The Detour: Season 4

Oh boy.

Here's me talking up the first two seasons of The Detour in 2017:

...might be the best pure comedy I've seen in a while... This isn't a reinvention or a reboot of a family road trip comedy, nor is it an inversion or a spoof or a parody - it's just a straight attempt at the genre done very well, very consistently

...the second season was even better, against all odds ...newfound sense of confidence to make all kinds of in-jokes and callbacks. I'm not saying this is Arrested Development or anything, but it might be the closest thing on TV today to that beautiful, excellent family comedy too smart for its own good.

That's some very high praise! Here I am a year ago with a take on The Detour after its third season:

...third season was undeniably the weakest one yet. ...The Detour is probably going to get renewed for a fourth season... but it's clear the show was running on fumes already in the third... I don't have very high hopes.

Well, I can't say I didn't see this coming, but the fourth season was just awful on every level. The initial premise, the cliffhanger from Season 3 - that the family's daughter has run away from her very messy family at, like, 16, and the rest of the family is traveling the world trying to find her - very quickly resolved in an unsatisfying way that left all four characters scattered and the show without any real story to tell. And it's fine for comedies not to tell big stories - nothing wrong with a hang-out session and an episode-by-episode conflict-and-hilarious-resolution cycle - but this wasn't that, at all. This was, "let's change the setting every episode and never really have an understanding of why any of the characters are where they are, or what they're pursuing, or what they're doing." There were too many episodes without the kids, and worse, there was an episode without the parents. The kids aren't really kids anymore - classic sitcom issue, frankly - but their characters haven't really become teens either - more like little adults. It just doesn't work! Neither does the increasingly broad, easy, groanworthy comedy the show opts for.

All this is fine - shows get shitty and shows get canceled all the time - but for a couple of seasons there The Detour was legitimately one of the funniest and most underrated shows of the decade. I would still recommend those first two seasons to anyone at all, but yikes was this a rough season. There've been murmurings that the show could be brought back for a fifth season on a different network, but at this point I don't think it's TBS that's holding it back creatively. Oh well!