Is It Safe To Be Jerrod Carmichael's Friend?
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Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show raises a lot of questions. For example: Should queer people expect more than just tolerance from our families? Is monogamy necessary for a successful relationship? Important questions that are good to explore and air out. Episode 3 of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show asks a different kind of question, but one we should consider just as carefully: Is it actually safe to be friends with Jerrod Carmichael?
“I have this problem,” Carmichael tells a crowd at the beginning of the episode (“Friendship”), “I only like to do exactly what I want to do.” Sometimes, he explains, he is forced to show up for other people and must reluctantly do so, like very early in this episode, when he is forced to show up at his friend Pooh’s wedding—because he is the best man. Best man jobs are of course like jury duty, you get that summons and you have to go, no questions asked. Carmichael says Pooh asked him to go to Men’s Wearhouse to be fitted for a rental tuxedo, but instead he sends his assistant—who has thus far been wise enough not to put herself on camera—to get a tux from Tom Ford. Carmichael shows up on the day of the wedding in the wrong clothes, makes a half-hearted attempt to get the right clothes, stops for a hot dog instead, and misses the ceremony entirely. We see only a furtively shot few seconds of the incomplete wedding party assembled for pictures, Carmichael-less, which tells me the bride was a hard no on participating in Carmichael's experiment.
“Am I a good friend?” He asks another audience. They—and I, and you, and Pooh, and Mrs. Pooh—lean toward no.
And then we are back to Carmichael’s New York apartment, where Jess, his friend from home, is coming to stay for an undefined amount of time. “Hey baby-daddy,” she says at the door. “Point me towards my domicile.” Jess has decided to hit pause on her job as a teacher in North Carolina and try her hand at acting. She’s done the expected thing, the comfortable thing, for too long—“I’ve steered myself away from the opportunity to even try to do this,” she explains—and now she feels it’s time for her to take a big swing. Carmichael tells an audience: “Jess and I used to dream together. When you grow up poor in the hood, dreaming together is big. I told Jess: when I’m rich: I’ll take care of you.” He pauses. “Then a crazy thing happened: I actually got rich.”
Now, this is a pro-Jess account, as you know if you’ve been reading, and I said as much to Carmichael when we met last month. “I think she's talented,” he agreed. “The show itself is an audition for her for the world. She can cry on command. She's funny. I don't see why not.”
Jess’s life is a little less orderly than Carmichael’s, as we learn right away. She’s a bit of a slob! She is not afraid to leave an empty bottle of Fiji water here and there! “I thought I had priced out of a roommate,” Carmichael tells an audience, which he has. In fact, he has enough money to put her up somewhere else right away, so you are left wondering how authentic this particular conflict really is, and who really benefits from her having a free place to crash.
Carmichael's boyfriend, Michael, comes for a visit, and he and Jess hit it off immediately, because Michael is good people. He and Carmichael have what Carmichael calls “secret sex, because I am a moaner.” Jess replies, “You ain’t gotta be quiet for me, because I’ll be at the door with a glass.” Jess, you and an unlimited number of Fijis are welcome in my home at any time.
Jess may be in the market for new friends soon anyway. Carmichael tells an audience he’s a little ambivalent about helping a friend with a dream that … he doesn’t even finish the sentence. He just makes a cringe face. “Look, I’m no mathematician,” he says, “but she probably won’t make it.”
Now, he knows she’s going to see this. He has either told her it’s coming, which is uncomfortable, or he hasn’t and she’s seeing it in real time with the rest of us, which is cruel. Worst of all, he’s allowed cameras into the couple of auditions she gets in the city, and as someone who used to audition a good amount, I can tell you this for sure: auditions are hard! Nobody is at their best in these situations! When they are pulled out of their context and aired for people who are not casting directors, audition tapes are just awkward! They should be confidential and locked up forever, subject to HIPAA regulation. Carmichael has done her dirty here.
Also here: Jess is talking a lot about her upcoming birthday, and whether they should go to the Hamptons for it. He maybe takes advantage of her excitement and anticipation a little bit by blindfolding her and taking her to a secret location, which is the apartment he should have rented for her in the first place. “I made it like it’s a fun surprise I’m kicking her out,” he says. And indeed, she is thrilled—“Look at God working in my life,” she says— but away from her, to Michael (and to the camera, therefore to the rest of us), he says, “I didn’t tell her I only got it for a month.” And then, perhaps most cruelly of all, he has left her alone to assemble IKEA furniture by herself.
From her own place, Jess calls and calls about her birthday, and he doesn’t answer. “Some people I just fall away from,” Carmichael tells an audience. “I need them, I get really close to them, and then something happens when I push them away.”
Carmichael and Michael talk about it, and Michael is characteristically level-headed: “Avoidance is cruel. Like, if you and I had a conflict in our relationship, how would you feel if I just went silent?”
“You better not,” Carmichael says.
“No, you better not,” Michael says, reminding him that the conversation is about Carmichael’s own actual real-time avoidance of his own actual friend.
“You better not,” Carmichael repeats, not getting the point. (Also it bears mentioning: Jess should have texted rather than called. This is 2024.)
At this point, faced with his own flaws in an apartment full of cameras and microphones, there is nothing for Carmichael to do but eat a moderate dose of mushrooms, watch a Brene Brown special, and apologize to everyone he has wronged. Most of them don’t seem to be too happy to hear from him, and we get snippets of some tough conversations: “Nobody can hurt you as bad as a gay man” says one. “You’re not even an A-list celebrity,” says another. Carmichael is having these conversations with earbuds in, but we hear them as if he is on speakerphone, so it’s hard to know what’s really happening.
“Friendship” ends with Carmichael flying to Atlanta to drop in on Pooh, the guy whose wedding has given the culture the most confusing Best Man situation since Young MC’s “Bust a Move.” Carmichael gives the Best Man speech he failed to give the first time around, and it’s fine, and Mrs. Pooh is not there, because Mrs. Pooh has some sense, which is something money cannot buy.
Last month, when I spent time with Jerrod for his recent Esquire cover story, I asked a broad question about Jess, which was: why on Earth would she sign up for this show in the first place? “She might have been the only one that had a motivation to do it,” he said. “I told her to use the show to her advantage, not just career-wise, but also for conversations in her life.” Submitting your entire life to cameras and editors is not the way most people address conversations in their lives, of course, which even he admits. “She was nervous. She's got a career, and she's nervous about her career. Every time I put a black woman on television, they always worry that they're going to say something that's going to get 'em fired. She's so nervous about that.”
It’s good to know he can acknowledge that very valid concern, which is why it’s even more baffling that the episode ends with Jess’s acting coach urging her to yell “fuck you” over and over, and then the words “you’re gay” with the subtext of “fuck you,” making her have to say, “Let me give a disclaimer: I love the gays.” Nothing there that can come back to haunt a teacher in the extremely laid-back political environment teachers are currently enjoying!
So where is Jess now? “She's in North Carolina,” he said. “It was hard, because all the strikes were happening, and so I wanted her to get some auditions, but there was nothing happening.” But, he adds, “She's considering coming back.”
That’s good news. And I will say this: Jess, the industry is thawing in a post-strike Los Angeles, and we have a guest room that is already a little messy. Think about it.
Read more of Dave Holmes’s coverage of Jerrod Carmichael:
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