User blog comment:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Banana / The Sidekick/@comment-9300845-20170611002608/@comment-31194372-20170611055003

Quick little story: Season 2 was interesting for me because, the way I grappled onto the show, it's comedic styles kind of matured as mine were. Season 1 was good enough at the time (especially since you couldn't compare it unfavorably to how great the show is now), and as a dumb kid, of course I ingested it a fair amount. As the show went on, though, I felt like my sensibilities were reshaping as the show's were, and that only drew me further in. (I admittedly sort of fell out of the show for the second half of Season 3 and Season 4, but I somehow got back into it, and thank God for that.) Maybe that's why I liked Season 2 so much - a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia - but that's not to discount the fact that it had merits in its own right.

As you mentioned, it was different for the better, and it shed the childlike preconceptions set by Season 1 so quickly that it's actually really impressive. And everything that has come to define the show now came from that point: Season 3 is arguably the standard of the show now, but it's only really a refinement of the precedents set by Season 2 than a complete redirect.

And I can't wait to talk about "The Detective" either - it's one of my five favorite episodes, I should think! And nobody else likes it... They're missing out.