All That Backlash? Jerrod Carmichael Saw It Coming.

At the end of the final episode of his self-titled reality show, Jerrod Carmichael sits in a movie theater and watches what he’s accomplished. Over the course of eight half-hour episodes, we’ve seen Carmichael, who came out as gay in his 2022 stand-up special Rothaniel, work out the kinks of his first long-term relationship with another man, as well as confront his long-standing issues with his father, a serial adulterer, and his mother, a devout Christian who has had trouble embracing her son’s sexuality. The road has not been an easy one, and the reception of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show has been even rockier, with audiences bristling at its unflattering depiction of its subject—which is to say, Carmichael’s depiction of himself. It concludes somewhat happily, or at least the series finds an up note to end on, but the compulsive exposure of his worst personality traits may well have done permanent damage to Carmichael’s public image. Still, maybe there’s a bright side, at least according to the friend who watches the finale alongside him. “Fingers crossed that everyone is watching TikTok and no one gives a fuck anymore,” his friend says. “Maybe the ratings come back absolute shit.”

Of course, if that friend were really sure no one was going to watch Carmichael’s show, he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to appear only in a ski mask and goggles with his voice disguised. But he’s got a point. “You treat the camera like it’s God,” he tells Carmichael. “But the god on the other end of that screen is the fucking public … and that’s a scary collective for the judgment of the most precious things in your life.” The fact that Anonymous is almost certainly Bo Burnham—who wore a ski mask to the Emmys and told a fan who asked why, “You’ll see”—adds yet another layer of spin. In his pandemic special Inside, Burnham appeared to document his progressive mental degradation under the strain of lockdown, but he deliberately made it impossible for viewers to discern whether what he was depicting was actually real. He might have given us access to his inner life, but the details of his outer life—his wealth, his relationship, his fame—were glimpsed briefly if at all.

Carmichael, by contrast, wants us to see everything, or at least feel as if we do. Like Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, which similarly aired in the late-night Friday slot that HBO apparently reserves for experimental nonfiction, Reality Show seems to have been edited according to the principle that the worse a sequence makes the series’ main character look, the more likely it is to make it in. Carmichael’s parents might well deserve the on-screen grilling they get over the course of the series, but even there his behavior complicates our sympathies. You can see his father’s face fall as he realizes that the road trip they’ve taken is just a prelude to an on-camera confrontation about how his infidelities messed with Carmichael’s feelings about monogamy, and it’s complicated further by not knowing if Carmichael chose that moment around a nighttime campfire because it would make a better scene. He’s got every right to be angry at his mother for insisting she loves him “unconditionally” when she refuses to treat his sexual orientation as anything other than a lifestyle choice. But he’s also less vulnerable and more confrontational with her than he is onstage, and the presence of a camera crew that takes its orders from him makes it feel as if it isn’t entirely a fair fight. Or perhaps it just takes him a while to accept that the same stubborn single-mindedness that frustrates him in his mother is a part of his makeup as well. (In the final episode, he wears a cap bearing the logo of the company owned by the overbearing mother in Ari Aster’s mommy-issues epic Beau Is Afraid.) As his sister-in-law advises him later, “I suspect that what you’re looking for you will get when you take your own wall down.”

Family relationships are always messy, but the way Carmichael treats his friends is harder to swallow. The closest I came to hating him is in the series’ fifth episode, when he coaxes an old friend, fellow comedian Jamar Neighbors, to come on the road with him. In theory, this could be Neighbors’ big break, but Carmichael has added a condition: If Neighbors wants to play to his audiences, he needs to try out a different style of comedy, less joke-driven and more confessional—in short, more like Carmichael’s. Neighbors, as Carmichael knows, has plenty of personal pain to draw on, including being born “a crack baby” and being abandoned by his father, but it’s never been a part of his act, which tends more toward bits like a pantomime of Spider-Man defecating off the side of a building. But Carmichael pushes him to be more revealing, and Neighbors complies, to utter disaster. The new jokes bomb, and so, in front of Carmichael’s audiences, do the old ones—for the majority of the episode, the most laughter Neighbors gets is when Carmichael peeks out from behind the curtain midset to check how he’s doing. It’s excruciating to watch, and it makes Carmichael’s superficially kind gesture seem more like an act of profound narcissism. He wants his old friends around, but that would be easier if they were more successful, so he pushes them toward the model of success most familiar to him.

I also knew that the anger I was feeling was exactly what Reality Show wanted me to feel. Neighbors, who told Vulture’s Hershal Pandya he was “furious” the first time he saw the episode, also said it was edited to exaggerate how badly his new act had gone over. “In the show, it made it seem like I was laughing at my own jokes when nobody else was,” he said, “and that’s not what the fuck was going on.” There’s a more blatant example of manipulative editing later on, when Carmichael takes his mother and his boyfriend, Mike, out for lunch at a sidewalk café in Manhattan. As they take their seats, the soundtrack is filled with the chattering of jackhammers and the piercing beep of reversing trucks, then it abruptly cuts to near-silence, both emphasizing the awkward lack of conversation at the table. But is that really what we’re seeing, or is it just the work of a sound mixer with their fingers on the volume knob?

Over the course of his career, Carmichael’s stand-up has become increasingly intimate, to the point where watching him onstage feels like being wired directly into his brain. But Reality Show, while inviting viewers into his life, also keeps him at a distance. It’s as if he’s challenging us to accept him at his worst. The series is a mess, made from the middle of a turbulent personal upheaval that Carmichael has barely begun to process—his Tortured Comedians Department—but Carmichael doesn’t want to clean himself up before showing off his newly out self. Sure, we’ll get Jerrod and his boyfriend, who’s in the process of finishing his first novel, snuggling in bed and exchanging loving kisses, but we also get an ongoing account of Jerrod’s cheating, breaking the rules of engagement even after they open up their relationship (although by the end of the series they’re arranging hookups on Grindr and sharing photos of enthusiastically lubed-up body parts). Carmichael is testing his mother when he tells her he loves her as much as he loves sucking a man’s dick, but he’s also saying she can’t have the first part of that sentence without at least hearing the second.

It’s not quite right to say that Reality Show is a series made by someone who doesn’t want you to watch it, but it does seem designed to cull his audience, to push back against his post-Rothaniel fame and separate the curiosity-seekers from the true believers. He admits at one point that the camera is there not just to document what’s happening but to make things happen: These are conversations he wouldn’t be having if they weren’t being filmed. Maybe once those conversations have taken place, it doesn’t matter if anyone else sees them. The only audience Jerrod Carmichael needs is himself.