Jerrod Carmichael's Ugly Narcissism Is on Full Display in His HBO Reality Show

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 25, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 25, 2024 |

I never watched The Carmichael Show nor did I see any of his earlier stand-up specials. My first exposure to Carmichael was through his Rothaniel special and his hosting stint on SNL the same week. I was immediately taken by him because Rothaniel is a brilliant, honest, and bracing confessional in which Carmichael publicly comes out as a gay man. Like Nanette, it was a vulnerable, soul-baring special, but while Hannah Gadsby’s special felt meticulously worked out, Carmichael almost seemed as though he was working off the cuff, almost as though he didn’t decide until he walked on stage that this would be the day he would come out.

I loved it. I thought he was a funny, honest, and exceptional storyteller. But he’s also a shitty guy.

This I didn’t know until I started watching HBO’s Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. Like Rothaniel, it is also open and honest to a fault. We’re not getting the heavily curated Instagram version of Carmichael. He’s an asshole, and he’s invited cameras along to capture it.

In the first episode, Carmichael obsesses over a longtime crush he’s had on an old friend, Tyler the Creator, who did not reciprocate his romantic feelings. Instead of simply accepting rejection, remaining friends, and moving on, Carmichael staged an awkward interview, where he put Tyler on the spot by asking him in front of a room full of cameras to have an open and honest conversation about his feelings for him. Although he politely went along with it, to say that Tyler was not interested in having the conversation in front of a camera crew is an understatement.

In the next episode, we watch Carmichael fall madly, deeply in love with his new boyfriend, and then repeatedly cheat on him. He’s impulsive and self-destructive and even aside from the infidelity that Carmichael documents on camera, the relationship is toxic.

In the third episode, we find out that Carmichael is also a shitty friend. He invites an old friend from back home to stay in his apartment while she pursues an acting career. She’s a lot, and while I appreciate that Carmichael quickly realizes that it isn’t going to work and that he needs his space, he handles it terribly. For her birthday, Carmichael surprises her by getting her an apartment so that he can kick her out and disguise it as a gift. She’s elated by the apartment, although Carmichael does not tell her that he only rented it for a month. After she moves out, Carmichael ghosts her. In the meantime, when she isn’t around, he shit-talks her for much of the episode, knowing that it will eventually appear on television for the world to see, her feelings be damned.

In that same episode, Carmichael is asked to be the best man at the wedding of a close friend, but Carmichael only likes to do things that he wants to do. That does not include showing up for his friends when they need him. In fact, he wears the wrong suit, stops for a hot dog on the way to the wedding, and misses the ceremony completely. He shrugs it off as an oops.

It’s hard to watch that episode without coming away feeling that Carmichael is a self-obsessed, self-entitled asshole.

And then comes episode four. Intercut with the reality television scenes are scenes where Carmichael talks about his various issues on stage. Here, he talks a lot of shit about his parents for not being as supportive as he wanted after he came out. His parents are Christian and very conservative, and though it’s clear Carmichael still has a lot of affection for his mother in spite of that, his relationship with his father is more complicated.

Carmichael’s dad is the quiet, closed-off type who has no interest in talking about his feelings and is obviously uncomfortable doing so. Nevertheless, when Carmichael invites his father—with whom he has been mostly estranged since coming out—on a road trip, his father begrudgingly accepts.

It was an ambush.

Look: I’ve never had to come out to my family (in fact, one of my parents came out to me), so I am not going to judge Jerrod Carmichael for distancing himself from his parents after he came out because they didn’t show their support the way he had hoped. But based on a few of the conversations Carmichael pulled out of his father, even though he didn’t fully understand, he accepted Carmichael and continued to love him.

“You say you’re gay, you’re gay. I might believe in one thing, and you believe in another thing, but that doesn’t mean we’re not family.”

His father also apologizes for giving any other impression than that, and it’s clear that he used every ounce of his emotional energy to admit it.

“I’m not ashamed to say it,” he said. “If that’s how you received it, I would apologize right here, right now. I remember telling you that you are my son, and that I love you, and that I love you regardless of what.”

I hate to chalk anything up to, “He’s an old guy set in his ways,” but Carmichael’s father is an old guy, set in his ways, and even still, he didn’t reject Carmichael. Not in the least. Carmichael seems to be upset that his parents didn’t throw a party for him after they basically found out — like everyone else in the world — that their son was gay from his stand-up special.

Still, they drive, and at one point, Carmichael confronts his father again about his sexuality. His dad’s attitude is something akin to, “Do whatever you want, Son.” And Carmichael asks him, “Do you want to see a photo of my boyfriend?” And Carmichael proceeds to pull a nearly naked picture of his boyfriend up on his phone.

It just felt like Carmichael was trying to get a rise out of his father, who didn’t take the bait.

If I had a straight son and he showed me a nearly-naked picture of his girlfriend, I’d probably ask what the hell is going on.

All the same, over the course of the episode, it really did feel like Carmichael and his father did some bonding. Carmichael told his dad about Daddies, Zaddies, Bears, and Otters, and his father talked some about his past, a sore subject for him. It was kind of sweet the way the two came together, and I was sort of hoping that’s how it would end.

Nah. In the end, Carmichael revealed what the whole trip was really about: Making his father talk about his other family (his dad had a mistress with whom he had several children). His dad doesn’t like to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. “Why are you digging so deep, Son? Why are you doing this?” his father asks, a pained expression on his face. “I thought this trip was going to be about you and I bonding. Let’s not talk about my past.”

Carmichael kept pushing.

“You got hostility toward me? I got feelings, too,” his dad says. “The way that you don’t want to be hurt, I don’t want to be hurt.” And then he asks that the discussion not be on camera. Carmichael insists otherwise before basically berating his father until he shuts down.

“You done expressed yourself,” his father calmly says to Carmichael after he’s finished dressing down his dad. “You said what you wanted to say. You’re going to do what you want to do,” he continued before meekly asking, while seemingly on the verge of tears, “Can I go home?”

Carmichael’s father is clearly not a great man. He kept his second life with four other kids hidden for 30 years. But the man is in his 70s, and in this very episode, made an effort to meet Carmichael where he is. I also know that this man is Carmichael’s father, but the dynamic has shifted. Fame, money, and all the cameras have put Carmichael in a position of power against his elderly, soft-spoken father, and this felt like bullying an old man. It didn’t feel like an attempt to reconcile with his father and heal; it felt like an attempt to make great television. It worked.

I am not sure what Jerrod Carmichael had hoped to accomplish by any of this, except to generate content for his reality series. And that’s what the entire show has felt like. It’s tense, awkward, and often uncomfortable, but it is compelling television. But it comes at a cost, and that cost seems to be the humiliation of his boyfriend, his friends, and now even his family.

Carmichael is not a great person, and his upbringing may have a lot to do with that. But he also knows what he’s doing. He knows who he is, and he does not care. The only interest he has in other people is in how their lives directly relate to him, and he uses his show to capture that. I don’t know if it’s brave to show the world that you’re an asshole, or if it’s just plain being an asshole.