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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
14
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Season 1 Review:
Of course, the catalyst for all of this on-camera candor was his decision to come out as gay, professionally and personally — and the hits Carmichael takes for his selfish behavior are balanced out by Reality Show’s wrenching depiction of how hurt the comedian was (and is) by his parents’ rejection.
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IndieWireMar 28, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The more you read “Reality Show” as self-obsession, the more likely you are to pull away. But if you watch it as a TV show, as a vulnerable story crafted by a master storyteller, the more likely you’ll be to come away with meaningful truths. Carmichael’s problem runs deep. But it’s easy to reach, so long as you’re willing to dig.
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Season 1 Review:
To dub the result a “reality show” undersells its artfulness and its subtle visual flourishes. The director Ari Katcher achieves a careful balance between naturalism and narrative coherence, and eschews the genre’s glossy direct-to-camera confessionals altogether; Carmichael’s inner thoughts are conveyed instead through snippets of borderline-diaristic standup. “Reality Show” can be tremendously moving, but it’s just as often funny in the way that life is funny.
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Season 1 Review:
Carmichael’s buoyancy and openness save the show from feeling dour or hopeless. So do his friends and lovers. And relatives. The fits of conscience that anchor a series notable for its moral and artistic ambition can’t get too precious or navel-gazey; they’re constantly tempered and undercut by the comic’s equally formidable sense of play. “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” peaks when it leans into those maddening human paradoxes.
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Season 1 Review:
Which is not to say that Reality Show is a self-serious slog; the half-hour episodes are funny, if often darkly so, because their protagonist and the people around him are funny. At a moment when most comedians brand themselves as either iconoclastic truth tellers or righteous arbiters of virtue, it’s refreshing to see Carmichael take such pains to be perceived precisely as he is.
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Season 1 Review:
If you’re not already a fan of Carmichael’s, STREAM IT this first episode to decide for yourself whether you’re ready for what’s to come. There’s certainly nothing here, though, that would surprise fans who have watched him become more and more self-reflective and performative, from the most sanitized broadcast network sitcom version of Carmichael he first presented on NBC, to his 2019 HBO home movies, to Rothaniel, to now this.
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Season 1 Review:
It allows a viewer to feel devastated for Carmichael in one sequence while wanting to punt him into the stratosphere very shortly thereafter, and it invites both responses. But its strongest moments, and the most absorbing ones, are the show’s brief portraits of the friends and family around its central figure. It’s ostensibly about Jerrod Carmichael, but its most fascinating question is how well he can see those beyond himself.
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