We Could Use More Scripted TV Shows About Rap, Just Not Lil Dicky’s

It’s understandable to be skeptical about any Lil Dicky creation. The satirical rapper born David Andrew Burd is responsible for arguably the worst hip-hop hit of the 2010s: “Freaky Friday.” The 2018 single imagines a situation where guest vocalist Chris Brown and Lil Dicky switch bodies. Dicky, now in Brown’s body, is excited to be black, and Brown, now in Dicky’s body, is disappointed to be white. “Cause I’m that nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga/I’m that nigga,” sings Dicky as Brown; “How his dick staying perched up on his balls like that?” wonders Brown as Dicky. It’s supposed to be edgy and ironic, but is actually just lazy. Any humor that could have come from a body swap takes a backseat to surface-level humor about race and dicks.

Dave, a new FXX series starring Lil Dicky and loosely based on his life, has a lot of the same issues as the comedian’s career-defining hit. Created by Dicky and Curb Your Enthusiasm executive producer Jeff Schaffer, the sitcom focuses on an up-and-coming rapper named Dave. There’s plenty of comedic material to mine from the absurdity of the modern hip-hop industry, which has hardly been handled in scripted TV outside of Atlanta (itself a surreal but honest antidote to soapy musical dramas like Empire). But instead, Dave boils down to two core elements: He’s a white rapper, and he’s got dick jokes.

Of the four episodes provided to critics, the pilot is by far the best. Dave stumbles through the L.A. hip-hop world unsure if everything is a scam, even his own work; apparently he has millions of streams but hasn’t made any money because he stole the beats. The central plot deals with Dave sending $10,000 to rapper YG’s manager for a feature, only for the manager to ghost him shortly after the transaction. At the end of the episode, YG finally turns up—but instead of recording a verse, he films Dave spitting a comical in-studio freestyle that goes viral. Aside from the fact that a freestyle with the line, “I just want a girl to let me hit it on a work day/I don’t think my dick has grown at all since the first grade,” would never go viral on YG’s Instagram, the pilot’s depiction of an up-and-coming rapper’s desperation is genuinely funny. Watching Dave suffer through the kind of turmoil that spawns real-life rapper breakdowns on IG Live is an idea that hasn’t really been explored beyond vlogger-comic types. For an episode, Dave feels like a show on its way to filling a comedic void, but it quickly becomes clear that its approach to hip-hop is stale and limited.

Dave’s real intent is to be yet another sitcom about an awkward, unempathetic white dude stumbling into success (see: Louie, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Silicon Valley). In the second episode, the storyline focuses on Lil Dicky’s obsession with the imaginary plight of the white rapper. Never does the series care to find the dark humor within situations where Dave receives an advantage because of his skin color. He’s asked to perform at the funeral of a young fan: “He loved guys like you and Macklemore, you know all those kinds of guys,” the grieving mother tells Dave, offering a setup that a smarter comedy might turn into an uncomfortably funny bit (imagine what Atlanta would do with this). But the scenario stays fully grounded in Dave’s annoyance about being compared to white rappers like Macklemore, G-Eazy, and the Lonely Island—which eventually turns amusing when the actual Macklemore shows up and steals the spotlight. Still, it’s the stuff of Jake Paul YouTube skits, or the work of someone whose gateway into hip-hop was Malibu’s Most Wanted.

It gets worse: The third episode is flat-out embarrassing. In an opening flashback to his childhood, Dave is comforted by his parents about a birth defect with his penis, which we learn is the root of his sexual insecurities. The episode then becomes a story about how disappointing sex with his girlfriend has made Dave turn to porn and sex dolls (he has graphic sex with a doll multiple times). It’s frustrating to watch Dave swerve sharply into vapid gross-out humor—not because dick jokes are inherently unfunny (American Vandal season one is among Netflix’s best shows to date, after all) but because this is supposed to chronicle an emerging rapper.

For Lil Dicky, hip-hop has always seemed like a foot in the door, a means to an end until he got his own series. His dream came true, and now he’s wasting one of hip-hop’s rare opportunities to be represented on-screen without a tragedy or a nostalgia factor attached. The genre has become nearly synonymous with pop culture, but television has yet to really reflect that beyond a rash of rap-related reality shows. Maybe Dave makes a mid-season course correction and actually finds the humor in the life of an aspiring rapper, but it seems unlikely given Dicky’s track record of hiding empty jokes behind his famous friends. To that end, I’ve developed a theory: Does Dave exist because someone at FXX owes Dicky’s manager, the almighty Scooter Braun, a favor? Now that would be a behind-the-scenes peek worth watching.

Dave premieres March 4 on FXX.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork