Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave offers the best portrayal of social anxiety

Mashable

"Anxiety is an emotion plenty of shows rely on to tell stories," says Alison Foreman. "Dramas create suspense to keep us invested, while comedies make their characters more relatable through embarrassment. But the lived-in experience of intense social anxiety — the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical process of rapidly descending into self-consciousness while in public and then frantically grasping for ways to cope — is something I've never seen accurately recreated on screen until now. The hilarious representation, it seems, came just in time for me to enjoy some much needed catharsis. That catharsis manifesting as a blend of crying and cackling as I Think You Should Leave's theme song blared across my living room stands to prove just how overdue it really was. Of course, Netflix's hit sketch show played odd-one-out comedy games for much of Season 1, and I related to some of those sketches then. (Who among us hasn't eaten the metaphorical gift receipt?) But in the series' sophomore season, Robinson and co-creator Zach Canin take more precise aim at the not-so-funny motivations behind some of I Think You Should Leave's more belligerently inappropriate characters. Rather than stopping at making it clear who should be embarrassed by their ridiculous behavior, Season 2 dares to drill down into why some of the show's characters act the outrageous ways they do. In the process, the series tap into a hyper-specific feeling us anxious folks contend with often that is at once incredibly funny and a bit sad to see on a popular TV show in 2021."

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• I Think You Should Leave exposes our online egomania: "You might think the vortex of narcissism, desperation and mindless rote behavior that characterizes many people’s Instagram use would be an obvious, not to say rather tired, subject for satire by now," says Rachel Aroesti. "In fact, TV comedy that mines laughs from the warped ways people behave online is vanishingly rare. But I Think You Should Leave – which returned for a much-lauded second season this week – does it in practically every sketch, drilling down into the absurdity of online interaction, and, in doing so, exposes the half-obscured egomania and self-interest that drives it."
• Which Season 2 sketches have the highest potential to become memes?
• That's The Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig singing one of Season 2's songs
• There's never been a better time to revisit Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson's 2017-2018 Comedy Central series Detroiters
• Presenting a Tim Robinson primer: From SNL to his My Mans comedy team
• Despite all the success of the first season, it would go against everything Tim Robinson knows to feel confident about the second: “The confidence…” he says, “you’re never confident.”