Nick Kroll of Kroll Show, which is ending after this third season.
Kroll Show, Nick Kroll’s delightfully absurd sketch show, just entered its third and final season on Jan. 13. Three seasons may seem like a short run, but Kroll’s “sketch-uational” comedy (a term Seth Meyers used to reference the show, a nod to the narrative style in its sketches) wasted so little time getting started and packed so much into each episode that it has already done more in just two years than most shows can in twice as long.
In the episode “Too Much Tuna” from the first season, the cold open has Kroll debuting his show to a robot, who is a perfect amalgamation of the 18- to 34-year-old male demographic. The robot instantly destroys the TV and then murders Kroll. It’s funny, sure, but it also shows the self-awareness of the show. Kroll understands who his audience is — the people raised on TV but sick of how endlessly unoriginal it can be. His sketches mercilessly ridicule the inanity of television but require a thorough knowledge of that kind of programming in order to fully get it. I’m reminded of my mother scoffing that Fifty Shades of Grey was the most disgusting thing she’d ever read as she left to go buy Fifty Shades Darker, its sequel. Kroll’s viewers are the robots and Kroll is serving up something that short-circuits the brain — a loud and boisterous television show that expertly critiques loud, boisterous television.
The show’s main target is the near-endless hours of exploitative footage milked from the lives of strange and ultimately sad people in reality TV. Rich Dicks satirizes the addicting catharsis of watching vapid rich people on TV; the PubLIZity sketch satirizes the love of drama-fueled meltdowns; C-Czar is pretty much an adult Honey Boo Boo, a character whose funny mannerisms and strange decisions overshadow a legitimately depressing background. Characters get recycled in endless reality shows, spin-offs, specials and commercials.
Every sketch is a fragment of a piece of fictional media from the bizarro pop-culture universe Kroll has created. It might be the first epistolary television show. Watching Kroll Show is like tuning into a channel being broadcast from an alternate dimension in a dystopian world in which everyone is eternally chained to their televisions, forced to watch increasingly strange programs featuring the same faces until their entire understanding of reality collapses into itself.
But that’s the beauty of Kroll’s decision to end the show after just three seasons. One of the primary things Kroll Show rails against is the endless recycling of ideas and previously successful gimmicks in television. The characters star in spin-offs of spin-offs in an endlessly recursive spiral, repeating until you don’t even remember how you were introduced to them in the beginning. This happens all over. When a Saturday Night Live sketch goes viral, the next few weeks are plastered with redoes of that sketch. When there’s a fun new YouTube sensation, it gets recycled a thousand times until it’s discarded.
Even the critically acclaimed Key & Peele is guilty of this — the duo just released its third iteration of the East-West Bowl sketch. Kroll envisions a world where jokes don’t get discarded when they’ve run their course; they just get their own reality shows. Kroll Show itself avoids one of the main flaws it depicts in its internal shows: It ends.
The show is a masterful work of sketch comedy. Kroll Show is more than just a collection of discrete comedic pieces; it’s a complex whole woven with conceptually relevant threads. It’s a show with a vision lampooning shows with no vision, meaningful absurdism that decries meaningless realism. Its conclusion mocks the idea of a televised wasteland with no end in sight.
