Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’ Season 4 On HBO, Where Robin Thede And Co. Have Become A Comedy Institution

HBO’s Emmy-winning A Black Lady Sketch Show returns for its fourth season with Robin Thede, Gabrielle Dennis and Skye Townsend joined by three new featured players: DaMya Gurley (who blew up on TikTok), Tamara Jade (a contestant on The Voice in 2020), and Angel Laketa Moore (Megan on Netflix’s Atypical). A bevy of celebrity guest stars will show up, too. So what’s in it for you?

A BLACK LADY SKETCH SHOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: This season’s premiere opens with a premise straight out of the Saturday Night Live bag of cold open tricks, with a C-SPAN graphic and a voiceover introducing us to footage from a U.S. Senate hearing. About what now? About whether to ban Instagram Live from bachelorette parties!

The Gist: That opening sketch leads into a new title sequence, which also introduces each of the main players plus the three new featured players, also slightly peacocking in the vein of that other, older, less-black-lady-sketch-show on the National Broadcasting Company.

We first get to see the full cast together in a music video, “Girls Trippin’,” wherein five of the ladies are flying somewhere to support one of their own who got wronged, but they all seem to find temptations on the flight to join the mile-high club instead.

Then it’s back to Bethlehem, so to speak, for another sketch set around the birth of Jesus Christ, only this time the women be gossiping about the so-called gifts the so-called Three Wise Men plan on bringing, only to be confronted by said men, played by Tank, Jay Ellis and Kel Mitchell.

This segues into a behind-the-scenes spoof with Sloane Nawford, the actress playing Mary Magdalene (Dennis). Then cut to a casino heist, which Townsend and Dennis could pull off successfully so long as Thede’s character does her job correctly as the lookout at the card table. Then back to more with the actress playing Mary Magdalene.

Finally, “Plugged In” stars Thede as Salina a woman with bad hair plugs who tracks down her childhood friend, LaDonna (Townsend), at Omarion’s mansion. “All it took was a little mail fraud, and I found you!” Turns out she wants a rematch of their MASH game, which explains how the one friend wound up with Omarion in a mansion! The girls get into a tussle, which gets their hair into a tousle, and wouldn’t you know it, Omarion cannot tell them apart now, so they have to prove to him who’s the real LaDonna.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? ABLSS is SNL without the live aspect, but with a distinct perspective.

Our Take: The show’s first season was criminally robbed of Emmys it should’ve won for both the series and its star creator (though ABLSS did take home the top prize for variety shows from the TV Critics Association for their debut, which proved amazingly ahead of its time not just for showcasing the talent of black ladies in comedy, but also for their season-long conceit in 2019 about an apocalyptic event. That original cast starred Thede, Dennis, Quinta Brunson and Ashley Nicole Black.

Brunson left after the first season because she sold her own show, Abbott Elementary, to ABC, which has worked out quite well for Quinta and ABC. Townsend and Laci Mosley joined to replace Brunson in season 2. Mosley has since gone on to co-star in the iCarly reboot for Paramount+ as well as NBC’s Lopez vs. Lopez. Black left after season 3, because she’s producing and co-starring in the upcoming Apple TV+ series, Bad Monkey, after previously working with Bill Lawrence on Ted Lasso.

Combined, the cast and crew have earned 13 Emmy nominations over the first three seasons, and three wins so far (two for picture editing, and one for directing), despite having to go up mostly just against SNL in the weirdly regulated Emmy categories.

And now, just like SNL, they need to recruit reinforcements to fill in the gaps as ABLSS cast members move on to other projects. That’s a luxury problem to have. But it also means that, now four seasons in, Thede and Co. have to keep auditioning to find the new new actresses who’ll blossom into the next big comedy stars. It’s decidedly unclear from this first episode what the three newest cast members will add to the mix. Just like SNL.

But the trailer for Season 4 does boast more than 20 celebrity guest stars, including returns from Yvette Nicole Brown and Jackée Harry, executive producer Issa Rae, plus Tracee Ellis Ross, Colman Domingo, Bobby Brown, Kyla Pratt, Sam Richardson and more.

Sex and Skin: Nope.

Parting Shot: A series of outtakes run over the credits, culminating in Thede’s hair-plugged character yelling: “It smells like a rapper’s coochie! A man’s!”

Our Call: Previews for the second episode promise the return of Thede’s “What up? I’m 3” girl, so for that alone, it’s worth a STREAM 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.