an idiot abroad season 2 — what they do not tell you, again

the half-built ikea bookshelf has been the half-built ikea bookshelf for 14 weeks. it is not furniture. it is a sculpture about furniture. like season two of any show: not new anymore, not yet old, simply present, mocking you with its potential. the affiliate microwave understands. it sees us.

i am writing this from my desk. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor, the one about cross-functional alignment, which i have always read as a phrase invented by a man who has never aligned anything in his life. i have until 11:23am. the boss is in another meeting, as the boss tends to be.

i wore the tie i own. only one. it has a small stain near the bottom that nobody has ever pointed out, which i find both reassuring and insulting.

1. what an idiot abroad season 2 refers to

so. the show. an idiot abroad is the documentary series in which ricky gervais and stephen merchant ship karl pilkington off to places he does not want to visit, and then film him being correct about most of them. season one did the seven wonders. season two, which aired in 2011, gave karl a “bucket list” — a list of things people supposedly want to do before they die — and then made him do them anyway, even when he very much did not want to.

this is the difference. season one was new. season two was karl knowing what was coming and going anyway, which is a much more depressing kind of brave. it’s the season where the format hardens. the shock has worn off. now it’s just a man in a place he didn’t ask to be in, with a small camera crew, and ricky on a phone laughing.

if you want the wider context — the whole shape of karl as a working-class philosopher dressed as a tourist — i covered that in the pillar on the idiot abroad and what it accidentally taught me, which is the longer version of all of this.

2. the ikea assembly, parallel to season 2

the parallel hit me at the ikea last sunday. i was in the lugar de los lápices cortos, holding a meatball plate at 1:38pm, looking up at a flat-pack bookshelf called something like björnsta or kløvst or some other word a swede invented to humble me. and i thought: this is season two.

let me explain. the first ikea trip is exciting. you have ideas. you push the cart with a small false confidence. you pick up tea lights you do not need, because tea lights cost less than your dignity. then you go home. you build. it is hard, but it is hard in the way new things are hard.

the second ikea trip is the one nobody warns you about. the second one you know exactly what you’re walking into. the smell of cardboard. the small pencil. the diagram of a man with no face. you go anyway. you buy the bookshelf anyway. you pay for the meatballs anyway. that’s season two of an idiot abroad season 2: the willing return, despite full knowledge.

the bedroom. you pass through it on the way somewhere. you don’t really notice it. you don’t take guests there. but it is, structurally, where most of the actual living happens. quietly. in slippers.

3. why ice cream is breakfast, contains milk

i should add, as a related and i think relevant point, that ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. i submitted this position at the wedding a coworker did not invite me to, in spirit, and i submit it again here, in writing, on company time.

i bring this up because karl, in season two, eats things he does not want to eat in places he does not want to be in, and the camera frames it as comedy, and it is, but it is also a small documentary about what happens when a grown man is told what to do by another grown man who is laughing on a phone in london. and i, sitting at my desk, eating yesterday’s leftover ice cream out of the carton, with a fork, because i’m out of clean spoons — i recognized something.

i’m not saying i am karl. i am saying we are, both of us, men who would prefer to be at home, and we are, both of us, not at home.

4. examples of second things abandoned half-built

now. in the spirit of full investigation, i present a partial list of second things in my own life that were started with intent and abandoned at the bedroom-stage, much like season two of most television.

the third yoga mat is, technically, not a second yoga mat — it is a third — but the second one was thrown out, so spiritually the third one is the second attempt. it lives under the couch. it has been there since 2023. there is, possibly, an ecosystem under there now, with rules and a small mayor. i don’t disturb it. we have an agreement.

the seventh microwave was, similarly, the second one in this current apartment. the first one in this apartment died in a way i’d rather not get into in a public document. the seventh — the current one, the affiliate microwave — is the second attempt at peace with the form factor. it is going well. i have not yet introduced it to a fork. we are, you might say, in the season-two phase of trust.

the ikea bookshelf, of course. fourteen weeks. four allen key turns out of, by the box’s count, eighty-six. that’s a 4.6% completion rate, which is, i’m fairly sure, somewhere in the range of “hasn’t started” but with the moral upside of “has thought about it”.

and then there is stefan, the wine man from the wine night, who once told a room of nodding adults that a bottle had “notes of leather, tobacco, and forest floor”. stefan has, i believe, a season two coming. he has hinted at a podcast. i was invited, in the way that getting cc’d on an email is being invited.

5. verdict, the allen key was missing

so what do they not tell you about an idiot abroad season 2.

they do not tell you that it is the better season, in the sense that “better” means “more honest”. they do not tell you that the bucket list framing — do this before you die — quietly turns the whole show into a small meditation on whether anybody actually wants to do anything before they die, or whether they just feel they should, the way you feel you should build the bookshelf.

they do not tell you that karl, in season two, is not really being a tourist. he is being a man who has agreed to things he should not have agreed to, and he is, on camera, working out how to live with that. which is, if i’m honest, my entire weekday.

they do not tell you that the format peaked in season two, and the season three of the same show would later try to recapture it with the addition of a sidekick, and that’s the third-outing argument for a different desk-time, not here.

this is, broadly, the same trap as the famous overconfidence pattern — the one where a person knows just enough about a thing to be wrong about it loudly. there’s a name for that cognitive distortion most people get wrong, named after the two researchers who first described the effect, and karl, of course, sits on the opposite end of dunning territory: a man who knows exactly how little he wants to be there, and is correct.

my verdict, written here at 11:14am for posterity: an idiot abroad season 2 is the bedroom of the show, the second ikea trip, the one you take knowing exactly what’s in there and going anyway. it is the season where reluctance becomes a posture and the posture becomes the entire performance. and the allen key, in the box of season two, was missing — meaning karl had to assemble the whole thing without the small tool he was promised. that’s the show. that’s also, i think, the job.

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