Jerrod Carmichael Makes the Camera His God

Comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s new show is obnoxiously compelling. It’s compelling because Carmichael cannot seem to help being electrically charismatic, and because the series moves through stories and ideas with an ease that belies the challenge of good pacing. It’s obnoxious because the only thing more trying than a vanity project is a vanity project that cannot stop examining itself as a vanity project. A half-hour documentary-style series, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show follows Carmichael during the period of his life after his 2022 special, Rothaniel, and mixes footage shot by a documentary crew, footage shot by Carmichael himself, and scenes from Carmichael’s stand-up performances that are filmed more like his special than a documentary. The series swings through moments of heartbreaking sincerity, tenderness, self-recrimination, rage, and puckish playfulness, and it lets those moods live together harmoniously. It allows a viewer to feel devastated for Carmichael in one sequence while wanting to punt him into the stratosphere very shortly thereafter, and it invites both responses. But its strongest moments, and the most absorbing ones, are the show’s brief portraits of the friends and family around its central figure. It’s ostensibly about Jerrod Carmichael, but its most fascinating question is how well he can see those beyond himself.

At its best, the series uses Carmichael’s obsessions and artistic ideas as a springboard for how to talk about comedy and creative production. The strongest episode, “Jamar,” focuses on comedian Jamar Neighbors, who has performed a kind of impersonal, shock-style stand-up for years and is running on fumes. Carmichael convinces Neighbors to try a different approach, to consider talking more about the things that are personal to him and his background. Neighbors is game but also resistant: It’s upsetting to dig into all of his early trauma and so much easier to just say that it’s in the past and it’s hard to make that stuff funny. What is the point? Why dawdle with all of this sad-sack stuff? That episode, and the arc it plays out of Neighbors’s eventual attempt at trying Carmichael’s comedic approach, is the nut of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show’s entire appeal but also all of its unresolved tension. It is an exploration of Carmichael’s artistic values — his method and belief system as a comedian — and it is effective publicity for his friend. It’s also the clearest articulation of the show’s primary source of discomfort: How much does Carmichael really see these people around him? How much does the absorbing spectacle of his 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 largely about two of his friends, it is hyperfocused on Carmichael’s relationship with his mother and his shifting perception of himself as a gay man. It begins with his romantic feelings for a close friend, the weirdness of attending the Emmys, and the experience of having lots of casual sex via dating apps. But eventually, it settles into a more extended consideration of Carmichael’s relationship with his boyfriend, Michael, and his attempt to reconcile with his mother, whose religious beliefs prevent her from accepting Carmichael’s sexuality. She looms over the early episodes 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 and his mother’s facial expressions becomes fraught with worry for the viewer — how will these conversations go?

The show’s intense, constant gaze on Carmichael is not always flattering: In various interactions with his friends and family, he demonstrates himself to be a pretty disappointing friend and a fair-weather and often selfish partner in romantic relationships. In the episode centering on 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 helping her with acting lessons and auditions. But before long, his patience grows 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 feels like 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 talking to an audience. Like Rothaniel, a special that included long sections where Carmichael appeared in dialogue with the audience, the reality show’s stand-up portions include audience interlocutors, who push back at Carmichael’s descriptions of his behavior and express sympathy for his pain. “Does he know?,” an audience member asks when Carmichael says he’s cheated on his boyfriend. “Play the 21 seconds,” someone yells, when Carmichael says he’s gotten a 21-second voice message from his mother.

There are also more direct depictions of Carmichael’s newly public sexuality, with shots of him and his boyfriend embracing or cuddling together. One scene early in the series shows Carmichael, shirtless and prone on a sofa, sucking on a man’s toes. Given Carmichael’s desire to define his sexuality to himself and especially to his mother, the footage of physical expressions of sexuality and affection seem designed for multiple audiences. They play like they’re offering strangers a window into Carmichael’s life. But as the series develops, these scenes of self-definition and self-expression for Carmichael also become evidence for his mother of who he is and whom he loves. And they’re scenes of self-definition and self-expression for Carmichael himself. 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 his need for sex becomes a way to distract from his pain.

Carmichael depicts the reality show as a slippery form of amends. Throughout, he acknowledges his failures toward the people closest to him: to Jessica, whom he wants to support but cannot bring himself to do fully; to another childhood friend he completely abandons at his wedding; to Michael, whom Carmichael continually fails as a romantic partner. Including all of this in the show looks like an attempt at self-awareness: See, he is honest about his flaws! See, he knows his behavior has been terrible! And at times, putting them onscreen also feels like an attempt at making it up to them. Jessica’s desire to be an actress is put on full display, on an HBO series, while her friend Jerrod Carmichael is speaking for her potential. The friend at the wedding gets a lovely moment near the end, designed to speak to Carmichael’s desire to do better. At times, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show appears to be fully invested in its exploration of Carmichael’s relationships, particularly the familial ones that have had so much weight in his comedic identity. His assistant points out that Carmichael and his mother are very much alike, and it’s true in this way too. Like Carmichael and his friends, Carmichael’s mother, Cynthia, cannot fully see him because she is so enveloped in her own worldview.

But the series also cannot help but constantly frame itself as a self-conscious exploration of performance and the public self, and here, its focus grows most tiresome. The show is bookended by appearances from an “anonymous” friend, dressed all in black, with a black mask and ski goggles, speaking through a voice manipulator. (If this is not Carmichael’s longtime friend and collaborator Bo Burnham, then Burnham should be concerned that he has a doppelgänger stalking around Los Angeles and making proclamations atop all of his favorite soapboxes.) “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 not truth. 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 how much of any of what Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show depicts is “the truth.” How much of Carmichael’s time with Neighbors is staged, filmed to create an emotional truth that has nothing to do with their real lives? How much of the wedding story is true? When audience members shout out to Carmichael during the stand-up portions, are those candid statements, or are they prompted?

There’s an appeal in a total cynical deconstruction of all of this — sexuality, the private self, performance, the enormous obsession with voyeuristic lifestyle-reality 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 about things — so Carmichael’s mother could care enough to give up her religious convictions, Neighbors can care about his own personal growth, and Carmichael can care about anyone other than himself. And occasionally, those scenes — regardless of the “truth” of them — are transcendentally powerful. But it only pulls this off when the show gets its head out of its own very charismatic ass.