Indecent Exposure
Jerrod Carmichael’s reality series attempts to excavate his deepest flaws.
comedian jerrod carmichael’s new show is obnoxiously compelling—compelling because Carmichael cannot seem to help being electrically charismatic as the series moves through stories and ideas with an ease that belies the challenge of good pacing; obnoxious because the only thing more trying than a vanity project is a vanity project that cannot stop examining itself. The half-hour documentary-style series Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show follows Carmichael during the period after his 2022 special, Rothaniel, and mixes footage shot by a documentary crew and by Carmichael himself with scenes from his standup performances filmed more like his special than a documentary. The series swings through moments of heartbreaking sincerity, tenderness, self-recrimination, rage, and puckishness, letting those moods live together harmoniously. Viewers may feel devastated by one sequence and want to punt Carmichael into the stratosphere shortly thereafter. But the series’ most fascinating moments are the brief portraits of the friends and family around its central figure. Ostensibly about Jerrod Carmichael, the show asks how well he can see others beyond himself.
At its best, Carmichael’s obsessions and artistic ideas are used as a springboard to talk about comedy and creative production. The strongest episode focuses on Jamar Neighbors, who is running on fumes after years of performing a kind of impersonal, shock-style stand-up and whom Carmichael advises to consider talking more about his background. Neighbors is game but also resistant: It’s upsetting to dig into his early trauma and challenging to make that stuff funny. How Neighbors’s attempt at Carmichael’s comedic approach plays out is the nut of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show’s appeal. The episode is an exploration of Carmichael’s method
and belief system as a comedian that doubles as effective publicity for his friend; it’s also the clearest articulation of the show’s primary source of tension. How much does the absorbing spectacle of Carmichael’s own personality and pain eclipse his ability to care about others?
Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show’s thematic interests are sprawling: queerness, fidelity, trauma, religion, libido, creativity, audience, and performance. Its lens, though, is small; beyond two episodes dedicated to Carmichael’s friends, it is hyperfocused on his relationship with his mother and his shifting perception of himself as a gay man, beginning with his romantic feelings for close friend Tyler, the Creator and having lots of casual sex via dating apps. The intense, constant gaze on Carmichael is not always flattering: In various interactions, he demonstrates himself to be a pretty disappointing friend and a fair-weather and even selfish romantic partner. In an episode featuring his childhood friend Jessica, who wants to pursue acting in New York, Carmichael tries to support her, allowing her to stay in his apartment for a while and assisting her with acting lessons and auditions, but before long, his patience wears thin. In the end, he makes a grand gesture to help her, then swiftly undercuts it in a way that plays like a punch line for the episode and a stab wound for the friendship.
The series feels most developed when it tackles gay identity, whether in conversations Carmichael has with therapists and friends or scenes of him speaking to an audience. The reality show’s stand-up portions mimic audience participation from
Rothaniel—interlocutors push back at the comedian’s descriptions of his behavior and express sympathy for his pain. “Does he know?” somebody in the crowd asks when Carmichael says he has cheated on his boyfriend. “Play the 21 seconds,” someone yells when Carmichael says he’s gotten a 21-second voice message from his mother. Eventually, the show settles into a more extended consideration of Carmichael’s relationship with his boyfriend and his attempt to reconcile with his mother, who doesn’t accept his sexuality on religious grounds. In early episodes, she looms as a figure Carmichael longs to speak with and feels deeply wounded by. When she does arrive, in the second half of the season, their relationship has already been laden with so much frustration and hope that each shot of Carmichael’s and his mother’s facial expressions becomes fraught. We worry how these conversations will go.
There are also more direct depictions of Carmichael’s newly public sexuality. (One scene early in the series shows Carmichael, shirtless and prone on a sofa, sucking on a man’s toes.) Given his desire to define his sexuality to himself and especially to his mother, the footage of physical expressions of sexuality and affection seems designed for multiple audiences. It plays like it’s offering strangers a window into Carmichael’s life, but as the series develops, these scenes of self-definition and self-expression become evidence for Carmichael’s mother of who he is and whom he loves. Sometimes they look like Carmichael demonstrating the type of person he wants to be (a supportive partner, in love). Sometimes they are reflections of his failings, especially when sex becomes a distraction from his pain.
Carmichael presents his show as a slippery form of amends. Throughout, he acknowledges his shortcomings toward the people closest to him, and including all of this looks like self-awareness. At times, putting his friends onscreen feels like an attempt at making it up to them; Jessica’s desire to be an actress is on full display on HBO, while her friend Jerrod Carmichael speaks about her potential. Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show appears to be completely invested in its exploration of Carmichael’s relationships, particularly the familial ones that have so influenced his comedic identity. His assistant points out Carmichael and his mother’s likeness, which is true in this way, too: Like Carmichael, his mother is so enveloped in her own worldview that she cannot fully see those around her.
But the series cannot help but frame itself as a self-conscious examination of performance and the public self, and here its focus grows most tiresome. The show is bookended by appearances from an “anonymous” friend with a black mask and ski goggles, speaking through a voice manipulator. (If this is not Carmichael’s longtime collaborator Bo Burnham, then Burnham should be concerned that he has a doppelgänger stalking L.A.) Anonymous is there to express the folly of this entire endeavor. “This is not a neutral eye,” he tells Carmichael in the first episode, pointing at a camera guy. “This is narrative that will be edited by someone, and the editing will all be choices. That’s not truth.” Carmichael pushes back: The cameras can be “like what God is.” What is wrong with exhibitionism? “There’s public and private and then there’s masturbatorily public,” Anonymous says.
It’s a worthwhile provocation. Viewers cannot parse what of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show is “the truth.” How much of Carmichael’s time with Neighbors is staged to create an emotional outcome that has nothing to do with their real lives? When audience members shout out to Carmichael, are those statements candid or prompted? There’s an appeal in a total cynical deconstruction of all of this—sexuality, the private self, performance, the obsession with voyeuristic lifestyle-reality-tv programming. You don’t have to really care about any of it if it’s all just a performance. But in its most moving scenes, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show depicts how vitally important it is to care—for Carmichael’s mother to care enough to give up her prejudices, Neighbors to care about his own personal growth, and Carmichael to care about anyone other than himself. Occasionally, those scenes, regardless of the “truth” of them, are transcendentally powerful but only when the show gets its head out of its own very charismatic ass. ■