Irony Point Chiefs on 'I Think You Should Leave' Season 3 Plans

July 25, 2024

Irony Point is a production company that might not yet be known widely by name, but its projects, Netflix’s critically acclaimed “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson”; Paramount Plus’ revival of “Inside Amy Schumer” and Schumer’s recently renewed Hulu dramedy “Life & Beth”; Michael Che’s Lorne Michaels-produced HBO Max show “That Damn Michael Che,” and Marvel’s new scripted “Squirrel Girl” podcast, certainly are.

The banner, which is currently one year into a three-year deal at Netflix, is headed up by co-presidents Alex Bach and Daniel Powell. And their rapidly ramping up company is one that studios and talent are going to regret not having gotten into business with earlier five years from now.

“Our partnership with Endeavor Content on ‘Life & Beth,’ they’re a behemoth and they operate in a budget space that we’ve previously not even come close to,” Powell tells Variety. “Being partners with them as the studio really allowed us to have our first experience in what I’d say is a different league, but one that we hope to continue in.”

Powell and Bach say the same goes for Irony Point’s teamup with Broadway Video on Che’s HBO Max show which “really helped generate this great relationship with NBCUniversal that we didn’t have before.”

The duo also teamed with “Black Mirror” bosses Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones’ Broke And Bones production company for Netflix’s special “Death to 2021,” which Irony Point handled production services on. Powell says Irony Point is in “active development conversations about potential future specials later this year” with Broke And Bones.

At the moment, Irony Point is looking to grow through “strategic partnerships” like these, rather than M&A opportunities, like their fellow “Inside Amy Schumer” producers Jax Media found in its acquisition by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment.

“We would never want to do anything that would make us unappealing to the kind of talent we want to work with,” Bach said. “We very much respect companies like Jax and what they’ve done with Imagine… It’s really nice that they have their model of one path we could take. Having said that, I think we’re very different, in our own way, and that’s not necessarily our route.”

Powell added: “Right now we’re just trying to keep our eye on continuing to make quality things with great talent and making sure that we have the trust of the talent that we’re working with.”

That includes expanding Irony Point’s reach into podcasting, something the company has been doing since 2019 with its Radio Point banner, launched in partnership with Smartless Media president Rich Korson and audio producer Houston Snyder. As Variety exclusively reported earlier this week, Irony Point’s Radio Point is producing Marvel’s newly launched SiriusXM podcast series “Marvel’s Squirrel Girl: The Unbeatable Radio Show,” based on Ryan North’s “Squirrel Girl” comics.

“We’re seeing a lot of business growth on the podcasting side,” Bach said. “We’ve got a project right now with Big Money Players Network, Will Ferrell’s company, which iHeart Radio will distribute. We just launched our first kids and family show based on the wildly popular ‘Who Was?’ book series with Penguin. We have a narrative show with Spotify that we’re in the process of writing right now. On the podcast side, we’re just seeing a lot of growth, and to be able to work with Marvel is certainly very exciting for us.”

And all of this began “as almost an experiment for development” based out of Irony Point’s Great City Post, a full-service sound facility in Manhattan, Powell said.

“We have this infrastructure for audio and we have sound engineers and mixers and artists that have done feature films. We could easily produce something at a high quality level from a sound design perspective. So why aren’t we using that for development incubation? And that’s what led to our first project,” Powell said. “But since then, Radio Point has really become comparable to Irony Point in the sense that, because of our audio infrastructure, we’ve been able to provide production services to Marvel, to iHeart, and in a way where we do do creative development — but we’re also brought on to handle the soup-to-nuts production services for podcasts, in addition to television.”

Despite so much growth on the horizon, it’s hard not to come back to Irony Point’s current most celebrated series: Netflix’s oddball sketch comedy “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson,” which it produces in partnership with Party Over Here’s Akiva Schaffer and Ali Bell. The series has yet to be renewed for a third season, having launched its second in July 2021 and its first in April 2018, but Bach assures us that doesn’t mean there won’t be a Season 3.

“The thing about ‘I Think You Should Leave,’ more than anything, is that Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin write every single script themselves,” Bach said. “Largely, the majority of the writing process is the two of them. And they just wait for the sketches to come to them. It’s just more about the writing really being what they want it to be and that’s what kind of delays everything. Not delays, but it’s why we have extended periods of time between seasons. And they have other stuff going on, too. They’re not churning out sketches the way that maybe they did at ‘SNL.’ They just won the second WGA award for Season 2, so it works. And so we’re like, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

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