Joe Pera Talks With You was the perfect handbook for an era of compounding crises
[Ed. note: This essay contains spoilers for the entirety of Joe Pera Talks With You.]
“I don’t think people are bad,” Sarah Conner (Jo Firestone) says towards the beginning of the third season of Joe Pera Talks With You. “Just…”
Sarah isn’t given the chance to finish her thought. She’s interrupted by a phone call alerting her boyfriend, Joe (Joe Pera), to the urgent news that apple turnovers are two-for-one at the local market. But her dangling sentence forms the itchy question at the core of this defiantly gentle Adult Swim series, which was canceled in early July after three seasons. If people are not, as a whole, bad, then why does it so often feel so frightening to be alive?
Joe Pera Talks With You— which premiered in 2018, following the one-off specials Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep and Joe Pera Helps You Find the Perfect Christmas Tree — purported to be a genially grownup twist on educational programming. Each episode bore a title promising some enlightening tidbit, from “Joe Pera Shows You How to Dance” to “Joe Pera Shows You How to Build a Fire.” More often than not, though, these nominal tasks were sidelined in favor of sketching in the fictional denizens of Joe’s Marquette, Michigan. Along with teachers Joe and Sarah, the series introduced us to beleaguered parents Mike and Sue Melsky (Conner O’Malley and Jo Scott), Joe’s retired best friend, Gene (Gene Kelly — no, not that one), and eccentric Gabriel (Zachary Uzarraga), a preteen recently relocated from his home on an Antarctic research base. This core ensemble, rounded out with a cast of recurring characters as heightened and vivid as The Simpsons’ Springfield, became the show’s strongest asset in what turned out to be its not-so-secret mission: tackling some
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