Spoilers for episode one below. The whole thing is eleven minutes and it is free in three different places, so go watch it and come back. We’ll wait.

Eleven minutes, and the first one is already in the books. If you took our advice and stayed up for it instead of watching it on YouTube over lunch, you made the right call… this is a show about the hour it airs in, and the hour does some of the work.

It opens on a phone call, and the whole bit runs under a minute. Mendoza is trying to book Steve Buscemi to host his new show and Buscemi is not interested, right up until Mendoza brings up Stop Asian Hate and mentions that this is the first Asian sketch show ever. Buscemi relents. Cut to the frame the rest of the series lives in: Buscemi in a suit, standing over a sleeping Mendoza like Rod Serling with somewhere else to be. “Don’t wake him. He’ll be having his Night Terrors soon.” He doesn’t stay in the wraparound either, which is the structural joke the show is built on, and he plays every second of it straight. Nobody winks, and because nobody winks the sketches can go anywhere they like.

The first nightmare is a bank robbery. A man in a hood puts five hostages on the floor, the news informs us that veteran negotiator Lt. James McMurphy is inbound, and McMurphy turns out to be Buscemi again. The robber gives his name as Chris and his demand as wanting to be a famous snake. What makes the sketch work is that nobody in the building treats this as a problem to be managed. McMurphy asks for clarification with total sincerity, wonders aloud whether that means a motorcycle guy, offends Chris, and then asks him to name a famous snake… at which point Chris cannot think of one and McMurphy’s entire room pitches in to help him. Kaa. Sir Hiss. Medusa’s hair. A hostage floats Nagini and nearly ends the standoff the wrong way. McMurphy lands on Ekans, which is the correct energy for a sketch about people being more thoughtful than their situation deserves. Chris is so moved by the collective snake literacy on display that he abandons the ambition entirely and decides he’d rather be a hostage negotiator, which is the warmest thing that happens in eleven minutes, and it lasts until he accidentally shoots the camera.

Then a courtroom piece shot in black and white, and pay attention to the charge, because Mr. Lang is on trial for robbing a bank. He swears he didn’t. Fred Melamed is Judge Hamilton, mid-way through closing remarks on the darkest strain of moral corruption. ORDER. And then the most punishing sentence the bench can hand down… fifteen… hugs and kisses from the nearest judge, after which Hamilton has the bailiff consult the handbook to establish who the nearest judge technically is. The gallery is horrified. Lang’s own lawyer is horrified. Lang is merely confused, scanning a room full of people who clearly understand how bad this is while he doesn’t. Melamed has built an entire career out of being the most reasonable-sounding man in any given room, and putting him in charge of nonsense is one of those ideas that looks obvious the second somebody finally does it.

Last is the one you already knew, “One of Us,” the sketch Adult Swim released as a teaser back in August, and it plays differently with the other two in front of it. Mendoza is in a library, minding his business, and a middle-aged man peers through the shelves to ask whether he needs the key to the bathroom, then comes around the far side to tell him his wife is Korean. He is holding an anime DVD. Cool. Another arrives disguised as a rescue, shoving the first man aside to ask whether this “cracker” is bothering him, before arriving at Vietnamese. Awesome. A third gets him at his car for Chinese. ‘Kay. By the time he’s in a break room explaining to a coworker that men in their fifties and sixties keep materializing to tell him about their wives, and she suggests they’re only trying to relate to him, the pattern is established well enough that a fourth can walk in mid-sentence, offer Osaka, and laugh like a Hammer film villain without the sketch having to set him up at all. None of them raise their voices (unless you count cackling eerily). All of them are certain they’re paying him a compliment. Mendoza runs, the man gives chase ranting that his right to claim an Asian wife is being taken from him, and the segment ends with Mendoza throwing himself into an Uber and telling the driver to go… at which point the driver starts putting it together out loud. The last name. The face. You must be Filipino… Like my wife. In the finest horror tradition, Mendoza screams himself awake. The night terrors are over, ended at the hands of a rideshare driver.

Buscemi closes it out and tells him to wake up, over a few more frames of Judge Hamilton administering the rest of the sentence.

Three sketches, a framing device that runs under a minute, eleven minutes total, no filler. And the monsters in this show are the dreams themselves. Old white men materializing to creep out an Asian guy. A judge who punishes a convict with hugs and kisses. A bank robber who wants to be a famous snake and settles for hostage negotiator. Mendoza has said out loud that some of these are dreams he actually had, which is the part worth sitting with, because every person in every one of them is certain he is being helpful and not one of them ever raises his voice. And Mendoza wakes up screaming anyway.

The crew

Trish Henson: “It reminds me a lot of the Kroll Show. I like it!”

Trish gets the floor to herself this week, and she’s onto something that took me longer to arrive at. Kroll Show ran on characters who were each about fifteen percent too much and then let them collide, which is exactly what “One of Us” does… four men who are each individually explicable and collectively a nightmare. It’s also the right lineage. What Mendoza is doing is character sketch with the volume slightly up, which is a harder thing to land than absurdism and a rarer one to see.

How to watch

Free, official, no sign-in: episode one is up at adultswim.com, and the full episode is also on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel, where it went up hours before the premiere.

Live: Adult Swim, Sundays at midnight ET/PT, which you can get through cable, satellite, or any live TV service carrying Cartoon Network… Sling, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, and DirecTV Stream all count.

To own it: the season is available to buy on Amazon Video for $17.99 HD and Fandango At Home for $19.99 HD.

Next Sunday

Episode two, same time, midnight ET/PT. We’re doing this every week for all eight.

And one question instead of an open invitation, because “tell us what you thought” got us exactly one answer and Trish deserves company: which sketch is still in your head on Tuesday? Drop it in the Discord or Socials or Comments below while episode two is airing and you’re in next Monday’s recap, credited however you like. A sentence counts. Trish’s was eleven words. Be twelve minimum.