Fans of The Other Two—the HBO Max comedy created, written, and executive produced by former SNL head writers Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly—are used to a bit of jumping around. The critical darling, which follows Brooke and Cary Dubek (Heléne Yorke and Drew Tarver) in their quest to escape the shadow of their Justin Bieber–esque brother, ChaseDreams (Case Walker)—and, eventually, the shadow of their Ellen DeGeneres–adjacent talk show host mother, Pat (Molly Shannon)—premiered on Comedy Central in 2019 before getting scooped up by the streamer for its second season. Nearly two years after making the leap from cable to streaming, The Other Two returns to HBO Max on May 4 for its third season, where it will make its biggest leap yet. 

After cruising through everything from a Hillsong-inspired baptism to an event dedicated to unveiling a secret Hadid’s face, season two ended on perhaps the best one-off pandemic joke we’ve seen on TV so far. Struggling actor Cary finally got a starring role in an indie film, with rehearsals set to begin—when else?—March 13, 2020. So, is season three all about the harrowing journey of making an indie film about essential workers amidst a global pandemic?  

Yes, says Kelly. “All 10 episodes take place in real time on March 12, 2020.”

He’s joking. Instead, Kelly and Schneider wisely decided to jump three years into the future for season three. “We did just skip right the hell over that,” Kelly says. “Please make sure you print that this is not, like, a COVID show. We are not all about COVID now.”

But season three doesn’t pretend the pandemic didn’t happen, either. “Our show is so grounded in what feels real and current. We didn’t want to make a show that completely ignored our current situation and the ongoing effects of living through a global pandemic,” says Schneider. (Fittingly, we’re talking over Zoom.) “We are three years in the future, but all of our characters have been impacted in some way by what we’ve all gone through. And we just tried to explore different funny routes that that would take them.”

Season two ended with Cary and Brooke both finding success in their own right—with Cary’s acting career finally taking off and Brooke becoming manager for every other member of her family. But that doesn’t mean all their problems have gone away. If anything, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

“With the time jump, the family is years into being part of the public eye,” Tarver tells me in a separate Zoom call with Yorke. “I feel like they’ve settled into their fame, or their notoriety, and the issues that they were dealing with have become more commonplace. There’s maybe a deeper layer of, I guess, humiliation and sadness that comes along with that. The show continues to deliver in terms of the characters being humiliated—the ‘other two’ getting humiliated—in a very exciting, funny, new way.”

The intersection between humiliation and hilarity has always been The Other Two’s bread and butter, whether that’s involved Cary’s nude accidentally going “gay-viral” or Brooke inadvertently leading a “Women can suck!” chant at a panel. But season two proved that The Other Two also excels at pointed cultural satire, with sharp takes on everything from HGTV to Vogue. Cary’s season two dalliance with Dean, a straight actor who wanted to seem gay in public, predated proliferating discussions of “queerbaiting,” while Pat’s talk show, Pat!, arrived right around the morning talk show renaissance that also brought us The Drew Barrymore Show, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and The Jennifer Hudson Show. Clearly, “Pat’s influence knows no bounds,” Kelly jokes. “This is all because of Pat.”

Still, Schneider and Kelly claim they can’t predict everything. ChaseDreams spent season two  in Rihanna mode, doing just about anything but singing. Kelly jokes that he wishes he’d had a pregnant Chase singing at the Super Bowl this season as well. “If we had called that one, we would just retire,” Schneider adds. 

Speaking of Chase, he’s part of the reason for the time shift—or at least the actor who plays him is. “Case Walker is truly 20 years old now, in real life. It’s crazy,” says Kelly in disbelief. Adds Schneider: “We started working with him when he was 14. That was part of the reason we needed to do the three-year jump. We were like, you’re not going to buy that this kid is still 16.” That, too, inspired a story line: In season three, Chase has to navigate the tricky leap from child stardom to adult fame. “We sort of explore when a child star turns 18 and they’re not a child anymore. Suddenly, they’re adult, and their team can kind of be like, hell yeah,” says Kelly. Sounds like Chase is entering his Miley Cyrus era.

Walker isn’t the only actor whose life changed dramatically between seasons two and three. “I got married the September we aired season two, and I thought, I don’t know, how long does it take people to get pregnant? Apparently, no time at all,” says Yorke, who gave birth to baby boy Hugo last June. “We were going to shoot in the summer, [but] we ended up shooting in the fall, which is great,” Schneider says. “It gave us a little more time to settle our scripts and get our prep time going. It ended up being super helpful to us creatively.”

“I’m just really lucky to have wonderful bosses who, when I told them I was expecting, it was just without hesitation asked when I wanted to return,” Yorke adds. “I said I’d love three months, and it was nothing…. I was so excited to come back when we were ready, when I was ready, the body was ready.” 

“I mean, other than you demanding your son have a huge guest role this season,” Tarver jokes.

“I had to launch his career,” Yorke replies. “I need to make him a nepo baby. I want Drew and I to be the ‘other two’ to my baby.”

This sort of repartee is natural for Yorke and Tarver, who have played siblings now for nearly half a decade. “The shorthand is there,” says Yorke. “We’re very lucky, and we know that we’re lucky.”

Though Yorke’s baby won’t be making an appearance onscreen, familiar faces like Josh Segarra, Richard Kind, Kate Berlant, and Jimmy Fowlie are set to return. New guest stars are also slated to appear, including Simu Liu, Fin Argus, Ann Dowd, Edie Falco, Ben Platt, Dylan O’Brien, and Lukas Gage. Brandon Scott Jones as Cary’s best friend Curtis; Wanda Sykes’s PR maven, Shuli; and Ken Marino’s hapless manager (and Pat’s boyfriend), Streeter, are back as well. “All of our amazing cast is back,” Kelly says. “It’s three years later, but they look 1.5 years older at most.” 

Kelly and Schneider are keeping more plot details from season three under wraps, in part because they haven’t finished working on all the episodes. “We are frantically editing right now,” Kelly tells me. “They will be published a second before they’re on air. It’s very SNL. We asked for this.”

These first-look photos give a few clues about what to expect. We see Cary taking a selfie in front of the historic West Village gay bar the Stonewall Inn, and Pat in her girl-boss era, with three large men behind her as she sits at a boardroom table. In another photo, Brooke is decked out in a space suit with a logo that says “Alpha Dawn.” Is she going on a Jeff Bezos–inspired, Blue Origin–esque trip? It’s anyone’s guess.

“This is definitely our most ambitious season so far,” Schneider tells VF. “We just take a lot of big swings and try a lot of big premises, because we as writers don’t want to be bored.”

The internet has, however, sleuthed out a few story lines. Last fall, photos from season three leaked when the comedy took over the Palace Theatre, putting up a marquee for a big, sad, gay play. Does Cary make his Broadway debut in season three? “It’s definitely a big Broadway play that’s a centerpiece of an episode in the show,” says Kelly. “But who’s in it? Why are they in it? I don’t know.” The marquee was so convincing that passersby actually stopped and asked if they could buy tickets. “I felt like a bad person,” Kelly says.

There’s been a bit of chaos at HBO Max since season two, as the streamer continues to make headlines for dumping and disappearing shows like The Minx and Love Life. But that’s not a huge concern for Schneider or Kelly. “We’re just kind of doing our own thing,” says Kelly. “We hear the things about HBO and HBO Max and stuff, but we just sort of keep working and keep making the show. I guess it’s sort of a separate thing.”

Whatever happens in the future, making the leap to a streaming platform opened the show up to a brand-new audience. “We felt like the first season, when we would post about it on our social media and stuff, the main comment was just like, ‘Where is this? It looks so good,’” says Schneider. When the show aired on Comedy Central, Yorke adds, “a lot of our friends watched it. We knew that people were liking it. And then we got to HBO, and you could feel that there were just more eyeballs. More people want to come up to us and tell us they love the show.” 

“And I’ll say this,” she adds, with perfect Dubek timing, “please approach me and tell me how great I am. I love it.”