‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’ Creator and Star Robin Thede On Competing With ‘SNL’ For Emmys, As Well As Her Infamous Meme After Losing One

Thirteen Emmy nominations in three seasons. One Emmy win so far, earned last year for editing. A TCA Award in 2020 for best sketch/variety series. And an early season-four renewal, all coming A Black Lady Sketch Show‘s way. Add to that a new three-year development deal from HBO and Warner Bros. Discovery, and life is looking pretty good for the sketch show’s creator and star, Robin Thede.
Don’t be ridiculous, it’s not all good news to share: We may never get to see Thede’s 21st century update on Perfect Strangers. She told Decider it’s “not moving forward at HBO Max, sadly, but it was really fun to write. I think multicam on streaming is very much finding its footing, still.” On the other hand, ABLSS heads toward season four with even greater ambitions, the third-season cliffhanger opening up an ABLSSCU, if you will. Take that, Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Hear here, or rather, keep reading to find out what else Thede had to dish with Decider about over Zoom. This interview has been edited and condensed.
DECIDER: Congratulations on five more Emmy nominations.
ROBIN THEDE: Yeah! We’ll take it!

Social media had fun a couple years ago with your reaction losing to Saturday Night Live for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series at the 2020 Emmys.
[Laughs] Yeah, it was the most watched GIF of the night. I didn’t know, because I didn’t know that they cut to me. After SNL won, then they went to a commercial break. My phone was going nuts anyway, but I didn’t want to look at it, because I just figured they were like, “Oh, sorry, you lost,” but that wasn’t why. It was because everybody was sending me the reaction video and that became a GIF.

Does it make it any easier, though, that this is your third go-around with the Emmys? You know the whole rigmarole, and at least your team has won one Emmy last year.
Listen, 13 nominations and one Emmy win in three seasons and who knows if we’ll get any this year? I can only hope. But it’s phenomenal. And you know, three of our guests actresses have had nominations (Yvette Nicole Johnson and Issa Rae in 2021, Angela Bassett in 2020) but none of our cast. So I agree with you, Sean, we definitely need to be much more considered in the acting categories. My whole cast, they’re all so phenomenal, and what they do in playing 30-plus characters in six episodes is just unheard of. And I think that, because we have such a small cast, I think people kind of overlook the amount of versatility it takes to do that. Because they make it look easy, you know.
And I think that’s the point, right? You shouldn’t make it look hard. But yeah, I think the craftsmen on our show, craftswomen on our show, for the most part, our production design team, our editors, our director. I think there’s only one dude in that whole group, one of our editors this season, but all people of color, all just incredible. Like there’s two Asian women that run our production design team. There’s all Black editors, Black woman director, all the writers are Black women. I just think it’s a groundbreaking. So every year, I’m shocked and amazed. So does it make it easier? I don’t know? But I will tell you it’s just as exciting in year three of nominations as it was in season one. And you know, we’re not showing any signs of slowing down. And I think the fact that we’re breaking into new categories, like production design, is a testament to how beautiful the show is and how great it is across the board. But I’m also very excited for our writers and editors who are so responsible for so much of the funny. And of course, series overall, I always tell my actors, that is your de facto nomination because without you acting your asses off, series would not be nominated. And they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah tell it to my non nomination.’ But yeah, I think the more we keep going, the more we’ll keep getting recognized is the hope.
The Emmys also have such quirky rules that sometimes make no sense at all. One of them being that even though there’s some other stellar sketch work going on right now in television, because there’s not too much of it, you can only have two nominees for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series?
And I don’t love that because I think there are so many great people doing so much work and there’s so many Black people, to be honest, more than ever doing it. You’ve got Ziwe, Ruffin (The Amber Ruffin Show), Che (That Damn Michael Che), Sam Jay (Pause with Sam Jay). All of them not in the top category. They’re in the sketch variety category and it shouldn’t have to be which show besides Saturday Night Live will get nominated, because really, we’re all in it for one slot. And I guess at this point, people have said to me, ‘Well, you know, it’s really just, who’s going to take it between you and SNL every year’ and I’m like, well, that’s not fun either. You know? I mean, look, it’s fun for me, because I love being nominated. But I think the whole point is that we all work really hard. Awards aren’t everything, but the Emmys really matter. They really matter in terms of the tastemakers in the industry saying you’ve done the work and we’re recognizing it. Our peers saying it. I know that people at home would have different opinions if they voted on things. And so I just don’t take it for granted. And I hope that we always win the Emmy vote, but also the vote of popular opinion. You want that, right? I’m just gonna be honest. There’s people who are like I don’t do it for that. What? Don’t you want people to watch your show? You want it to resonate with them. So we are constantly considering our audience and what we want to bring them joy with and how, and I think that shows in the consistency of the work we’re doing and the quality of the work we’re doing. But it’s not to the detriment or competition with any of these other shows who are doing great work. It’s just sad that only two of us can be nominated.
At the same time, though, you do have a double vote of confidence from HBO and Warner Bros. Discovery, considering they’ve renewed both your show and your development deal with them.
It’s like a quadruple vote of competence in a lot of ways, because they are so trusting and so supportive in terms of how I make the season. To make it to Season 4 of anything these days is mind-blowing. So we don’t take that for granted, but just in the ways that they interact with us and how supportive they are in our content and the swings we want to take. We’re not going to sit around. Every season has improved upon the last, and season four is going to blow anything that we’ve done out of the water and I’m confident in saying that. We’re taking a very big swing looking into Season 4, and I think that we just don’t want to remain static in any way ever. I think that the best sketch shows continue to evolve. And I think that we have evolved over the seasons, even though we had to shoot two seasons fully in a pandemic, and moving into a third fully in a pandemic. Season 4 we’ll still have COVID protocols. But Season 2, we shot in August of 2020. Everyone (else) was still at home. And we were double-masking and shields and there was no vaccine, and people forget that. We’ve never made this show in a regular year and we shoot everything on location. It’s wild. It’s not like we have the confines of a stage or a set to do this. We’re out in the world. So I’m just really proud of this crew and the fact that we’re able to do this and I’m just really honored that our peers see that. That they see the work. Because I really set out to make the most cinematic sketch show in history. That was my goal. And that’s what I told HBO and with folks like our our DP, Kevin Atkinson, this past year and Bridget Stokes, our director (nominated this year for an Emmy) who’s also returning for season four. Their minds and their creativity are just out of this world. We’re only in competition with ourselves to do better than we did the season before. I’m already looking forward to that. Like yes, the Emmys are coming up, but I’m already like, OK, season four. I’m just so, so excited to be making it.
How much of this could you have imagined when you signed your first deal with HBO back with Cleos Apartment/The Message for This Just In (a short-lived comedy streaming platform when HBO partnered with AOL in 2007)?
Ah! Oh my God. OK, so on that I was strictly an actor. I was a comedian, a performer. That was all Bashir (Salahuddin) and Diallo (Riddle), and they are obviously the masterminds behind Sherman’s Showcase South Side, all these amazing things. They were on Fallon for years. Dear friends of mine. We were doing live sketch comedy together and they got that deal with HBO. That’s right. Back when, oh God, it was a whole different crop of executives back then. But yeah, HBO created that platform for us to just do so much silliness. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been doing sketch comedy since I was 13. By the time we did The Message, I’d already been doing it 10-12 years, and now I’m like, I don’t know 80 years in or whatever. But yeah, I had been through Second City. I had already been in a bunch of Black lady sketch groups, and then we did Cleos Apartment, and then more sketch groups came out of that and it was really fun. So how much of it could I foresee? Probably all have it. I always thought I was going to be on you know, whatever the In Living Color was going to be when I got there, or, of course I auditioned for SNL and made it to the final in front of Lorne, which was amazing. I was like, OK, I’m doing something right. Like I’m getting closer. Every year I was getting closer and closer and closer. So I just kept working on my characters and honing it and who knew by the time I created this sketch show, that I would be playing like over 100 characters in three seasons. In 18 episodes over 100 characters and I have way more to play. So I’m ready. All that training, all those decades of training did well.
Even if some of those shows along the way may have been literally Clunkers.
Oh my God. That show never saw the light of day.
Who was that supposed to be for?
Showtime. And then I think it went to DVD or something. It was an independent project that was financed independently, and then Showtime picked it up, and then Sherman Hemsley died. So that’s actually a sad story.
It’s on Amazon now, though.
Is it?! Yo, I’m not getting no money from that s—.
You can find Clunkers on Prime Video but then it comes up as part of Freevee, which used to be Amazon’s IMDbTV. But they auto-play trailers, and you’re the first thing that comes up.
That was based on a character like a Black Mimi from Drew Carey, like crazy makeup, really sassy secretary in an auto lot. We shot down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for like six months. It was so hot and muggy. I was like, I can’t breathe. But it was great. You do all this journeyman work throughout your career. You don’t know where anything is gonna go, and I did a bunch of like, very wild projects that never saw the light of day, but then some of them end up on Amazon, giving you no residuals.
What year was your SNL audition?
I was head writer for Queen Latifah when I auditioned for SNL in 2013, but it wasn’t part of what Ruffin and Leslie Jones and Sasheer (Zamata) and all those girls did.
Lorne’s infamous public casting call in reaction to criticism for having no Black women in the SNL cast. 
No, it was a year before that. No, I was the only Black person there (laughs). And like six white people out of the final 14 got on the show that year (Beck Bennett, John Milhiser, Kyle Mooney, Mike O’Brien, Noël Wells, and Brooks Wheelan). And I was like damn, y’all not gonna cast me?!
Larry Wilmore gave you that chance, hiring you as head writer for The Nightly Show, and then Larry also helped Issa Rae shoot her shot with Insecure, and then Issa reached her hand back to you to pull you up to HBO.
And then me hiring Quinta (Brunson), and then Quinta going to do our own show (Abbott Elementary).
And Ashley Nicole Black is now also working on Ted Lasso.
I can’t take credit for that. I can’t take credit for any of it. But yeah. It’s a small circle of upwards influence. Yeah, for sure.

Talk to me a little bit about the importance of that, both as the person getting a hand up and then the person putting the hand out?
Getting the hand up, it’s definitely a game changer. Chris Rock produced my late-night show (The Rundown with Robin Thede, on BET 2017-2018) and was so hands-on with getting that off the ground. Larry Wilmore obviously took a chance on me. Made the first Black woman head writer on late-night television, and wrote for the White House Correspondents Dinner. He was like, ‘I believe in you. You are better than your resume.’ I had been in the business since 2002 when Larry hired me in 2014. when When Queen Latifah hired me in 2013, I had been in the business 11 years! When Affion hired me and Jamie Foxx, on (In The Flow with) Affion Crockett on FOX, it was 2010. I’d been in the business eight years. It wasn’t like I just got anywhere. I had been there a very long time. But I had been writing for other comedians. I was writing for Mike Epps, Kevin Hart, Anthony Anderson, Wayne Brady, all these people. I wrote viral videos for Funny or Die. I was doing some on YouTube. I wasn’t good at crafting a career that was focused on one thing because I always wanted to do everything. So some people knew me as a writer. Some people knew me as a producer. Some people knew me in front of the camera, as a comedian, as an actor.
So Larry helped me really hone my voice. And then when I went to do my late-night show, he said this show is good. But you’re going to find the thing that’s really you. And when the late-night show got cancelled, Issa said, ‘What are we doing together? You’re free and you’re never free.’ I said, I have this sketch show. I sold it to somebody else, but I don’t like the budget. I want to make this really cinematic show. And she said bring it to HBO and HBO was like, yes, go to series immediately. No pilot, no script, no anything. Hire the people you want. I said, I know my cast. I texted them. And they said yes. And we shot it in 425 days. And that was the first season. We wrote it really fast. But it was because we were desperate. We were all ready. When Ashley was in that writers room, she left (Full Frontal with) Sam Bee to come do these six episodes. Brittani Nichols who’s now writing on Abbott Elementary, who’d been on Transparent. All these great writers who already had either Emmys or Emmy nominations came together the six of us, that first season of the sketch show because we had all been lifted up by someone. Right? And so it was just me saying, I’m just providing you the space. You’ve already done the work. And now I can take chances on more green writers and lift them up into that system. So yeah, all of those people from David Alan Grier, giving me a job in 2009 when I had $7 to my name, to all these people supporting me. Marlon Wayans putting me in A Haunted House, and JB Smoove saying we’ve got to do something together. You know, all those people have helped me. And then I go back and say, alright, great. Now I have an HBO show. Come do a sketch. Let’s do this together. Let’s write that thing. So it’s really important and it’s absolutely critical for our success. Especially I feel like in the Black comedy community, because there just aren’t as many chances. There is way more now.
So anyway, super long story short, Larry Wilmore has always looked out for me, and continues to do so. And if there’s ever anything I can do beyond putting him in a sketch. I would and I will. he said this industry is not a constant climbing of the mountain. It’s a roller coaster. So I always tell people, I tell my interns, my assistants, I say when you’re my boss, remember me. when you’re hiring people remember me? I’m not gonna be on top forever, and that’s not like negative thinking. That’s just how the business is, you know? So right now, I’m good. And we have 13 Emmy nominations, and one win. And that’s why I don’t take a moment of it for granted, because I have been helped by so many. And I will continue to do so, as my friends have done for me.
Will you have any reactions prepared this time around for the Emmys, win or lose?
No, I didn’t have that one prepared! I mean, honestly. We knew we were going to lose (in 2020), because when we saw where our table was. We were in the camera row. We were like, oh, are they even shooting us? We’re so far back. It was funny. We were with Amber Ruffin and her table, with all the Black shows in the back. So we were like OK, great. We’re just gonna have a good time. And like I was talking to my friends at the SNL table. So during the commercial breaks, I was running from one side of the room to the other trying to scrounge up guest stars for the next season. I was like, ‘Do you want to do the show? Do you want to do the show? Nice to meet you.’ I was totally casting. That is literally 90% of why go to Emmys. So I was doing that. We had already lost (for) writing. And Issa was like, ‘Haha, we lost,’ and I was like, ‘Why are you? OK’ And then series was coming up. And I go to my table: ‘When we lose to SNL, everybody look really pissed.’ And they were like, absolutely not. No, we’re not doing that. Because I said it like literally as they’re opening the envelope, because I was like, we’re gonna lose. And then we lost and I did the bit. Issa was like, fake calming me down. But if you look at the rest of the table, they’re just like, Robin is an idiot. Like they’re just laughing at me. Not with me. They are laughing at me. So it was just something I felt in the moment. But I do feel a little bit of pressure. I had no idea it was even going to be on camera. I knew the camera was there. So I was like, well, if the director decides to cut let me at least give them something to have, right? Because I used to write and produce award shows for years. For like 10 years I wrote on (the BET Awards). So I’m like, I know that they’re gonna have the cameras here. The director will have a choice to cut to me. He’ll only cut if it’s interesting. I don’t even care about saying that, but I want people to know it wasn’t real. Like I want people to know that I was certainly not angry that SNL won. It’s SNL.
You’re a professional,
I don’t know that anyone would call me professional, but I’m…
BOTH: A professional comedian.
So this year, I don’t know how to top that. I won’t be trying if there’s something in the moment that I feel, but hopefully I won’t need it because we’ll win.

Are there any characters on the show that you feel like you’ve done such a great job with them that you wouldn’t want to risk bringing them back for season four, because you already did such a perfect job with them?
No, everybody can come back and everyone will come back. No, absolutely not. The work is never done. And you know what? That’s the nice thing about creating this Black Lady Cinematic Universe that we all know is now run by Dr. Haddassah, mind controlling these women and creating these characters. And now that these characters can meet, there’s unlimited possibilities. So I feel like it’s actually like we’re kind of restarting because now we can do so many different things. Now that Trinity and Octavia met, we know that the end of the world was not the end of the world, but that the world they live in is not the world we know, because the world they live in, these characters actually exist. Now that they’ve started to meet, it’s like, oh, they all exist in the same world. So we can Avengers the s— out of it!

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.