The first thing I did when I got to Jerrod Carmichael’s apartment, a luxury loft in Chelsea with commanding views of the Hudson, was take my shoes off. He didn’t have to ask; I already knew, from the show. The show is called “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” an eight-episode documentary series that recently aired on HBO and is not quite like anything else I’ve seen on TV. Carmichael gets himself into plenty of situations, but it’s not exactly an unscripted sitcom. He is a comedian, and the episodes are often funny, but the humor seems almost incidental. The show is more concerned with truth, or at least with the performance of truth—but then it will undermine this concern with a meta punch line, or with a self-conscious gesture hurled like a projectile through the fourth wall. It’s more artsy than most reality shows—less E! than A24, less Kris Jenner than Caveh Zahedi—and yet it shares a lot of the hallmarks of the reality genre, including forced confrontations, ever-shifting power dynamics, and an abiding fascination with interpersonal mess. On most reality shows, there are several main characters who are gradually revealed, under the unforgiving glare of the lens, to be less likable, or at least more complicated, than they first appeared. Carmichael is one of the few people who has knowingly cast himself in that role.
In 2022, in an HBO special called “Rothaniel,” Carmichael came out as gay, and, while he was at it, divulged several other family secrets. This both elevated his career and shattered his personal life, and the premise of “Reality Show” was that he would let a camera crew follow him around as he tried to pick up the pieces. The cameras would also give him the courage (or excuse) to stage conversations (or confrontations) that he still found difficult to initiate, especially with his parents. (“I’m trying to self-‘Truman Show’ myself,” he says, early on in the series.) In each episode, he sets out to resolve a personal dilemma, big or small: Will he and his boyfriend survive an open relationship? Will he and his mother ever truly communicate? Will his overbearing roommate take the hint and move out? He brings his boyfriend home to Winston-Salem, North Carolina; he hosts his mother in New York, and they attend a queer-friendly church.
The first episode is full of headline-grabbing revelations, not least Carmichael’s confession that he has long harbored romantic feelings for one of his best friends, who just happens to be Tyler, the Creator. It also features Carmichael taking mushrooms in the back of a limousine, sucking a Grindr date’s toes, and debating with an anonymous friend, who may or may not be Bo Burnham, about the nature of art and artifice. Before we see any of this, though, we see the HBO camera crew entering the apartment and asking, “Do you need us to take our shoes off?” and Carmichael responding, without any self-effacement, “Yeah, I do.” Film me while I’m half naked, puking, stoned and grandiose, disconsolate—all good. But don’t track dirt into my house.
In fairness to him, it’s an immaculate apartment. When I visited in June, it was full of sunlight and tasteful rich-person details: fresh orchids, hand-screened toile wallpaper. At one point during our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, he offered me a peach. I demurred, trying to be polite. “You sure?” he said. “We have them sent from Georgia.” (Well, in that case . . .) We sat at a marble table in a room with sea-green walls, overlooking the High Line. The table was strewn with yellow legal pads and well-loved books (Baudrillard, Thomas Merton, “What Is Art?” by Tolstoy); on the floor were a guitar, a keyboard, some houseplants, and a kite decorated with Michael Jackson’s mug shot. To make room for my laptop, I had to move a Bible—not the three-volume W. W. Norton edition or the five-volume Bibliotheca edition, both of which were on a shelf in the next room, but a plain old King James version.
This feels like some kind of allegory, the fact that I literally have to move the Bible out of the way so we can have this conversation.
[Laughs.] I’ve been thinking about the Bible a lot. I’d gone away from it—because I was gay, I felt rejected by religion—but I’ve started reading it again, almost rereading it as a novel. It’s amazing what that feels like.
What else are you reading?
There’s certain books that I’m constantly thumbing through. Bertrand Russell, Marcus Aurelius, some Carl Jung, some Tolstoy. I’ll tell you who I’m on real hard right now: Walter Ong. He is incredible. He’s a philosopher, and he was a Jesuit priest—Marshall McLuhanesque, like, that school. This book [“Orality and Literacy”] is all about writing as a technology, about oral cultures before the invention of writing and how writing transforms consciousness. Also, because of my boyfriend, I’ve been reading more fiction. [His boyfriend, who appears throughout “Reality Show,” is a novelist who just got his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.]
[During this answer, he was taking notes on one of the legal pads.]
Can you say anything about what you’re writing right now?
Just perspectives and thoughts, and a lot of them become jokes. I just write out of habit.
I’ve been in situations where I’ll be taking notes on something—a movie I’m seeing, or a conversation I’m having—in a way that makes people suspicious, like, “Wait, are you going to use this for something?” In fact, watching your show, I thought about that as a parallel between comedians and journalists, comedians and writers—that feeling that everything might become material. That you might think you’re having a private moment with your friends, and then the next minute they’re going, “Wait, you’re not going to put me on blast in your next book if I say something weird right now, are you?”
Yeah. And maybe. Maybe I will. It’s funny, the people who ask usually don’t stand a chance. I was in North Carolina, and someone was, like, “You’re not gonna put me in your next comedy show, right?” I was, like, “Have you seen my work? You wouldn’t make the cut. You could kill a man in front of me.”
[Laughs.] I want to cover some of the basics first, and then we can move in whatever direction we want. The big-bang explosion that led to this moment was “Rothaniel,” right? But, even before “Rothaniel,” you already had a successful career. You had a multi-camera sitcom, “The Carmichael Show,” on NBC, from 2015 to 2017. Your first special was directed by Spike Lee.
My ego gets mad sometimes when I see certain things online. There’s this comedian who called me an industry plant: “He’s gay—that’s why he got all this attention.” And I’m, like, I get no credit for all the work I did before coming out?
I made a couple of documentaries—after the sitcom, before my last special—just me being a reporter for my own life. [In “Home Videos” and “Sermon on the Mount,” both released in 2019, Carmichael went home to North Carolina to film interviews with his family and friends.] Looking back, that was kind of my soft launch. It’s where I began to explore things that weren’t being talked about at home. I was still afraid to come out, but it was a fearful attempt.
At one point you described it to me as “Evel Knievel lands on the school bus.”
That’s right. Crash, rehab, get back on the bike.
But at some point you decide: I have this big secret. I’m afraid to say it, so I should say it. What was the process that led to that?
It came together pretty quickly. I was crashing on Bo [Burnham]’s couch for Christmas. It was my first time not going home for Christmas. I didn’t even know you could do that. That was one of the more radical things I’ve ever done in my life. Like, I’m not gonna go home, back to my religious mother’s home, for Jesus’ birthday? I just couldn’t handle it that year.
Did they know why?
They knew, but it wasn’t talked about. They could maybe justify it as work, or something.
I was feeling kind of low. I didn’t think I was gonna do standup after “8” [a previous special that was directed by Burnham], because I felt like I was circling. I was still writing, but it felt lateral. And then around that Christmas I decided to say it all. I hadn’t talked about being gay onstage. So I went to [the L.A. club] the [Comedy] Store, which is a tough environment. That room could be really crazy—people got chairs thrown at them. Eddie Murphy referred to it as comedy’s last boxing gym.
A boxing gym being a famously fun place to come out.
Exactly.
You didn’t think of going to Largo, going to a softer room?
No, it was impulsive. And it was horrible. Bo and I had dinner, and he was, like, “This is gonna take at least a year to develop.”
Because it was unfocussed?
It was unfocussed. It was rushed and raw. It was—it wasn’t even clay yet. It was just, like, water and sand. I talked about being gay, but I was still trying to do it through a hypermasculine filter. The Store breeds that. A lot of the clubs can breed that. Comedy is a very masculine art form—I won’t say that, because I actually think the art form requires vulnerability. I noticed this after coming out, just how often comedians talk about gay people. It’s not about, like, punching up versus punching down—I don’t really care about that. How I view it is that comedy is tension and release, and you need vulnerability for the audience to have access, to have license to laugh. And, for a lot of men who can’t access their own vulnerability, they offer the hypothetical of homosexuality as a punch line—so it’s, like, “Well, some guys get fucked in the ass!”
The premise of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show is deceptively simple — tell the truth. Combining that with reality TV as we know it and the very unique media x cultural environment we’re currently in has proven to yield a polarizing mix of uncomfortable topics stirred by viewers’ distrust of what they’re seeing on their TV screens. The persistent debate, beyond the merits of Jerrod’s efforts with his family and partner, has primarily been how much of the show is real and how much is scripted. Bo Burnham’s presence in the first episode, as an anonymous character that shows up again later, doesn’t help this blurriness when he scolds Jerrod’s attempt at a version of an honest reality show by noting the degree to which it’ll be edited. To me, this positions reality TV and the show itself as existing in the binary space of a housewives series that does not attempt to convince the audience these events aren’t heavily manipulated, and the TV show The Hills that shattered the innocent perception people had of new reality TV and it’s “realness” up to that point. But Reality Show is something totally different, something that Bo, even in his pseudo-participation in the show, seemed to miss. And talking about what makes it different is way more interesting to me (right now) than getting him, or anyone else to think differently about what the show is.
As someone who tried to take the show at face value, it was an emotional season with so many cringe-worthy, infuriating, endearing, and truly triumphant moments. And even without having had the experience of a homophobic, religious zealot of a mother who rejects my gayness, the finale episode still managed to grab me by the throat and squeeze a few tears out. For the most part, the last episode kept us in a taught balance between some of the sweetest home videos of a Black mother and her gay son to ever hit the airwaves, and the current tension between two people trying desperately to find their way back to each other and realizing what we all know — on its own, love is not enough.
For example, it warmed my heart to see young Jerrod making dinner for his mother and painting her room for Mother’s Day while she was at church. As an adult, Jerrod taking Cynthia to Pastor Mike Walrond’s First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem, known for its inclusive and contemporary approach to Baptist theology, was also such a hyper-specific event and an even more specific feeling seeing her enjoying herself. I’ve taken MY mom (and MeeMaw) to FCBC! That was immediately followed by Cynthia and Jerrod sitting with Pastor Mike in his office for a brief family counseling session, where Pastor Mike challenges the idea of Christians saying someone is “going to hell” because it “usurps God’s power”. Surprisingly, Cynthia emphatically agrees and when Jerrod questions her about having done that exact thing, she gaslights him immediately by saying she never said that and then proceeds to defend her position by presenting her interpretation of the bible to (and I cannot stress this enough) Pastor. Mike. This was the whiplash the episode kept us in right up until the final scene and y’all, it was dizzying.
While it’s easy to write off Cynthia as just another homophobic, conservative, Black Southerner, I found myself extending to her the grace I probably would if she were a member of my own family. Similar to my feelings about Jerrod, while I don’t necessarily agree with her and the way she hides behind the cross, I do understand her. And thinking about the things she’s been through, the very specific reason she holds religion so closely, and the existential challenges that presents for her if she were to let just an inch of that resolve slip, it’s no surprise to me that she’s having the trouble she is, learning how to love her son in a way that doesn’t feel directly in conflict with her religious constitution. But this is a grace I’m able to extend not only as a person who’s been out and comfortable in my sexuality longer than Jerrod, as a person who’s been in therapy longer than Jerrod but also as someone whose internal validation has reached a level of unshakability that we watched Jerrod search for in these chaotic 8 episodes. And most importantly, it’s a grace I’m able to extend while also standing firmly with Jerrod in his attempts at getting her to see things from his perspective.
But it’s crucial to know that Cynthia and Jerrod do love each other. Anyone who’s been in this type of relationship with a family member or loved one can attest to the complexity of these things living together and that’s part of what makes your skin crawl often during this show. They’re both clawing and scrambling toward each other, all thumbs and no grip, just desperate to revisit the wholeness and purity of the love that exists between a Black mother and her young son. What both of them miss however is that this love and this relationship have to change once you’re mature enough as a son to see your mother as a whole person, and once you’ve chosen to access a new level of selflessness as a mother by releasing your ideas of who you thought your son would be to embrace the man he is.
Jerrod has decided, at least for now, that the most important thing is the truth. Above the public perception of him, above both the perception and reality of his relationships with the people he’s closest to, and above the comfort of everyone involved in the show, the truth of his life and the unconditional love and embrace of his parents are all that matter. In many instances throughout the show, his valiant and criminally misguided pursuit of that puts him at odds with his boyfriend Mike, both his best friends Jess and Pooh, and even his brother in comedy, Jamar. What’s common for people newly indoctrinated into a religion or therapy is the intense desire to spread the gospel of what you’re experiencing to everyone who’ll listen. It fails a lot. Most notably in his attempt to help Jamar be more honest and hopefully more successful in his comedy. But in other ways, it’s just what he needed. Like Jamar finding a way to be himself and allow some softness and vulnerability in his life. And sometimes the benefits were one-sided, like when Jerrod went on his apology tour in episode three and gave a lot of the people he’s hurt by being selfish, an opportunity to voice that hurt and their frustration to him directly.
By the end of the final episode, in the single, 90-minute therapy session Cynthia reluctantly agrees to go to, Jerrod makes the salient point that she’s using God as a way to not think for herself. To which she asks, completely serious, “But what does it matter what I think?” The therapist jumps in without skipping a beat and says “Because he cares and you’re his mother.” They got a lot of work done in the brief time we got to see, and later in what seemed to be Jerrod’s turn at bending a little for his mother, they sat on his couch in his home while he allowed her to pray that God would remove his homosexual urges. As someone who, as a child, sat quietly and in private praying for that exact thing for myself, I can’t imagine the damage it would’ve done if that had been initiated WITH GLEE by my mother. Was it the wrong thing for Jerrod to offer/accept as his response to his mother going with him to therapy? Absolutely. Did Jerrod learn that too? Almost immediately.
As painful as this episode is, it’s also really heartfelt.
Source: Various sources
