There’s more Yolo on the horizon: the third season of the Adult Swim series, subtitled Rainbow Trinity, arrives March 9—promising to continue the fantastically zany bestie hijinks of Yolo: Crystal Fantasy and Yolo: Silver Destiny. There’s no other show quite like it, and it deserves to have more eyeballs devouring its freakiness.
The first time I discovered Crystal Fantasy, it was late at night after a day at the theme parks on vacation. We’d just gotten back to the hotel room from drinking all over the world, and turned on Adult Swim for some background noise. The animation was rough, reminiscent of Beavis and Butt-Head—if they were millennial chicks in Australia’s club scene. We had some laughs at jokes that would grab our attention, but it wasn’t until a creature from a toilet bowl broke reality and turned the lead animated character Sarah (Sarah Bishop) into a live-action human (played by show creator Michael Cusack) that we all were sucked down the drain along for the ride. It was a quiet moment, a dance of self-reflection that lingered until it smash cut back into the cartoon world, where the character Sarah was really off in her head drunkenly having one of those moments on the dance floor.
The irreverent absurdity of the episode hooked me. I had to binge the show when we got back home, and fell in love with the messy friendship between uncool and chill Sarah and her chaotically toxic yet endearing best friend Rachel (Todor Manojlovic). Maybe I recognized myself as having been part of similar friendships—but as which character? Often times… both, depending on whether I was in my destructive era or healing era of my 20s. What really got me was Yolo‘s dank-meme internet humor mixed with the fantasy and sci-fi circumstances the best friends would often have to overcome.
The millennial bestie experience is roasted here with choice cringe humor. Like when one of you has to fight your boyfriend’s new trash girlfriend (but no, really she’s a trash bin) to the death—but also experience those fizzy, bubbly giggle moments, like when your horoscope says you can take a rocket to your parents’ holiday house to take a break from your toxic best friend. Then it gets all out violent, like when you go to a music festival where you dance till you die Hunger Games-style, and also go through the usual acid trips of epiphanies of needing to grow up or grow apart. You know, the ones that you end up forgetting all about after a good night of sobering sleep, but also both realize “Omg—like, we almost died last night.” Yolo is relatable content.
The seasons of the friendship between Rachel and Sarah fill me with secondhand embarrassment and wistful wishes to relive the ragers spent with the women who helped me become the person I am now. From the first few episodes I’ve seen of Yolo: Rainbow Trinity, we are so back, baby, for more cosmic misadventures about the complicated nature of friendship. There’s more Boomer parent involvement this time around, which is—again—super relatable, because who hasn’t been on a wine tour looking for that hole in the wall club and then had run-ins with the awkward nerds simping for the clueless girl protected by her don’t-even-think-about-it bestie after getting trapped in an alternate reality of the past? The stakes get weirder as they get older and we’re here for our girls Rachel and Sarah always.
Yolo: Crystal Fantasy and Yolo: Silver Destiny are season two are now streaming on Max. Yolo: Rainbow Trinity releases on Adult Swim and Max March 9.
Update (2/28/25 @ 11:43 PM ET): This story has been edited to clarify the new Yolo show’s subtitle is Rainbow Trinity.
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