Over the course of four seasons, Miracle Workers has had an interesting progression. The first season was based on the book What in God’s Name, by the show’s creator Simon Rich, while the second season, known as Dark Ages, was based on his short story “Revolution.” However, with the third season, Oregon Trail, Rich left the series as showrunner, while Dan Mirk and Robert Padnick took over. Oregon Trail eventually found its footing, but that lack of Rich’s source material could be felt throughout.

Yet nearly two years after Oregon Trail, Miracle Workers comes back with its fourth season, End Times, and the series is even more hilarious and creative than ever before. Almost immediately, the charm and brilliance of the high-concept new season makes itself known, and the series is revitalized by a scenario that feels familiar by design, yet wholly original in its approach to post-apocalyptic movies and television. With End Times, Mirk and Padnick aren’t just matching the quality of the Rich seasons, they may even be surpassing them.

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What is ‘End Times’ About?
Image via TBS

End Times takes us into a world that has been destroyed by “The Boom,” as we meet two road warriors, Sid (Daniel Radcliffe) and Freya (Geraldine Viswanathan), who despite the rough world they’ve been thrown into, have fallen in love. Sid and Freya get married and move to Boomtown, the closest thing to the suburbs that this world has, as they begin to find some normalcy in their lives. Sid gets a job with Morris ‘The Junkman’ Rubinstein (Steve Buscemi), while Freya has difficulty toning down her warlording ways. The couple also has their own pet, in Scraps the War Dog (Jon Bass), and Freya’s best friend, TI-90 (Karan Soni), a partying android who is often stopping by. In their new home, Sid and Freya learn how to adjust to a calmer sensibility, while also trying to survive in this nightmarish world.

The first episode, “Welcome to Boomtown,” written by Mirk and Padnick and directed by David Wain, immediately embraces this concept with gusto and has a ton of fun with it. Boomtown is essentially the Thunderdome, while both Sid and Freya look like they could’ve come out of the Mad Max series. Especially genius is Bass, who can best be described as a man-dog, barking at mailmen, and sleeping in bed with his mommy and daddy of Sid and Freya. In this first episode, Sid and Freya are invited to The Junkman’s house for dinner, which we discover is a McMansion (literally a McDonald’s that he lives in, complete with shitty chairs and a ball pit) with his hologram wife.

Mirk and Padnick do an excellent job of blending the standard sitcom tropes with a myriad of sci-fi and apocalypse stories. For example, in the third episode, “The Matrixxx,” Sid and Freya enlist the help of TI-90 (also known as just “Tai”) to help spice up their sex life. This results in the couple getting caught in—as the name implies—a sex Matrix, where anything is possible. Again, the “spicing up the marriage” storyline has been done countless times, and The Matrix parodies have been done to death, and yet End Times manages to combine these two tropes and make them feel completely new and ridiculous again.

‘Miracle Workers: End Times’ is as Dark, Weird, and Hilarious as One Would Hope
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Because of the situation these characters are in, End Times often plays in extremely dark humor, but in a way that never feels out of place in this scenario. In the show’s second episode, “The HOA,” Freya attempts to become the president of the Home Owner’s Association after being told to take down the decapitated heads she puts in her front yard. This same episode also features David Dastmalchian as a monstrous man akin to Dune’s Baron Harkonnen who wants to make a questionable deal with The Junkman. The way End Times plays with the conventions and the concepts of these sci-fi stories and the inherent darkness within them, and still make this season funny and often sweet is a testament to the writing and love for these existing tales.

As with previous seasons of Miracle Workers, it’s also the great cast of comedic actors willing to do seemingly anything that makes these scenarios work. Radcliffe does an excellent job as the road warrior that wants more than just the violence and terror of the highway, while Viswanathan is equally great as the warlord who is trying to make it work in this new home. Buscemi has always been a lot of fun in these seasons as characters who are deliciously slimy and weird, and this might be his strangest role yet, while Soni, thankfully, gets more time than in most other seasons, and he’s such an odd, but perfect choice for this world’s take on a Terminator. Throughout four seasons, we’ve watched these actors get pushed in all sorts of odd directions, and this one might be the weirdest yet, but the cast is always game for anything thrown at them.

But it’s Jon Bass as Scraps the War Dog that is a true standout this season. Bass has always been an oddity in this series, going completely all-in with whatever idea this show throws at him, but End Times pushes him even further than ever before. Almost every choice he makes is priceless, and the absurdity of his existence alone makes him the MVP in a series full of fantastic and bonkers performances.

‘End Times’ Just Might be ‘Miracle Workers’ at Its Best
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As a writer, Rich has such a unique voice that creates crazy worlds, yet manages to find a nugget of relatability and truth to those scenarios that make them something more than just a goofy concept. This season works because Mirk and Padnick have managed to maintain that spirit that the first season had, but arguably do it even better than Rich did. End Times ends up feeling in the spirit of that first season, or even similar to Rich’s other series, Man Seeking Woman, in the way that the show can embrace the preposterous while finding the heart and charm within the ridiculous.

In its fourth season, Miracle Workers has reinvented itself once more with a wild concept that makes this series feel fresh yet again, and showcases some of the best work this team—both in front of and behind the camera—has given us so far. This is the most consistent and consistently hilarious season of Miracle Workers that doesn’t feel like the end times—it feels like a new beginning.

Rating: B+

Miracle Workers: End Times premieres on July 10 on TBS, with new episodes airing every Monday.