson are blessed with rubbery faces that can flit between dopey joy and righteous fury on a dime. None of Tim and Sam’s failures ever linger longer than an instant, before they’re back to believing they are the best ad men in the world.
Detroiters was created by Robinson and Richardson, who are from Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, along with I Think You Should Leave co-creator and writer Zach Kanin and Joe Kelly. Richardson has said he and Robinson wanted to show their city in a more positive light than the “ruin porn” urban hellscape it is normally portrayed as being. There are plenty of Detroit in-jokes: many of the adverts are based on ads Richardson and Robinson remember seeing on local television, and one recurring character, newsreader Mort Crim, is a real and amazingly named Detroit newscaster who Will Ferrell has credited as the main inspiration for Ron Burgundy. (Crim delivers many Burgundy-esque segues, like: “That’s one murder that had a happy ending.”)
Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels and Jason Sudeikis were executive producers on Detroiters (the latter plays a small, recurring role as Carter Grant, a big-shot Chrysler executive whose life is ruined after Tim and Sam run him over in their lemon of a car.) But even with such comedy chops behind it, Detroiters was cancelled in 2018 after two seasons. Richardson has attributed its end to network interference, once telling the Guardian: “It didn’t get the respect from the network that it deserved, or the chance that it was promised.”
When Detroiters ended, late night host Seth Meyers wrote an op-ed calling for someone to save the “brilliantly stupid” show. Sadly no one did – but the profoundly stupid I Think You Should Leave came afterwards, so we can’t be too sad.
Detroiters is streaming on Paramount+. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
