Written by Katie Dolan and Marty Schousboe
Directed by Marty Schousboe

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

This is the last week of Joe Pera Talks With You for the foreseeable future. If the show's been renewed, nobody's announced it, but I only found out season three was coming a couple months ago, well over a year since the one-off "Relaxing Old Footage With Joe Pera" quarantine special, so this was never the kind of show that had HBO-level between-season marketing hype. As funny as I think it would be to live in a world where the people of Marquette were writing into DeuxMoi to report Dan Licata's filming around town but he's always wearing the same clothes, so maybe his DJ character is dead in the new season, I recognize that I'm just going to be out here wondering for a while. This is a good 22 minutes to start the next period of wondering on.

I'm trying not to do that, though. I am trying, and have been trying, to take things as they are, and we can say I'm Garden-State's-Zach-Braffing it up and "living in the moment," but I'd rather think of it in Joe Pera terms. I am putting the time in to build the chair I've been unable to find.

In this episode of Joe Pera Talks With You, we get this season's double-sized installment and watch as Joe turns a bundle of wood into a chair. It ends up being almost astonishingly nice, considering how haphazard its creation looks initially. There are a few shots of Joe using a drawknife like he's about to cut his stomach open. (I want to be clear that I don't know how to make a chair or do anything with wood, and that it took me six minutes of googling to figure out that the tool Joe uses is called a "drawknife.") But the chair comes together, and it's lovely.

This season's initial project had been finding a chair; building one only happens at the very end, as a necessity. At one point in the episode, we see last season's project, the bean arch, frozen over in Joe's yard. The bean arch was part of nature. It was passive. We watched it grow and fill out in the background as the year progressed, and Joe was tending to it, but the arch was primarily self-sustaining. The search for a good chair (and its underlying metaphor for settling down) seemed like it would just come, that Joe would visit Gene at the furniture store in the middle of a random episode and bam, the perfect chair would be there, in the middle of the showroom floor. That didn't happen. Joe had to make the chair.

He jokes about building the chair to Sarah, in a joke I could relate to if I wasn't so lazy: "It feels like, as a guy who's lost a certain amount of hair, I was expected to get into woodworking."

"You have at least 1,000 yellow hairs left," Sarah says. It's a sweet joke.

The further the conversation goes, the more the couple allude to the pressure to have a kid. Joe seems ready, Sarah does not. I'm not comfortable using the term "ready" when talking about this, because it implies an immaturity in the totally normal decision to not have a child, but Sarah really doesn't seem ready. Jo Firestone plays her as a person who's still trying to become comfortable with everything in her life. She builds a bunker and then admits to Joe that maybe people weren't meant to live underground. She isolates and then slowly makes friends. Her anxiety isn't a long term solution to anything, and it's getting to be that she doesn't want to use it as a short term solution, either. When Sarah hesitates in the discussion about children, it feels like she's doing so because she knows her partner will gently push back and remind her that the world is not a flaming wreck.

With the money from his grandma's house, Joe buys a 30 acre plot of land that he and Sarah can build a cabin on. It's another active project. Sarah walks the perimeter of the land, Joe takes his perfect chair out and plants it in the ground.

The future of Joe Pera Talks With You will be announced off-handedly. Joe will tweet a short video announcing a premiere date, or he'll explain during a stand-up set that he's decided to work on a different project. I have always been bad about letting good things go. I cannot appreciate a show this good without starting to wonder if a perfect episode of TV is also the series' last. I am trying, though. I am trying to build the chair. Joe Pera Talks With You is a great enough piece of art that it can encourage me to feel that way. It's the funniest, most life-affirming thing on TV and I am thankful for it. Have a great 2022.