I Think You Should Leave: Seasons, Best Sketches & Season 4

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson is a Netflix sketch show created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin: three seasons, 18 episodes of roughly 17 minutes each, released in 2019, 2021 and 2023. Nearly every sketch runs on one engine: someone makes a small social mistake and, rather than admit it, doubles down until the situation becomes a nightmare. It is the most quoted, most memed and most imitated sketch show of its era.

Here is everything you need: who made it, how it works, the sketches to start with season by season, what Robinson has done since, and the honest state of season 4 as of October 2026.

Who made it: Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin

Tim Robinson is a Detroit-area comedian who trained and performed with The Second City in Detroit. He joined Saturday Night Live as a featured player for the 2012–13 season, then moved to the writing staff. With fellow SNL writer Zach Kanin (also a New Yorker cartoonist), Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly, he created Detroiters for Comedy Central (2017–2018), a warm, very silly sitcom about two Detroit ad men starring Robinson and Richardson. It was cancelled after two seasons and has a devoted cult following.

Netflix picked up Robinson and Kanin’s sketch show next, with The Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone among the executive producers. The first season dropped on April 23, 2019, with almost no promotion, and spread by word of mouth.

How the sketches work

The mistake and the refusal

The classic ITYSL sketch starts somewhere completely normal: an office, a restaurant, a focus group, a tour. Then someone makes an error: a bad joke, a misunderstanding, a social misstep anyone could make. Instead of apologising, they defend it. And then defend the defence. The comedy lives in the gap between the character’s total conviction and everyone else’s obvious discomfort, and the sketch’s job is to keep widening that gap.

Rage and shame

Robinson’s characters are often furious, but the fury is a disguise for embarrassment. They are men (it is usually men) who cannot bear to be seen as wrong, and who would rather burn the room down than lose face. That gives the show a surprising edge: underneath the screaming, it is a precise study of fragile male ego.

Specific, strange details

The writing fixes on oddly specific objects and phrases: a particular brand of shirt, a made-up TV show, an imaginary sandwich, a catchphrase that should never have caught on. These details give the sketches their replay value and explain why fans quote them obsessively.

Short and relentless

Episodes run about 17 minutes, with no host and no connecting framework. Sketches end when they’ve been squeezed dry, often abruptly. The brevity is part of why people rewatch whole seasons in an evening.

Season one (2019)

The first six episodes established the formula and produced the sketch that defines the show. Highlights, in our own words:

The hot dog car. A hot-dog-shaped car crashes into a clothing store. A man in a full hot dog costume (Robinson) stands in the wreckage insisting, to everyone who obviously knows better, that he wants to find the driver. His line “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” became one of the most-used memes of the decade.
Baby of the Year. A parody awards show for babies that escalates far past the point of taste.
Focus Group. A car-company focus group turns into a battle for approval, with Ruben Rabasa as an older participant whose deadpan made him a fan favourite.
Coffin Flop. A fake clip show of coffins falling open at funerals, played straight, with a darkly absurd twist.

Season two (2021)

Released July 6, 2021, the second season is, for many fans, the show at its peak: more confident, more varied, sometimes even darker. Highlights:

Little Buff Boys. A competition for impossibly muscular young boys, hosted with sinister cheer.
Detective Crashmore. A trailer for an absurdly violent cop movie, with Robinson as a detective whose methods are best left undescribed.
The prank show at the mall. A hidden-camera prank goes wrong, and the man who was pranked is sent into a full existential collapse.

Season three (2023)

The third season, released May 30, 2023, is the most experimental, with more surreal premises and a willingness to linger. It is also the season that won the show its Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series. Highlights:

The TV pundit. A cable-news panellist who cannot cope with the conflict his job is built on.
Metal Motto Search. A heavy-metal contest broadcast that runs into technical trouble and handles it very badly.
The wedding photo booth. A photo booth at a wedding becomes the site of an escalating clash with the father of the bride.

The guest performers

Robinson anchors most episodes, but the show is a showcase for comedians and character actors. Sam Richardson, Robinson’s Detroiters partner, appears regularly. Patti Harrison, from the New York alt scene, became one of the show’s most recognisable faces, and Tim Heidecker turns up as well. Ruben Rabasa, a veteran character actor, became an unlikely star. Many sketches cast lesser-known performers who play the bewildered bystanders, and their reactions are half the comedy.

The case against (and why it doesn’t stick)

Not everyone is a convert. The most common complaints are that the formula is repetitive, that the shouting grates, and that the third season leans too hard on surreal premises at the expense of the social realism that made the first two land. Some viewers find the cringe physically hard to sit through.

The repetition charge is the easiest to answer. The engine is the same, but the targets keep changing: work, parenting, dating, grief, consumer culture, masculinity, television itself. And the show is always aware of its own pattern; many of the best sketches play with the audience’s expectation that someone is about to dig in. The discomfort is real, but it is also the point. If you can’t take more than one episode at a time, that may be the right dose.

Why the show matters

Three things put ITYSL among the essential comedy of its decade:

It updated sketch for the internet. The short episodes, the screenshot-ready faces and the quotable phrases made it travel online like no sketch show before it. For a while, reaction images from the show were their own social-media dialect.
It found a fresh engine. “Man refuses to admit he was wrong” sounds thin, but the show proved it could generate dozens of distinct sketches without repeating itself.
It said something. Under the absurdity, it is one of the sharpest portraits of male insecurity in modern comedy.

It sits high on our list of the 25 greatest sketch shows and is a key text of alt comedy in the 2020s.

What came after: Friendship and The Chair Company

Robinson has stretched the same sensibility into longer forms. Friendship, written and directed by Andrew DeYoung and released by A24 after a 2024 festival premiere, stars Robinson as a suburban man whose attachment to a charismatic new neighbour (Paul Rudd) curdles into obsession. It is the clearest proof that the ITYSL character, the man who cannot let go, can sustain a feature.

In 2025 Robinson and Kanin launched The Chair Company on HBO, a half-hour series starring Robinson as a man whose public humiliation, when a chair gives way beneath him, sends him down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. It carries over the show’s fascination with embarrassment, at longer length.

Is there a season 4?

As of October 2026, Netflix had not announced a fourth season. The most concrete signal came in 2025, when executive producer Akiva Schaffer said Robinson and Kanin had written sketches for a new season and that Netflix wanted more. Since then, the pair’s time has largely gone to The Chair Company. Treat any article giving a season 4 release date with suspicion unless it cites Netflix.

Where to watch I Think You Should Leave

All three seasons stream on Netflix worldwide. Detroiters has moved between services over the years, and Friendship and The Chair Company are on rental services and HBO Max respectively, as of 2026.

Frequently asked questions

How many seasons of I Think You Should Leave are there?

Three, each with six episodes: season one in April 2019, season two in July 2021 and season three in May 2023. The full run is under five and a half hours.

Will there be an I Think You Should Leave season 4?

Nothing official had been announced as of October 2026. In 2025, executive producer Akiva Schaffer said Robinson and Zach Kanin had written sketches for a new season and that Netflix wanted one, but the pair have also been busy with their HBO series The Chair Company.

What is the premise of I Think You Should Leave?

There is no single storyline. It is a sketch show in which ordinary social situations (a job interview, a tour, a birthday party) are derailed by someone, often Robinson, who makes a mistake and then refuses to back down, escalating rather than admit it.

Who is the trans comedian in I Think You Should Leave?

That is Patti Harrison, a comedian, writer and actor from the New York alt scene who appears in the show and has become one of its most recognisable guest performers. Our Patti Harrison profile covers her career.

Where can I watch I Think You Should Leave?

All three seasons are on Netflix worldwide, as of 2026. It is a Netflix original, so it is unlikely to move.