HBO comedy creator promises wealth of ideas
LOS ANGELES — Calling the new HBO comedy series A Black Lady Sketch Show is not completely mathematically or grammatically on target. An argument could be made that the name refers to series creator/writer/star Robin Thede, but the Iowa native is surrounded by a core cast of comedy performers that includes Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis and Quinta Brunson.
There were several conversations about the name, but there was never any question as to what Thede wanted the series to be.
“We just wanted to show that black women can be more than one thing and that we can be dozens and dozens and limitless numbers of things,” Thede said at the TV Critics Association summer press tour. “It’s just that we have so many rich ideas and we work in so many different genres in this show. It’s like 40-some odd individual short films.
“There’s horror. There’s action thrillers. There’s musicals. The variety of sketches and characters that we’re playing, the core cast of four players over a hundred original characters in six episodes. That’s crazy.”
They will use various genres to examine culturally relevant themes such as social norms, anxiety, religion, sex, dating and relationships.
The first season’s six episodes, debuting Friday, will feature five or six sketches, showcasing the comedic talents of the central cast plus a long list of guest stars that include Angela Bassett (in the series opener), David Alan Grier, Yvette Nicole Brown and Garrett Morris.
The long list of well-known guest stars was easy to put together. Bassett was excited about being able to do a different kind of role, and Grier knew as soon as he heard about the series that he wanted to be a part of the program.
Tying the sketches together is a running storyline about the last four women on Earth following a major apocalypse. The device was needed to both illustrate — as Thede puts it — that “black women are very resilient” and to separate the sketches because HBO doesn’t have commercial breaks.
“It was a nice return to a home base between the different varieties of the sketches because they’re so different,” Thede said.
“So we decided to make a show within a show and have the interstitials tell the story of these four women a little bit out of sequence, so you learn that it’s the end of the world, and then we go back to the beginning of that day in episodes two through six, and work our way back up.
“That was just something fun we wanted to do to create heightened versions of the core cast, so people can get to know us outside of our character makeup because sometimes we’re not that recognizable. And to, also, really give a nod to black womanhood and cultural conversations that we have in a heightened comedic form.”