Fans of the Gmail “undo” feature rejoiced last year when Comedy Central announced Unsend, a web series about the constant waking nightmare that is social media, produced by Paul Scheer and starring Very Online™ comedians Patti Harrison and Joel Kim Booster. The network quietly launched the show on Facebook and YouTube on March 19. Initially intended as a half-hour pilot, the three short episodes find Patti and Joel cataloguing the worst tendencies of our online selves, from tone-deaf celebrity-death tweets to the frustratingly pervasive Insta-complex of models posing cheekily with carbs they’ll never eat (“Olivia Holt doesn’t even put cream cheese on her bagels. She’s going to be an active shooter very soon”). They also sit down with guests like Esther Povitsky and Jimmy O. Yang to put them to task for the cringe-inducing online behavior of their younger selves.

The show is essentially a riff sesh on online trends, a premise that definitely requires a level of immediacy and presence in the Twitter meme-cycle to pull off effectively. During certain segments, it’s clear that a lot of this material was filmed a while back, including a bit where they riff on thumbnail posters of newly streaming movies, which ends up including long-forgotten random movies like An Irrational Man and My Friend Dahmer. In addition to Patti and Joel’s infinite watchability, it’s a testament to writers Deanna Cheng and Matt McConkey that they still produce something fresh and funny out of some less-than-current subjects (“There’s a sweetness to this Jeffrey Dahmer, and I like that”). Speaking to Vulture, Scheer said, “I would love to see this show on once a week, with Patti and Joel getting to do whatever else they wanna do, kind of like the same way that Joel McHale got to do The Soup,” and it does seem that this show would be able to thrive in a more up-to-date, weekly filming format. In its current format, Unsend still has plenty of evergreen, refreshingly funny side bits:

. perfectly articulating the problem with tall men

michael vincent (@mvddm) March 27, 2019

Despite its tight editing, visual gags, and physical humor, what watching Unsend reminded me of most of all was the feeling of listening to a familiar podcast, something like Harrison’s own A Woman’s Smile or the late great Internet Explorer, with the hosts’ playful talking over each other and goofy tangents completely winning you over with their idiosyncrasies. The show lacks the shaggier vibes and DIY aesthetics of a podcast or indie YouTube series, but the hosts’ kooky energy and the irreverent, insightful writing suggest a much stranger version of this show lying just outside of frame. This potential for it to lean into its oddest impulses and become something truly essential is why I hope we get to see more of Unsend.

Or as Patti Harrison says in the first episode, “Death in general. I’m against it. It should be banned … We’re here, we’re queer, and we’ll never die.”

You can watch all three episodes of Unsend here.