Woke

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.