The comedian Jerrod Carmichael spends a remarkable amount of time in his new HBO series, “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” with his head in his hands like Henri Vidal’s 19th-century statue of Cain after he has killed his brother Abel.
Maybe that’s fitting, since the series focuses on Carmichael’s tortured process of coming out, and like many people who bravely take that step, arriving at the realization that, in a sense, the old you must die so that the new you can live. More pointedly, you must kill the you who is false.
Coming out isn’t always followed by congratulations and celebrations, even today. And for people like Carmichael — and me — who come from religious families and have family members who struggle to reconcile their religious beliefs with our insistence on being free and being seen, it can also be wrenching.
Exposing that dilemma to the world is one of the great services Carmichael performs with his series.
But, of course, the show isn’t really “reality.” It can’t be. Carmichael says that he’s trying to “self-‘Truman Show’” himself, but that’s almost impossible. The cameras aren’t livestreaming his life; they’re collecting footage that is edited — curated — into the moments we see.
The series seeks to address this point in its first episode, when an anonymous friend of Carmichael’s — who is masked when he’s onscreen — says of the presence of cameras, “This is not truth,” and what Carmichael is doing is being “masturbatorially public.”
There’s truth, certainly, to that observation. Carmichael seems to find something exquisite in anguish, not just in his own discomfort, but also in the discomfort of his audience. His stock in trade is the exploitation of the awkward, in forcing his audiences to squirm in the pregnant pause; recall his clever and insightful, but somewhat uncomfortable, monologue at last year’s Golden Globe Awards.
He’s committed to the idea that one can tickle the belly of every trauma, that nervous laughter is still laughter.
This style of comedy has brought him success and accolades. In 2022, he won an outstanding writing Emmy for his HBO stand-up special “Rothaniel,” during which he came out as gay.
The new series is an exploration of his life as a newly out gay man, but it is in his exploration of humanness that Carmichael’s project truly shines. As the ancient playwright Terence wrote, “I am a human: I regard nothing human as foreign to me” — it’s a testament to the universality of the human condition.
And above all else, Carmichael dwells on troubled human relationships: being spurned by a love interest (he confesses his romantic feelings for his friend, the hip-hop artist and producer Tyler, the Creator, only to have those feelings dismissed), being unfaithful to a partner, being a bad friend and longing for parents’ acceptance.
The show is also about how hard emotional maturity can be to attain, about how emotional vulnerability and moral accountability require a courage that many strain to reach. As Carmichael says, “It’s easier to say ‘I’m gay’ than ‘I’m sorry.’”
But perhaps one of the most poignant and important themes in the series deals with the discordant, disorienting feeling of someone who comes out later in life and brazenly centers sex in his gay identity and journey.
“I came out late in life. I was like, basically, 30,” he says, adding wryly, “in gay years, I’m 17.” That’s one reason, he says, he wants sex all the time. But he wrestles with his voracious sexual appetite, trying to understand whether it’s a sign of liberation or disorder.
While talking to a therapist, he says that he was a “very sexual” child “with older kids,” and that he has had at least 1,000 sexual partners.
He repeatedly cheats on his boyfriend, and the two eventually agree to an open relationship, which comes with its own hazards. This doesn’t come across as purely prurient but rather as an honest expression of the complicated relationship many people have with sex, sometimes using it as a distraction from pain and injury.
As Carmichael says, he uses sex to escape.
And then there’s his continuous effort to heal his uneasy relationship with his parents, who have both caused him pain — his father by being unfaithful to his mother and avoidant toward him when he was younger; his mother by not extending her unconditional love to him after he came out. Carmichael doesn’t come across as a saint in this, however. He can’t seem to grant grace to his parents for their flaws, even as he desperately seeks — and expects — grace from them. If Carmichael is the hero of this series, he is of the X-Men variety: complicated and working through trauma.
But, as is evident in the series, the love between parent and child can be irrepressible. It can reassert itself even after the worst, the way sprigs emerge from the ashes of a forest fire.
Carmichael’s show adds to the body of important works that look at life through a queer lens, particularly through a somewhat unconventional Black gay lens, but it’s not just for a gay audience. It is ultimately about the universal themes of brokenness and healing, of a quest for personal liberty, of what it means to love and be loved.