Jerrod Carmichael often does something unusual for a comedian: He stops talking. In a medium that frequently moves a mile a minute, Jerrod will pause, he will sit, he will try to pull the right words and place them in the right order to express exactly what he’s thinking. The long, soul-searching silences that punctuated his 2022 HBO special, Rothaniel, are evident throughout his performances these days. They hang there, unfilled by audience participation, more compelling than most comics’ whole sets. He’s comfortable in the searching, under the stage lights.
“I’m considering, well, what am I saying to you?” he says. “Why should it matter? Why should you listen?” Carmichael wants to put on a good show because he believes performance is a revelation. When he was three years old, his mother worked as an usher at a church in North Carolina. After the services, Carmichael would ask her to hold him up to the microphone so he could hear his voice on the loudspeaker. “I think your voice being amplified,” he says, “is a miracle.”
Carmichael, thirty-six, should luxuriate in those pauses, because they are the only moments of silence he’ll get for the time being. On March 29, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show premiered on HBO. It is Carmichael’s experiment in radical honesty: a self-Truman Showing of himself, in which his entire life, including his most intimate moments, are filmed and put on display. It is a big-budget exploration of his fidelity to his first real boyfriend as an out gay man, his struggle to be a less self-involved friend, and, most prominently, his relationship with his very Christian mother and the father who raised him alongside a whole other secret family.
On Reality Show, Carmichael’s voice—and his silences, and his desire to connect—are turned all the way up and will be for the next eight Friday nights on HBO, streaming from here to eternity on Max. So will the voices of the boyfriend and the friends and the mom and the dad who have less experience in the spotlight. It’s like nothing we’ve seen on television before. It is laugh-out-loud hilarious and lacerating, thrilling, and slo-mo-sports-injury hard to watch. And what I’m wondering as I talk with him over the course of two days is not only how will he survive it, but how will they?
In his trial for impiety and corruption of youth, Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living. And it’s important to remember: The Real Housewives franchise hadn’t even caught on back then. Now, after thirty-plus years of reality television and at least one generation warped by social media, Carmichael’s experiment prompts a different question: Is the over-examined life worth living? Is it even survivable?
“This is a raw, uncensored, hilarious look into my complicated relationship with my homophobic family, my insane sex life, and my unlikely best friend,” he says, reciting off his iPhone the show description his media coach just emailed. We’re in his hotel room in Beverly Hills, and he’s still in the Stüssy fleece and Kapital pants he wore on Jimmy Kimmel Live! a couple hours ago. He nods. “Yeah. That’s good. She puts things in very clear terms.”
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Carmichael has become one of the most popular comedians in America—and an in-demand actor, most recently in the multiple-Oscar-winning Poor Things—precisely for his own ability to put things in very clear terms, even if it takes a few pauses to get there. Reality Show is something he struggles to describe in his own words, maybe because he’s too close to the subject matter, maybe because the subject matter is his actual soul. “I’m just a little sensitive to the whole thing. I’ve been trying to talk about the show and sound articulate, and it’s not easy. Basically, I’m one of Cesar Millan’s dogs,” he says, describing a reality TV show from a decade ago, Dog Whisperer. “It’s like interviewing the Chihuahua about why he peed on the rug. Like, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not J-Lo’s This Is Me…Now.”
Pretty quickly our talk starts to resemble what therapy looks like to people who have never done therapy. He goes from sitting up to lying across the sitting-room sofa, facing me, in a chair, as I nod and scribble notes. The table between us is a jumble of books, Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? right on top. In real life, Carmichael takes his therapy sessions to go. “I do therapy on a walk. My therapy’s in my headphones just on the sidewalk, no awareness of who’s around. New York has really desensitized me to being seen. I don’t care. I’m just saying anything and whatever I want.”
It feels natural for us to settle into a simulacrum of therapy, because there is a therapeutic aspect to what we’re discussing: the essential danger of what he’s about to put out into the world. “These are real relationships,” he says. “The Housewives model is a group of people put together. Like, this dinner party’s going to be a place where the fight may happen and the drink may get thrown in the face.” Reality Show cuts deeper, closer. “These are ongoing problems in my life and ongoing conversations that I’ve been actually actively avoiding. They’ve been land mines, and so the stakes are hard.”
He stayed out of the editing room, as he’s done for his stand-up specials and his sitcom, The Carmichael Show, which aired on NBC from 2015 to 2017. “I’ll be too precious,” he says. “I’ll be like, Oh, well, I don’t like my face here. I don’t like this look or something, or I’d be too sensitive about the story and take out all the good shit.”
Before my first meeting with Carmichael, I was given access to all eight episodes of Reality Show. I watched them in one sitting, and I was rapt and entertained and left with a low-key feeling of dread and discomfort. Why, I wondered, in a show that includes and involves the parents whose religion will not allow them to engage with his homosexuality even in the abstract, would he pull his sexuality so vividly into the real? What is the purpose of forcing them, Clockwork Orange-style, to see what they strain to avoid? After spending time with him, it becomes clear that the project was made with love and honesty toward a larger goal of more love and more honesty. Carmichael appears to find both liberation and inspiration in the process of radical sharing. Good can come from it. He’s not wrong.
But I still can’t shake my worry, for his parents, and for his boyfriend, and for him. I’m not the only one.
Some of the best shit in episode 1 of Reality Show involves a visiting friend dressed in what we can call a fashionable hazmat suit. The friend’s face is completely covered, his voice is altered. “To me,” the figure says, gesturing to the lights and the cameras and the impending action, “these cameras, it’s like there’s sarin gas in the room, and I’m masked up.” “Anonymous,” whose identity Carmichael won’t reveal to me but who Internet chatter suggests is Bo Burnham, does not approve of Reality Show. “I have one friend who thinks it’s just me creating chaos and destruction in my life,” Carmichael says. Maybe that’s Burnham, maybe director Ari Aster, who has expressed concerns about the morality of the project, “and that’s maybe one way of reading it. But I think it’s me actually trying to heal things in my life, trying to fix things.”
The iPhone buzzes. It’s a Google alert for the name “Jerrod Carmichael,” one of many—many many—that pops off in our time together. “It’s a Reddit post about me,” he says. “This is so meta.” He puts the phone down on the table. But not out of reach.
In episode 1 of Reality Show, Jerrod deals with the fallout of some off-camera, pre-HBO radical honesty. Namely, his decision to be honest about his romantic feelings for his best friend, Tyler, the Creator. “I think that conversation is so wild and important,” Carmichael says, “and I mostly have gratitude to him for doing it. It’s a conversation that’s never happened before on TV, and he knows that I’m insane, I guess, so he was down for something chaotic.” Tyler was not down for a relationship, and as for whether their friendship has endured the chaos, the final decision is still not in. “Yeah, I don’t know. I think we’re okay. I’m in New York now, so I don’t see him that often, but still admire him and love him, and his friendship meant so much to me, and he inspired me so much.” The past tense doesn’t bode well, but Carmichael remains optimistic. “I think every conversation in the show has made the relationship better, at least more honest. But I think we’re good.”
If anyone is down for something chaotic, it’s Tyler, the Creator. And the candor and the vulnerability are thrilling to watch. But Tyler knows his way around a camera. He’s savvy; so is Carmichael. They’re both aware of their images and how to maintain them. I can’t help but worry about the later episodes, when Carmichael initiates equally candid and vulnerable moments with people who aren’t camera-ready and media-coached.
Carmichael grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and moved to L.A. to pursue stand-up at the age of twenty. It would take six years of grinding it out in clubs before his 2014 breakthrough, when he was cast in Neighbors and, later in the year, when Spike Lee directed Carmichael’s first HBO stand-up special, Love at the Store. He started racking up the hyphens soon after. There was The Carmichael Show and another HBO stand-up special, 8, directed by Burnham. He appeared on Tyler, the Creator’s album Igor; starred in the video for Jay Z’s “Moonlight”; and served as a producer on Ramy. His directorial debut followed with 2021’s On the Count of Three. He earned an Emmy nomination for hosting Saturday Night Live and MCed the 2023 Golden Globes. But it was Rothaniel that made him a cultural force. In the HBO special, again directed by Burnham, Carmichael came out as gay and spoke—and paused—at length about his family’s discomfort. Rothaniel won him an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special.
With the credits and critical acclaim have come friendships with famous people. At one point in our conversation, he tells a story about Burgers Never Say Die, a smash-burger joint in Silver Lake that Tyler and Carmichael mention in episode 1. BNSD started as a backyard pop-up only the cool kids knew about, and Carmichael was one of the cool kids.
“I brought J and B there before it opened,” he says. “I was telling J about it, because he loves food.” I nod, not knowing. J and B? Bo Burnham’s name has come up a few times, so maybe that’s B? But J? Has there been a J? Carmichael presses forward: He called the Burgers Never Say Die owner and asked him to open the place for him and his friends. “Just trust me,” he said to the owner. As he tells the story, I start furtively flipping through my notes for a J. “He didn’t even have dining inside, so we were just playing Connect Four and Uno in the backyard. It was one of my favorite Sundays I ever had.”
In the name of radical honesty, I give up. “I’m sorry. Who are J and B?”
A pause. A look. “I mean Jay-Z and Beyoncé.”
Oh my God. Jay and Bey. My soul leaves my body at this point in the conversation. I am watching the two of us from above, and while I do not have clear or specific memories of what happens in the moments that follow, my Voice Notes app indicates that we talk about Erewhon, the maximum-swank wellness grocery store down the road from his hotel. “Lunch costs me $67,” he says. “All I got is a hot plate and some juice shots, and it’s $67, and I’m cool with it. I’m completely cool with it.”
It’s therapy here, basically, so I speak my feelings. “Jerrod, I am so embarrassed I didn’t immediately get that J and B were Jay and Bey.” It feels good to be honest. It feels important to tell the truth. (Most of it; the fact that my brain pulled Bartles and Jaymes before Beyonce and Jay-Z is one that I keep to myself.) “I feel like an idiot.”
“No,” he laughs. “I dropped some names, and then I had to pick ’em back up.”
Some of his famous friends appear in Reality Show, but the most complicated character—though it feels incorrect to call this person a “character”—to emerge over the eight episodes is his mom. Cynthia Carmichael is warm, funny, incandescently proud of Jerrod, and completely unwilling to engage with the reality that her son is gay. “My mom is a soldier for the Lord,” Carmichael says. “She watched the trailer. She saw herself trying to pray the gay away, and she’s like, ‘I hope this saves some souls.’” Cynthia is a private person, but Jerrod says she’s not worried about the show making her recognizable. “She’ll say in public what she says in private. It makes an interesting TV subject, but a really difficult relationship.” He pauses, looking for the correct words. “Her eyes are watching God, and I’m trying to get her attention.”
It wasn’t always this way. When The Carmichael Show was on the air, his parents told everyone about their son, the famous television star. The network-clean NBC show about the straight guy with the Christian mom was in line with his parents’ values. “Now it’s like, ‘Did you tell your friends about the HBO series?’ ‘Yeah, no, if they see it they see it,’” he says, momentarily less upbeat. “I don’t know if they will get why that disappoints me, or if they’ll care, and maybe it’s just a line that they just can’t cross.”
The line seems to have been drawn in the drying cement around the time of Rothaniel. “It’s amazing how many times I’ve been on national television and said the word gay and how little that’s acknowledged,” he says. “My parents just completely ignore the words that I’m saying, and that muted response led to Reality Show. The lack of acknowledgment is what made me go, ‘Okay, I'll turn the volume up.’ How do I make it as extreme as possible? It’s testing the limits of their cognitive dissonance. Can you acknowledge me speaking directly to you in a comedy special? They don’t really acknowledge that. What if you’re actually in the thing? Will you acknowledge that? I keep showing my mother herself and…” another pause. “Yeah, I don’t know. I’m still a kid just crying for attention. I’m just begging for attention.”
Since the first commercial break of the premiere of MTV’s The Real World in 1992, pretty much everyone has thought about what their lives would look like on television. Carmichael’s parents are from a time before people had those considerations, but the episodes are going up either way. Carmichael is definitely offering up his brokenness, but he is also offering up theirs. Ready or not.
Another reminder buzzes, and Carmichael pops up and goes to the table opposite his bed. “It’s funny being in a constant state of flux. I never know what I’m doing or what I just did, I just know that it’s time to take PrEP.” From a dispenser, he tears off a packet of the drug that prevents HIV. “It’s how I know what the date is, my little PrEP packets. Like, oh, it’s Wednesday, March 20th.”
In Reality Show, Carmichael frequently uses the LGBTQ dating app Grindr, so I ask what the grid looks like at the very center of the most prestigious ZIP code in Los Angeles. Are there even faces? “Beverly Hills Grindr is a lot of torsos,” he admits, grabbing the phone again. “If it’s on my phone and I check into a hotel, I’m so curious: Is anybody at the hotel? Yep. Oh, look, there is.” But he’s been avoiding it on this stay, distracting himself with snacks from Erewhon and episodes of The Sopranos. Carmichael’s on his first watch of that show, and he’s drawn to the realness of it. “There’s a scene where Tony wakes up in his home theater. He’s got popcorn crumbs on his shirt, and I’m like, this is the most true thing I’ve ever seen before in my life. I love this so much.”
The day before we meet, I watch Carmichael perform a stand-up set at L.A.’s Elysian theater. He is clearly in a new stage of honesty and playfulness in his act. At one point, he goes into a long, hilarious monologue about his twelve-year-old self’s reaction to seeing D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” video. (I’d quote from it, but audience members are asked to lock up their phones at his shows.) This joke, and others like it, come from an underlying tension in Carmichael’s life: He is a gay man who told himself he was straight for most of his life. “Now I’m able to see my reactions to things in culture, things in my family, things in life, and remember how I felt,” he says. There were desires he had but couldn’t act upon, people he wanted but couldn’t touch. “Now I’m finally able to tell you.”
And yet for all of Carmichael’s radical honesty, uttering the words “I’m gay” remains difficult. “I still think saying you’re gay is saying something’s wrong with you,” he says. “And so much of comedy is just gay jokes. As long as people continue to laugh at it and mock it, and as long as it’s a punchline, it’s going to be scary for somebody. It’s scary for me.”
To illustrate his point, Carmichael points to a remark Dave Chappelle made after Rothaniel dropped. “He referred to it as the bravest special for 1996,” he says. “And it’s like, that’s a funny enough line, whatever, but I wonder if he gets the irony that the fact that you are mocking it even then is why it was hard.”
Carmichael and Chappelle have had something like beef for the last couple of years. In 2022, Carmichael gave an interview in which he talked about Chappelle’s legacy. “I said he’s not revealing anything personal about himself and he’s removed from what he’s talking about, and I think he’s smarter than that and deeper than that and has more interesting thoughts.” (Carmichael’s exact words were “Chappelle, do you know what comes up when you Google your name, bro? That’s the legacy? Your legacy is a bunch of opinions on trans shit? It’s an odd hill to die on.…It’s just kind of played.”) “But he took it as fuck Dave Chappelle, because he’s an egomaniac. He wanted me to apologize to him publicly or some shit.”
The iPhone keeps buzzing during our therapy session. “I’m getting too many Google alerts for myself. That’s not good. I like during the slow periods. I’m very sensitive when it starts happening a lot.” And it’s important to note: All those buzzes still bring messages from a time before anybody’s seen Reality Show. But a few important opinions have already come in. Like that of Jay, for example. (Jay-Z. American rapper and businessman.) “Jay is an artistic North Star for me. In the world of rap where people don’t give access or insight to their inner turmoil or emotions, he was such an emotional rapper. He’d make songs like “Regrets” and “You Must Love Me” and “Lucky Me,” where it wasn’t just Champagne and girls, it was also remorse and fear. I sent him everything. I sent him the road-trip episode with my dad, and I remember his text back just being like, This is an X-ray.”
But again, he’s not the only one whose insides are being photographed and exposed to radiation. I ask him what the dangers are for his parents. His father, for example, had kids with another woman while he was married to Jerrod’s mother, and although that hasn’t been a secret for a long time, it hasn’t been a storyline on a television show until…a couple of weeks from now. “My dad’s worried about these things being public. He’s worried about the world, and he should realize that the danger is me. He’s seen the episodes, and I’m like: Do you watch me in it? Do you watch me regressing to a child? Are you listening to me? Are you watching my face? I think we all have a fear of being seen and being exposed in some way, and so he’s recognizing that as the danger. But to me, that danger is negligible. Who cares? Care about these relationships, care about our relationship.”
Jerrod has a joke about why his parents would sign up for such an X-ray: “I was joking on Kimmel that they did it out of love, and also I paid for their insurance.” It’s a joke that speaks the truth pretty plainly. “I think everybody in the show did it because of their love for me. Everybody was reluctant. Nobody wanted to do it.” He repeats. “Nobody wanted to be in the show.”
“My boyfriend gets mad at me because I always wanted to do an OnlyFans,” Carmichael says. “He’s like, ‘For attention?’” I’m like, ‘Well, kind of, but more so for the freedom.’ Freedom from the shame bomb. Like, Oh, okay, here is the thing that nobody wants to put out. The scariest thing is out there and there’s nothing else to worry about.”
Sex on camera nearly happens on Reality Show, both within Carmichael and his boyfriend Mike’s relationship and—thanks to uncredited cast member Grindr—beyond. “The show goes right up to the edge of it,” Carmichael says. Men arrive at his house for a hookup, and Carmichael kicks out Sean, his cameraman, before the hookup escalates. “I would’ve been down, and guys that came over would ask: ‘So, we filming?’ And I’m like, ‘How far are you going to go?’” We’re out on the Beverly Hills streets now, a couple of days after our first meeting. We stop to get coffee, and Carmichael—now in an Acne Studios tracksuit—slaps his American Express down before I have a chance: $20 tip on a $15 bill. The sidewalks are as free of pedestrians as the clichés suggest. There is one guy, down at the other end of the block, walking a dog. Thick, tall. Carmichael notices, I notice, and we notice each other noticing.
But wait: an OnlyFans? “I’m not ruling it out,” he insists. “It’s a freedom that I’m seeking that I feel like sex on camera would provide. It was such a place of shame, so I have a personal reason of wanting to just dive headfirst into that world. But also it seems like the answer to AI, it just seems like…” And then we pass Thick & Tall with the dog, who turns out to be extremely handsome up close, and Carmichael continues: “…I love it when someone’s as hot as I was thinking they were going to be a block away.”
Telling the truth really is a thrill.
We know how Cynthia Carmichael feels about God, but I wonder what Carmichael’s relationship with the Almighty is. “I think I long abandoned the concept of God that I was taught as a child,” he says. “Now I believe in an internal God, and not the man in the sky.” God takes many forms, it turns out. “I was talking about Scott Rudin at dinner and how much I miss him,” he says about the EGOT-winning producer, who has effectively vanished from the public eye after stories of his abusive behavior toward employees surfaced. “I miss him. I love him. I was saying, Scott’s just so important. He’s so good. He’s so important. Describing Scott Rudin is describing God, in that he’s just like, I can’t tell you exactly who he is, just that he’s needed and that he makes things better and that he offers a certain security and focus that is hard to articulate.
“I don’t know how to explain the concept. I just know He’s needed. He’s needed.”
A couple millennia ago, Socrates was put on trial for acknowledging gods that were not recognized by the city of Athens, and for corrupting the youth of the city with his dialogue, his method of questioning that revealed the contradictions in the other person’s beliefs. People don’t like that shit; he was put to death. In Reality Show, Jerrod Carmichael questions modern evangelical Christianity, and monogamy, and masculinity. And he does it before the omniscient and all-powerful God of cameras. And God’s righteous judgment will come, in the form of Twitter and Reddit and the quickening buzz of those Google alerts.
You don’t just wonder whether Carmichael will have to drink the hemlock. You can’t help but wonder whether he’ll be the only one, whether his boyfriend and friends and mom and dad will also suffer this wrath, and whether you care, because in the name of amplifying his voice, to plead to the people closest to him to really see him, Carmichael has made a wildly entertaining and groundbreaking television show.
“I offer this piece at the altar of Twitter…or X, formerly known as Twitter,” Carmichael says, smiling but not laughing. “Dear God, please dissect it. Take my life and dissect it and comment. And again, I would rather it be focused on me and not my family, not my boyfriend, but”—and there is no pause here, but there is emphasis—“take it.”
Read the author's recap of episode 1 of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show with exclusive commentary from Carmichael.
Story: Dave Holmes
Photos: Andre D. Wagner
Design Director: Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visuals Director: James Morris
Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck
