It’s a scene that feels genuinely surreal—and the sort of visual joke more typically suited for an animated series—but also oddly at home for Angie Tribeca. This series is still one-of-a-kind unpredictable, but it’s found a way to somehow normalize the absurd nonsense it fires with the ferocity of a police-issued machine gun. The show has never felt more comfortable with itself, which allows this season to get creative in some really exciting ways.

For a show that’s so concerned with gags and puns, you’d think that after two seasons and 20 episodes, these jokes would be running thin. Miraculously though, Angie Tribeca isn’t slowed down the least in its third season. It still has the best visual gags with glorious punchlines that will make you belly laugh like nothing else on TV. When villains come into this show, they are beyond over the top caricatures of caricatures. Everything is turned up to 13 here.

Angie Tribeca even manages to up the stakes some in its third year. The show adds a big central case to chew on that percolates in the background all season, and it’s a doozy. Tribeca and her department find themselves with a serial killer on their hands. The show has nearly too much fun putting all of the various serial killer tropes under its microscope (including Chris Pine in a wonderful Hannibal Lecter-esque role). Adding more melodrama to this ultra-silly show is never a bad thing. This structure proves that if Angie Tribeca has learned anything over the course of three seasons, it’s that an episodic setup with a larger case developing behind it all is the best approach. They experimented with this last season with all of the Mayhem Global material, but they reach a more comfortable balance this time.

Serial killer material can either be hit or miss, but Angie Tribeca goes in the right direction. The show rises to these lofty narrative challenges, while still making the subject matter terribly funny. You know how serial killers can tend to be trophy hunters and keep souvenirs from their victims? Well, Angie Tribeca’s serial killer hunts actual trophy hunters.

There is also great comedic value to mine from the fact that all of the serial killer’s victims are “rich white men.” The series has obviously invested a lot of time in making the police force the brunt of its jokes in the past, but seeing rich, white men fill some of that role this year is a lot of fun. The show is dangerously adept at combing through the libraries of all the televised police procedurals that are out there in order to steal from their most ridiculous and unbelievable actual plot lines.