I Think You Should Leave & Detroiters
I Think You Should Leave created by Tim Robinson & Zach Kanin
Detroiters created by Sam Richardson, Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin, & Joe Kelly

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

Five years ago Tim Robinson’s new sketch show, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, arrived on Netflix. It was met with immediate critical acclaim and meme’d to death pretty quickly. Two subsequent seasons have had the same effect and fans are currently waiting for any hint of season four as Robinson works on other projects, most notably a series for HBO. The people who love I Think You Should Leave really, really love it. You don’t have to search far to find people dressed up for Halloween as the Driving Crooner, lusting after Dan Flashes, or wearing TC Tugger shirts. It’s a show with an immediate, noticeable visual language—all bright colors and the volume turned all the way up. The world Robinson builds in I Think You Should Leave is extremely specific and blissfully stupid, and it’s one he started building in his previous project: the excellent, underappreciated Comedy Central series Detroiters.

Detroiters premiered in 2017 and ran for two seasons of 10 episodes each. Like any series, it wasn’t brought to life by Robinson alone. Both Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave were co-created by Zach Kanin, Robinson’s longtime collaborator. Sam Richardson, who also co-created and co-starred on Detroiters with Robinson, has also appeared in several episodes of I Think You Should Leave. Both shows have a similar manic energy, featuring Robinson’s expert-level talent at being loud and wrong. They regularly feature misunderstandings and misconceptions that grow and fester as someone doubles down, absolutely refusing to admit defeat. Robinson sets the tone in the very first I Think You Should Leave sketch, as he plays a man who so desperately wants to avoid embarrassment after a job interview that he rips a door off its hinges to prove it was a pull, not a push. “It goes both ways,” he insists, with increasingly sweaty confidence.

Because Detroiters was a narrative series, it built characters and relationships over its all too brief run. Robinson and Richardson played Tim Cramblin and Sam Duvet, respectively, two best friends who took over Tim’s father’s ad agency. Are they particularly good at advertising? No. Are they capable of running a business and managing employees? Definitely not. But they’re trying their best. They produce low budget yet sometimes ludicrously high concept commercials for Detroit businesses, the kind of weird ads for local furniture stores or restaurants you remember from childhood. Despite its sitcom format, Detroiters maintained a sketch comedy sensibility, largely through the revolving door of clients at Cramblin Advertising (later Cramblin Duvet). Having the leads work at an advertising agency gave the show a great opportunity to bring on guest stars and build storylines around pitches for increasingly ridiculous companies. In an early episode, Tim and Sam are tasked with writing a jingle for Devereux Wigs, which may or may not contain hair from dead bodies. In another, they need to win back the trust of a client, car dealership owner and former Detroit Piston Rick Mahorn, after he overhears them insulting his acting.

Both Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave share both tonal similarities and a penchant for extremely goofy names: one of the greatest pleasures of a Tim Robinson production is hearing names like Roz Chunks the Mom Lawyer, Tommy Pencils, or Karl Havoc. Both shows also regularly dropped in perfectly cast guest stars. In Detroiters’ short time on the air, it managed to feature guests like Malcolm Jamal Warner, Amber Ruffin, Keegan-Michael Key, and Richard Karn. I Think You Should Leave boasts Steven Yeun, Vanessa Bayer, Andy Samberg, and countless more. Cecily Strong, Tim Meadows, and Connor O’Malley have appeared on both shows. It’s a delight to watch these performers slide into Robinson’s chaotic world and play around for a while, game for whatever he might throw at them.

Detroiters was underappreciated at the time, but that doesn’t mean it was entirely ignored. It was beloved by other comedians, a cult favorite that made a number of “Best Of” lists in both of its seasons. When it was canceled by Comedy Central in 2018, Seth Meyers took to Vulture to write a plea for someone, anyone, to rescue it. He rightly noted the show’s extremely high jokes per minute (truly, it approached 30 Rock territory) and the fact that it was, in his words, “an old school cackler.” Elsewhere on Vulture (they were perhaps the biggest champion of Detroiters at the time), comedian and Barry writer Emily Heller cited it as her favorite show, and said “the show is so kind to its characters, without sacrificing the comedy of it.” She was right; Detroiters treated every single character with compassion, even when it was making fun of them. Tim and Sam were nearly always the butt of the joke, but they were optimistic and full of hope for themselves and their business. The heart of both Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave is, well, heart. A deep river of compassion runs through everything Tim Robinson creates. Whether Tim is coming to terms with the fact that he can’t sing on Detroiters or Connor O’Malley is playing a man frantically responding to a “honk if you’re horny” bumper sticker on I Think You Should Leave, the comedy comes from the frustrations, the humiliations, the absolute silliness of being a person. An instant I Think You Should Leave classic features Robinson convinced that a baby he holds is judging him, somehow able to tell that he “used to be a piece of shit.” By the end of the sketch, Robinson, the baby, and the audience are left confident that people really can change, that no one has to be a piece of shit forever.

Recently, both seasons of Detroiters became available to stream on Netflix, where I Think You Should Leave also lives. Watching them back-to-back is like taking a long, chaotic road trip with your best friend. If you missed it during its run on Comedy Central, and you’re looking for a show that’s full of Tim Robinson’s brand of pure, joyous stupidity, well… I Think You Should Watch Detroiters.