Woke

Woke has its goofy side, to be sure, but it’s thoughtful as well, handling thorny subject matter with a light, comical touch. It doesn’t minimize the very real issues Keef faces, but it vividly illustrates them with highly specific observations.

Charming. This can be credited in large part to Mr. Morris, who plays Keef with equal parts self-awareness and bemusement, but also to the balance “Woke” strikes between politics and the pure comedy of human interaction. Or collision. ... The music is remarkably good. The cast is even better.

Smart, likable, a little weird, hard to pin down. A largely successful mix of genres and themes — some romance, some wacky cohabitation comedy and some social satire, regarding identity, authenticity, justice, performative rage and real exhaustion — “Woke” does sometimes go just where you might expect, but more often does not.

Keef's inner struggles as a Black artist versus an artist who happens to be Black is an unapologetically funny and honest through line that also gives the show the authenticity it needs. Although San Francisco as a setting doesn't factor in as the uncredited character that it should, Stanley Clarke's thoughtful score deliciously folds in a number of Black musical influences and vibes.

The show develops a bit slowly but deftly straddles the line between weightier matters and mining its sillier side.

Just in the first episode, the guest voices all stole the show, but there was definitely enough going on with Keef, Clovis and even Gunther to keep us watching. We just hope that as Keef gets more “woke,” his character becomes more well-rounded.

“Woke” is a funny, smart show and the always likable Morris handles the lead character’s predicaments in the every-man style fans of “New Girl” would expect.

Woke spends its 8-episode season nudging Keef toward his epiphany, all the while making necessary but not particularly interesting discoveries about the variety of micro- and macro-aggressions Black people face every day. ... The best scenes in Woke are between Keef and his roommates.

There's a lot about "Woke" that works because of the people in it, and the man who makes it, and not entirely due its execution, which begins a lot of conversations but doesn't pause or conclude them in ways that give the premise of the series its meaning.

It’s a modest live-action sitcom. ... More focus, overall, could have made something sharper out of the idea the talking trash can and marker represent, that Keef’s sudden wokeness can make him feel as if he were going crazy.

While I can’t fault the performances, the discontinuity and lack of purposeful writing are where the series failed for me. Initially having high hopes for Woke, I walked away not quite knowing who the intended audience was. And while the subject matter grabbed my attention, I had to wait until the final culmination for it to pay off.

Woke very much has a message about the complications of being black in a place that can be fundamentally hostile to blackness itself. Sometimes, it gets that message across in clever ways, while at others it seems as confused or out of step as Keef is.

The show is at odds with itself, drawing a mordantly funny vision of a person sent into disarray by his newly surfaced awareness of American racism and seeding it with broad and somewhat lazy sight gags. A version of “Woke” with fewer distractions — limiting or perhaps fine-tuning the comic device, and keeping its eye more closely on Morris’s performance — would be one that got its point across, and that entertained, far more effectively.

“Woke” has a serious spine, but the tone is light, even goofy, as a dramedy so caught up in what it thinks are teachable moments that it often doesn’t succeed at either.

There isn’t anything particularly refreshing about Knight and fellow creator Marshall Todd’s tepid comedy.

The show’s efforts to be comic tends to undermine Keef’s righteous fury. Instead of leaning into moments where the audience might sympathize with Keef’s rage, Woke spins out his anger into something that is laughed at. Considering the poignancy of Keef’s reckoning, it’s an uncomfortable distancing—and the result is not reliably funny, either.

Woke doesn’t just feel redundant, but ranklingly under-thought. It’s not only that Woke is so politically tepid, although it’s that, too. It’s that the show cares so little to flesh out its protagonist, Keef Knight. ... There’s no reason why the results have to be so bland.