The sitcom’s not dead! Why you should be watching Grand Crew
Grand Crew is one of the funniest shows on TV – the latest to earn the title “the best show you’re not watching”. On Friday the NBC series toasts its second season, no small achievement in an industry where studios are scrapping completed shows before air in the name of cutting costs. That Grand Crew managed to beat the odds is proof a Black sitcom can thrive on network television when given due time and space.
“It just felt like there was an opportunity to have a hangout show with a Black cast that had the energy of Happy Endings and Insecure, something that was true to our experience but with a lot of jokes in it,” says the show’s creator and showrunner, Phil Augusta Jackson.
Anytime NBC makes a sitcom about a group of mates, there are bound to be comparisons to Friends – which still can’t escape criticism for its lack of diversity. But Grand Crew wasn’t greenlit to atone for those sins or to reproduce the cultural impact of Friends. “I’m glad they didn’t say, ‘Here’s your Black Friends,’” Jackson says of the network. “It’s hard to have a hangout comedy without having Friends as a point of reference. I like Friends, the show was incredible. But I didn’t really watch Friends. I was more of a Seinfeld guy. So it’s not like I was behind the scenes saying, ‘Oh, OK, here’s how Friends did it, let’s figure out our way of doing things.’”
The show follows six friends through the ups and downs of love, life and career. There’s baker and free spirit Noah (Echo Kellum), his serially dating estate-agent older sister Nicky (Nailed It’s Nicole Byer), vegan accountant Anthony (Aaron Jennings), unemployed hustler Sherm (Carl Tart), married sounding-board Wyatt, and Faye (Grasie Mercedes) – the new friend with the hidden past.
In the fin de siècle heyday of TV sitcoms, a show about a Black friend group bonded by their appetite for fermented grapes might have seemed an odd premise, like a Black lawyer and obstetrician raising their five kids in a Brooklyn brownstone in the 80s. But after we spent the past two decades watching everyone from Olivia Pope to black-ish’s Johnsons to LeBron James decompress over full-bodied glasses, Grand Crew feels right on time. Jackson is simply writing from experience. “This show is a result of me hanging out at a wine bar with my friends,” he says.
Though it’s just getting warmed up, Grand Crew swaggers like a show already three or four seasons in. Its characters’ being Black is often ancillary to social quicksand traps they’re constantly stepping into. The series starts with Noah (Kellum), a hopeless romantic, pining for a real-life meetcute and stumbling into it during a dry-month vineyard trip. In season two, he finds out just how much he has to commit when this new love interest unmasks herself as a Canadian on an expiring visa.
Even as the show is being funny, it’s tying you into knots; Grand Crew’s leads are so winsome, you can’t help but root for them to sidestep the rakes Jackson and his crew of writers leave in their path. “With relationships, so much of it is about chemistry between people and timing,” Jackson says of the doom baked into the Grand Crew’s romantic pursuits. “We like to play with both of those things. When in doubt, we just lean on things that can happen in real life and then figure out how to heighten that.”
Throughout our interview, Jackson speaks with a zen-like calm – but that’s where the comparisons end between him and the basketball coach who shares his first and last name. He began his career in New York in advertising in the noughties and fell into performing and teaching improv and sketch comedy. After writing a oneact play and taking it off-Broadway, he briefly dropped his last name “because I didn’t want people to think I coached the Lakers”, he says. “So I went by Phil Augusta, which is my mom’s middle name. She hated it and now she loves it.”
But then she would, given how often the name appears on screen. Key & Peele, Survivor’s Remorse and Insecure are just a few of Jackson’s credits. It was while working on Brooklyn Nine-Nine that Jackson perfected the art of packing a fusillade of jokes into 20 minutes and evenly distributing them among a large ensemble. That time in the Nine-Nine not only explains Grand Crew’s dizzying joke rate, but also environmental punchlines that walk the line between hyper-specific and universal. In between, Nicky is breaking up with a dreamboat after finding out he’s a conservative, and Anthony’s getting dumped after his girlfriend’s barbecue king father finds out he’s a vegan. Isn’t LA the worst?
Getting all of this so right is especially hard work for Jackson and his tight writing staff, but the actors offer a big payoff by milking their moments.
What’s more, Jackson leaves the show open for switch-ups. The series kicks off with Garrett Morris, Black TV royalty, relating the legend of the Grand Crew. Another episode opens with a spoken-word performance from the slam poet J Ivy – whom Jackson met while working in advertising. The show’s theme song is composed and performed by Jackson, who sometimes puts music to show gags, too. One episode opens with the Grand Crew reacting to a tangy wine by grunting like James Brown. (Ow! Funky!) Says Jackson: “It’s almost an opportunity to have a show within the show, to say, ‘Hey, before we get into all these deep storylines, let’s just remind you what you signed up for from a comedic perspective.’”
But that’s not to say all of Grand Crew is light fare. Arguably the best episodes are the ones where the show leans all the way into its Blackness, mining the headlines and the lived experiences of its writers and cast. Like ABC’s Abbott Elementary, Grand Crew has a knack for showcasing high emotion while keeping the levity at 11. In one debut season episode, a pie becomes an emotional breakthrough for a Black father and son whose conversations never go beyond the surface level. Another is entirely devoted to the different ways in which the characters process the constant stream of viral police shooting videos – a drinks conversation if there ever was one.
“Those are such exhausting moments,” says Jackson, speaking to me not long after video of Tyre Nichols’s police shooting dominated our timelines. “But you’re happy that you can just sit and exist with people that understand inherently why it’s a stressful thing that would weigh on you. When things like that happen, you need your friends. They’re the ones that hold you up.”