Jerrod Carmichael’s ‘Rothaniel,’ as Moving as It Is Funny, Shows a Comedian Stepping Into His Own Shoes: TV Review
variety.comCaroline Framke Chief TV CriticThe moment Jerrod Carmichael tells an audience that he’s gay for the first time in his life stretches into an impossibly long silence, until someone finally lets out a tentative “whoo!” from a corner of the room.
As director Bo Burnham stays close on Carmichael’s face, the comedian doesn’t exactly smile, nor heave some obvious sigh of relief.
But he does absorb the reaction: tentatively, at first, until he shifts into an even slightly more comfortable position he can assume until leaving on his own terms.In “Rothaniel,” which premiered April 1 on HBO, Carmichael walks an astonishingly difficult tightrope between the fraught past and present to, he hopes, a more hopeful future.
The crowd doesn’t fully realize this until some 20 minutes into the special, which otherwise starts out with Carmichael retelling old family stories — or, more accurately, his family’s long held open secrets, which intertwined with his own before he even knew it.
Read more on variety.com