I wonder if people in Detroit feel the same way about Detroiters as Portlanders felt about Portlandia. I doubt it—Detroiters’ cheerfully inclusive silliness is the polar opposite of of its Portland counterpart. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s brand of smug, barbed humor was one of too-cool-for-school kids at the back of the classroom, talking snark about everything and everyone. Detroiters’ Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson, on the other hand, are cheerfully sitting up front, raising their hands and irritating the teacher with too many questions. Portlandia was ostensibly a show about a place where young people go to retire—Detroiters is a show about how our best friends keep us young. For a show written by and starring grownups, it’s a much better look.
Richardson and Robinson’s character-based comedy—it doesn’t quite seem accurate to call it a sitcom—is in the middle of a giddy, goofy second season on Comedy Central and has been the only sliver of uplift in this entire miserable year. (Westworld, The Handmaid’s Tale, and American life in general—I’m looking at every last one of you.)
The show’s premise is simple and unimportant: Sam Duvet (Richardson) and Tim Cramblin (Robinson) are best friends who run a small Detroit ad agency, where they make hilarious, low-budget commercials for local TV. Their clients are a blur of real and invented businesses, and through their wonderfully ridiculous ads, we get a glimpse of the flavors that make Detroit uniquely Detroit. When Tim and Sam are off the clock, they inhabit a city that’s bizarrely hilarious but rooted in reality. Characters eat Coney dogs and drink Faygo. They make embarrassing music videos about “April in the D,” that magical time of year when the seasons of the Tigers, Pistons, and Red Wings all overlap. There’s even a repeating cameo from Mort Crim, the Detroit newscaster who inspired Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy.