Why is Joe Pera Talks With You's Season 3 set in 2018?

Vulture

"Season 2 ended in the fall of 2018, so I just wanted to continue where we left off," Joe Pera tells Vulture. "I wanted to do a winter season for a long time. So after we did that spring and summer season last year, it just made sense to pick the story up where we left off. I like running the show by the seasons." But what about this season's “How to Build a Fire” episode, featuring Jo Firestone's character prepper-ism and anxiety a bit darker years before the pandemic? "It was kind of a tough episode because we don’t want to get ahead of the characters, whether we know something will happen or not," says Pera. "And just kind of treating her anxiety as a real thing, taking it seriously while still keeping in mind that it’s a comedy show. With the grief that I dealt with last season, it felt like we had to walk a line between not making it unbearable or uncomfortable to watch while still handling that type of subject matter in a way that felt true. It’s kind of tricky. In the edit, we have a lot of conversations about it. I didn’t want to make it a horror episode but really wanted people to consider whether something was going to happen or not."