Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Carmichael Show earned kudos for its star and creator, the stand-up comedian Jerrod Carmichael, when it debuted on NBC in the summer of 2015. Critics compared Carmichael’s family-oriented social-issue sitcom to the multi-cam classic All In The Family. Despite naming his TV parents after his real mother and father, nothing in his primetime network scripts could ever compare to the real-life drama that has played out for decades back in the Carmichael home in North Carolina. That’s painfully clear in a two-part documentary he shot for HBO.
The first part, Home Videos, premiered on Mother’s Day. Upon first glance, it’s a loving look not only at Carmichael’s mother, Cynthia, but also to all of the women in Jerrod’s family and life. Short and sweet. Only a half-hour long. The trailer finds some of these women ribbing Jerrod upon his hypothetical suggestion of bringing a white girlfriend home to visit.
But upon seeing the second part, Sermon on the Mount, which premiered this past Sunday (June 30) on HBO, viewers will realize why Jerrod only focused on the women in his life first. And you’ll figure out why Carmichael and HBO passed on airing the 46-minute finale on Father’s Day.
Sermon on the Mount opens and later reaches its climactic scene with the family’s preacher making a strong, persistent case for forgiving Joe, the Carmichael family patriarch.
The preacher also, it turns out, is a longtime friend of Jerrod’s father, has some forgiveness of his own he seeks for deeds he hopes nobody ever finds out about, and believes that the Carmichael family may be cursed. For her part, Cynthia tells Jerrod in Home Videos that she’d long forgiven Joe for cheating on her, even having multiple other children outside of their marriage.
Trying to entice his own mom into exploring her own relationship options, Jerrod even confides in the fluidity of his own sexuality: “I’ve hooked up with dudes before.” His mom’s initial response? “OK.” But as mother and son agree they live by very different philosophies, she tells him: “Life is full of choices. I choose to be happy.”
When one of Jerrod’s sisters challenges the preacher’s worldview at the end of Sermon on the Mount, suggesting that their father was taking advantage of their mother’s forgiving nature, and failing to accept responsibility or accountability, the camera zooms in on Cynthia’s face, then on her eyes. Jerrod’s sisters don’t believe the family’s cursed. Instead, they’re actively talking sense into the men and children in the family, trying to break the cycles that either family tradition or outside societal and racial pressures may try to put back onto them.
Jerrod’s mom isn’t happy and hasn’t been for quite some time.
His father, meanwhile, would rather not say if he’s still cheating on her, and would much prefer Jerrod call them “affairs” because cheating “sounds demeaning.”
Which is why it’s even more telling that the first of Jerrod’s family interviews in Home Videos takes place with one of his nieces, who cites her mother as a role model.
Several of Jerrod’s male relatives, meanwhile, still seem to struggle with the notion of what it means to be a man in America, in North Carolina, or at home. One of his uncles acknowledges he has fathered 14 children because having kids “made you feel like man, then.” One young man dressed in army fatigues recalls having no other two-parent homes to look toward outside of the Carmichaels. Another young male relative of Jerrod’s describes still feeling nervous about passing cars many years after a drive-by shooting on their block.
Jerrod’s sisters stand determined not to let the next generation grow up without knowing about issues of race and sex.
Those are life lessons everyone in his family, and yours, can stand to learn.
If nothing else, Carmichael’s home movies look as though they have opened up his mother’s eyes to the possibilities of a happy ending.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
