What’s the name of the show? The Carmichaels
When does it premiere? Wednesday 26 August at 9pm EST on NBC. Two episodes air each week for three weeks.
What is this show? It’s basically Everybody Loves Raymond but with a black family.
Hey there. That sounds a little racist. I don’t mean it to be, but it is essentially the same show. Jarrod Carmichael, a mild-mannered standup comic, just moved in with his well-meaning girlfriend, Maxine (Amber Stevens West). He is torn between her, his crazy mother (Loretta Devine), his cranky father (David Alan Grier) and his dopey brother (Lil Rel Howery).
Alright, that does sound really similar. Is the brother 7ft tall? No. He is also not Brad Garrett.
But shouldn’t we applaud NBC for creating a comedy about a family of color? Yes, we should. Television needs more diversity. However, the groundbreaking thing about Will & Grace was not that it was a sitcom about a gay guy and his best friend, but that it was a good sitcom with gay characters. The same thing goes for black-centric sitcoms like Good Times and The Jeffersons. ABC is having great success with Blackish and Fresh off the Boat not because they are about families of color, but because they are great shows that happen to feature families of color.
What you’re saying is that The Carmichaels isn’t very good? It’s not horrible, but it’s not very good either. There’s a topicality to the jokes that is refreshing. In the first scene Jarrod refers to someone as “brave, but not Caitlyn Jenner brave”. You don’t usually find pop references that fresh in network sitcoms.
However, everything else about the show is so incredibly dated it looks like, well Everybody Loves Raymond. The set for Jarrod’s apartment is the stock set for every apartment in Urbantown, USA (except it is distractingly littered with art and items with the number 8 emblazoned on them, for some reason). His parents’ living room is the same living room that is on every three-camera comedy. There are jokes about how kale is gross. Actually, most of the jokes don’t seem that well integrated into the plot, but rather stray observations that detract from it.
There are some good gags, but they don’t make up for how slow the action feels or just how incredibly dated the concept is. There is a cast-off joke about how black people never vote Republican, and it gets a good laugh, but Blackish already did an entire episode making fun of that very thing and the episode was keenly observed, had some insight into the issue, and was really freaking funny. The Carmichaels doesn’t do any of these things. This show is as light as a dust bunny, and hopefully will be swept away as easily.
Why does it matter if The Carmichaels feels so old? NBC was cutting-edge for years with low-rated critics’ darlings like 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation. Then it gave Netflix Emmy nominee Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and went back to developing broad comedies like The Michael J Fox Show, Sean Saves the World and this summer’s Mr Robinson. They’ve all been awful.
This comes at a time when CBS’s only new sitcom, Life in Pieces, is more like Modern Family than it is All in the Family. Even TVLand, where syndicated sitcom reruns go to die, is making original programming that is edgy in comparison. NBC doesn’t want to live in the future and hasn’t been able to replicate the past, so that’s not very good for their present.
So where does that leave us? With a mediocre show that probably won’t get renewed. But this is also bad because this gives NBC cause to say: “Well, we tried two sitcoms with black leads and they didn’t work out. Let’s hire every white man from the Actors Studio.” The issue was not the color of the people in these shows, but the shows themselves. If the network was creating great shows that happen to feature audiences that are underrepresented, they would find themselves reaping double the benefits.
Should I watch this show? Please don’t. But at least give Blackish a season pass on your DVR so that the networks know there is still a demand for shows with diverse casts.
