Until last weekend, I only knew Tim Robinson as one of the current white guys on SNL. Soft featured, sunken-eyed and understated on the middle-aged NBC series, it was easy to write him off as another writer/card reader. After all, next to the personalities of Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson, the ensemble nature of Saturday Night Live is less than habitable for not-so-obvious breakout talents. But in the open plains of Netflix, well beyond Lorne Michaels’ fortified kingdom, “I Think You Should Leave” is the glistening city on the hill: a drop-dead-gorgeous, hour-and-a-half effigy to a sparkling perspective on comedy.

The show is fascinated by character motivation and its influence on action and interaction. For example, this old (4:00) man isn’t just being weird for the sake of it, he wants to be popular within a car idea focus group and embarrasses a colleague critical of him as a means of asserting his dominance. That sort of development is exceedingly rare in this art form. Watch something from Collegehumor or Funny or Die and try finding motivations as evolutionary as ITYSL’s. You likely won’t. Robinson is also not afraid of repetition. By retaining common lexicon throughout an episode, a through-line exists between the shorts: the audience’s familiarity with the minds these concepts emerge from. Robinson stars throughout, while the next most common performer only shows up in two episodes. It is reminiscent of the Chappelle Show since it centers around the personality of one man, but contrasts Dave Chappelle’s use of stand-up and pop culture figures. Rather than a Dave-type star quality, Robinson’s understated persona allows characters in his sketches to speak (or scream) for him. The six-part-season of fifteen-ish minute episodes starring Tim as unconnected characters have changed the sketch comedy landscape over one weekend.

That is especially interesting to me since, on Friday, May 3, the Wolfpack Comedy crew will be performing the Biggest Little Sketch Show on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. The show will be funny. We’ve written the hell out of it for the past few months, have practiced the sketches incessantly, and laboriously edited together video and music content. However, it lacks the overarching thematic cohesion ITYSL satisfies. That isn’t due to a lack of trying. In fact, at the beginning of the writing process, I explicitly stated an intention for strong thematic and tonal consistency across the show. But in the crunch-time search for the best and funniest ideas, the democratically chosen line-up blurred out any specific message. It was outside of my skill level to write an hour of great comedy from a targeted, meaningful perspective.

An unintentional theme does stand out from the University of Nevada show: death and decay. Six of our nine sketches deal with that topic in some regard; either in preparation for a funeral, controlling the marionette corpse of Rocky Balboa for one last prize-fight, or “Paradise Frost” where three sections of a snowman express their views on melting in rap style. This through-line is less of an intention than it is inherent darkness in our comedic styling. Robinson’s cohesion relies on more than just tendency. Where our work resembles anthology — a compilation of disconnected work with commonalities — Robinson’s is an album, with the axis being a single mind (despite the extensive collaboration involved.) For Tim, however, the firepower he assembled translated into access to white-knuckled talent.

Robinson reached deep into his SNL network for his creation. I, on the other hand, didn’t even try phoning John Mulaney or anything. Robinson collaborated with The Lonely Island; the comedy collective of Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, along with Akiva Shaffer, who also directed the show. The two other writers; John Solomon and Zach Kanin, also punched into 30 Rockefeller. Alice Mathias, known for her five Emmy nominations on comedies like Documentary Now and Portlandia, directed most of the season with Shaffer.

Put broadly, I Think You Should Leave centers around social faux pas and the worst reactions to them. Robinson explains as much in an appearance on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast. The first episode opens at the end of a job interview that went well. Exiting the cafe, the applicant, Tim Robinson, pulls a push door to no avail. “Actually, it goes both ways. I was here yesterday,” Tim assures his interviewer. With drooling strain, Tim proceeds to pull the door: the frame and hinges groaning, snapping, flying, wide enough to escape.

Though social meltdown is not the hard-and-fast goal of every sketch. Some highlight halting specificity. “Has this ever happened to you?” a commercial lawyer asks, shifting in front of a nondescript office library setting. Something about termites in your house, then the pest control guys use your bathroom and trick you into thinking their foot is stuck in your toilet, but they’re just pranking you, yell “It’s turbo time,” and jump on your sofa — but you can’t join or they get mad, and so on. “Has that ever happened to you?” The fluidity and frequent abandonment of message allow complex elements to be holstered in favor of unconstrained comedy.

The conclusions of Robinson’s sketches stand apart from other works. As a writing style focused on novel premises, sketch comedy often relegates the last lines to one final, far-flung, absurdist extreme. (See: Dear Sister from SNL) Other times, a final punchline caps it off, leaving the audience laughing as the players rush off stage (Stefon, also SNL). Instead, ITYSL presents new flavors. Sometimes sending off viewers with an upbeat song at a funeral, a high pitched, repeated word or a corpse smiling. (Yes, there are multiple funeral sketches.)

My sketch, “Toby’s Troublesome Night,” follows the escalation formula. Toby, a child with sleep paralysis, experiences an episode mid-yawn. Despite reassurance that dreams are fake, “Hooey Baba-Booey,” by his mom, he’s harassed by increasingly absurd dream demons. A lumpy, oily, fuzzy fright tears his room apart and creeps him out. Next, a Benihana chef chops onion volcanoes atop him and tosses shrimp into Toby’s frozen-yawn. Finally, Toby’s mother returns to his relief. Except she reveals a plate of shrimp and adds to the shellfish shelling. She coos “It’s real Toby, it’s always been real!” Next to the inaction of Toby on screen, Toby’s frantic voiceover places over-the-top melodrama in a disturbing setting. Here, comedy comes from discomfort and terror, but caricatures that fear.

In another ITYSL sketch, a magician embarrasses a man in front of his wife, leading to marital problems. The humor here stems from another fear: falling for a magician’s tricks makes you less of a man. Failing to redeem himself at a second performance, the mild-mannered character yells “You ruined my fucking life!” freezeframe, text overlay of the words “MAGICIANS SUCK!” There is not a clear rhyme or reason for these send-offs. However, because of the 15–18-minute format, and because there are only brief musical interludes between each sketch, these off-note conclusions offer a staccato rhythm that illustrates a series completely in control of its path while making unorthodox decisions the whole way. Where SNL is the TomTom GPS, sticking to freeways and major avenues, “I Think You Should Leave” is Waze; cutting through neighborhoods and construction zones.

Developing my own sketch show, I learned a lot. How a sketch evolves from its inception in a writer’s room. How the biggest-seeming problems tend to be easily solved, usually by my brilliantly hilarious and organized girlfriend, Paige, while non-issues melt into crucibles of debate. However, I’ve learned more about sketch comedy from “I Think You Should Leave” than I did making the Biggest Little Show because it opened me to fresh angles of attack for everything from character creation and delivery to the manipulation of setting and expanding the world of a humorous concept. The grandiose goal of a coherent comedy remains my white whale, and Robinson will be my closest reference for years to come.

“Paradise Frost,” our puppeteered snowman song, I invoked a Robinsonian conclusion, where the final word is not stated, but written. Not only does the musicality of the song benefit from the change, but the shifted method of information gathering is a punchline itself.

Many in the comedy world are prophesying the effects this little Lonely Island creation will have on today’s young comedians, and I too see I Think You Should Leave as a generational shift for sketch comedy. While I’ve found enormous joy in recent series like Key and Peele, w/ Bob (7:30) and David, and even some recent episodes of Saturday Night Live, Tim Robinson’s work makes me question, “what is everyone else even doing?”