The Carmichael Show

More thought-provoking than the typical current sitcom and with more laughs per half-hour than most, The Carmichael Show deserves more than a short summer run.

It has great potential to be an incendiary comedic voice among a sea of family sitcoms with a harpy mother, a no-nonsense dad, a scheming brother and a girlfriend who wants the approval of her boyfriend’s parents.

The Carmichael Show won’t win any prizes for originality. It does, however, play very well with the above-average material it has. That’s in no small part due to the well-blended cast.

A sharper, more thoughtful, and just plain funnier version of the kind of retro multi-cam sitcom "Mr. Robinson" was trying to be.

Although the series is not as philosophically unsettling or politically unpredictable as his stage comedy, which gambols in the depths of human self-deception, it is unusually topical and thematically pointed for a people-on-a-couch comedy in the year 2015.

The Carmichael Show improves as it goes, especially when veteran performers Loretta Devine and David Alan Grier come on screen.

No one is going to say The Carmichael Show is a groundbreaking sitcom, but it’s certainly a likable and, with some regularity, a funny one.

The Carmichael Show, which co-stars Lil Rel Howery as Jerrod's brother Bobby and Tiffany Haddish as Bobby's ex-wife, relies on far too many cliches, but Carmichael manages to take hackneyed situations and turn them into something unexpected and fresh.

Carmichael and his writers find a way to balance the laughs--like a very funny moment when Cynthia races off to put on her “civil rights clothes”--with the unavoidable rawness stirred up by the situation [of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown]. Even though it’s not a perfect mix, you can see the series The Carmichael Show is striving to be here.

Everyone seems too busy delivering hokey lines to focus on being, you know, funny. [21/28 Aug 2015, p.96]

Over the course of three episodes, some funny moments do emerge, but too often the writing feels as if it’s veering out of its lane to make points instead of doing so organically.

It’s closer relative is actually “Everybody Loves Raymond.”... In the TV world, imitation is the sincerest form of content production. What counts are the performances and the dialogue, and The Carmichael Show scores adequately in both categories.

Like “Mr. Robinson,” it’s a cliché-filled mélange featuring terrible acting. But at least it tries to be more, and occasionally it succeeds.