As a comedian and a TV writer, Jerrod Carmichael has always been very good at blending reality with scripted material. The Carmichael Show (2015-2017) is a prime example, being one of the few shows from that era that confronted America’s red-button issues (Black Lives Matter, gun ownership, separation of church and state et al) without sounding like a high school civics lesson. His widely-acclaimed, Emmy-winning special Rothaniel (2022) is one of the most unusual, intimate hours of standup you’ll ever come across. Carmichael came out as a gay man during the show and discussed his parents’ reactions at length, especially his staunch Christian mother’s struggle to reconcile her faith with her son’s truth.

With his latest offering, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, the comedian goes a step further and applies the practices and techniques of unscripted TV to his own life. It’s radical honesty televised, or as Carmichael says during episode one, an attempt to “self-Truman-Show myself.” We’re currently three episodes in (each between 25-30 minutes lengthwise) and so far, it makes for compelling, heartbreaking, tragicomic reality TV. It’s so unrealistically good that I feel a little dirty admitting that this is essentially the same genre as Sexy Beasts or Jersey Shore.

Episode one sees Carmichael avoiding his mother and confessing to his best friend (rapper Tyler, the Creator) that he’s falling in love with him. Episode two covers Carmichael’s sex addiction, his boyfriend Mike (“the first person I fucked who I was in love with”) and his chronic infidelity. Episode three focuses on Carmichael’s childhood friend Jess, who has just quit her job as a teacher and is trying to become an actor—a goal Carmichael says he will help her with (even though he feels she won’t make it in showbiz), because he’s trying to make up for years of being an absentee friend.

Clearly, all of this is intense emotional territory, punctuated by throwaway jokes that only underline the inherent awkwardness of so many of these conversations. When he’s opening up to his friend Tyler, for example, it is a moment of raw, unadulterated vulnerability. Tyler looks more and more uncomfortable with every passing second, every remark Carmichael makes about his romantic feelings. Eventually, Tyler makes a vague remark about being caught unawares and then lets out a big ol’ fart on camera (after warning Carmichael and the viewers).

As I watched this bizarre and yet achingly human exchange unfolding, I felt as though Matt Stone and Trey Parker had adapted Waiting for Godot into a South Park episode. Like Diane Arbus’ photographs of dwarves, giants and other “freaks” across America, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show asks the audience to interrogate their notions of what’s beautiful, what’s ‘grotesque’ and what happens when the two collide in a singular image.

Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show asks the audience to interrogate their notions of what’s beautiful, what’s ‘grotesque’ and what happens when the two collide in a singular image.

The second episode, with its many tender moments between Carmichael and his boyfriend Mike, begins like a Sunday-picnic home video and ends like a horror novella. Its determination to pull the rug from underneath the audience at every turn is remarkable. We are shown how terrible Carmichael feels cheating on Mike (he is enrolled at an Iowa writing course and visits on weekends), how the two of them are in couples counselling, airing grievances and insecurities. And like clockwork, every little hint of optimism is duly crushed, with Carmichael succumbing, yet again, to the allure of Grindr and the quick, uncomplicated hookup. 

The fact that these tonal shifts never once appear jarring or abrupt is down to the technical finesse on display. Bo Burnham (whose voice-distorted, masked cameo here is the most transparent attempt at anonymity since ‘Vincent Adultman’ in the show BoJack Horseman) directed Rothaniel and one of his signature touches was well-timed Stanley Kubrick-esque extreme-close-ups of Carmichael’s ‘confessional’ moments. Here, director Ari Katcher offers a slight refinement of that method, with plenty of super-close-ups interspersed with outdoorsy scenes where the comedian is ‘facing the world’ (attending the Emmys, for example).

Carmichael’s friends and family have been consistently shot in a more flattering light (literally and metaphorically) than the comedian himself, emphasising his ‘anti-hero’ positionality in their lives. A word also, for the excellent, classical-adjacent score by Daniele Luppi, which elevates the drama and adds a sense of Shakespearean foreboding to proceedings. I have never watched anything where people making out to Haydn sonatas ended well—the music’s just too happy, the brainchild of a garrulous man who lived till almost 80 in the 1700s, when getting to 40 was a pipe dream for most.

During the second episode we are shown a clip of Carmichael doing some crowd work during a standup show. He’s telling the audience that Mike doesn’t know about all of his infidelities yet—just “some of it.” Somebody in the audience says, clearly and earnestly, “Tell him the truth!” The bulk of the crowd responds with “Noooo!” Carmichael starts laughing and says, “That’s how you know you’re in the middle of a fucked-up situation, when somebody says, ‘tell him the truth’ and the whole crowd is going ‘nooooo!’”. You don’t need to be a professional comedian to understand the high price extracted by radical honesty.

“I got to get used to talking to this (points to the camera). Cameras make me feel more comfortable,” Carmichael says at the beginning of the first episode, when the camera crew is setting up their things. “I like this. It seems permanent, and it feels really dumb to lie. I keep saying I want to live more truthfully. And I found myself alone a lot, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m afraid of telling the truth. Anyway, what am I doing this for (waves at the camera)?”

Of course, the earnestness of this is undercut by Carmichael pausing to respond to a Grindr text, wherein a man sends him the 💦 emoji and a picture of his asshole. Do I see this sequence-of-events as high art? Actually, I think this is life itself. That’s the highest compliment one can offer to Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show.