3 out of 5

Created by: Zach Kanin, Tim Robinson

A little of Tim Robinson goes a long way.

I loved Detroiters.  SNL graduates and their Comedy Central shows are incredibly hit or miss for me, generally dependent on how winky self-aware the creator/s persona is, but Tim’s shout-prone dullard bounced wonderfully off of smiley innocent Sam Richardson in that show, and latched their beat-the-joke-dead sense of humor to a loose narrative and a streak of developing bizzareness.

Now Tim is unhitched from Sam, and promoted to a ring-leader of a short-form sketch show.  While, on the one hand, this lends itself to full-borne strangeness, which gives the show a handful of great moments, without the enforced downtime of a plot, after making a fantastic impression on the first episode, the ones that follow tend to repeat Tim’s play-it-straight-faced-then-yell joke pattern.  And there’s a frustrating inconsistency to the bit players, which, whether the actors in each sketch are involved in the writing or not, makes it subconsciously easy to associate the non-Tim-starring bits you like and don’t like with particular people… and then you never see them again, which doubles down on the “memorability” of the more repetitious aspects.

It’s frustrating, because when a sketch lands, it’s golden.  And crammed into the less-than-half-hour eps, there are generally a couple of these gold spots, but having barreled out of the gate with the most uproarious effort, the series – while certainly worth its time in chuckles – shows promise of much more, perhaps by giving Tim some more consistent personas to once again bounce off of.