Lamorne Morris and Sasheer Zamata star in a Hulu comedy about a Black man's racial awakening.
Had the new Hulu comedy Woke — starring Lamorne Morris as a Black cartoonist in San Francisco who undergoes a racial awakening after a traumatic encounter with the police — debuted last year, it could’ve been an instantly forgettable also-ran among the issues-driven sitcoms of Peak TV. But debuting after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, and the resulting resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Woke doesn’t just feel redundant, but ranklingly under-thought.
It’s not only that Woke is so politically tepid, although it’s that, too. It’s that the show cares so little to flesh out its protagonist, Keef Knight, that we have no idea why a 30-something Black man who was presumably alive and conscious during the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Philando Castile by cops just a few years ago would presume that police violence would never happen to him. And that lack of context and backstory is all-the-more conspicuous when the show shoehorns in the coronavirus through post-production dialogue, which means that Woke is set in 2020… but its majority-Black cast of characters never think to connect Keef’s rough treatment by law enforcement with anything else happening this year.
Timidity and carelessness hobble this star vehicle for Morris, who supplied a much-needed wildcard energy on Fox’s New Girl and who is too often stuck making chitchat with a marker here. (In a wholly unnecessary and exhaustingly unfunny development, Keef starts to hear various inanimate objects talk to him after the attack by police, voiced by the likes of J.B. Smoove, Nicole Byer, Eddie Griffin and Cedric the Entertainer.) The familiar jokes about San Francisco and the generic roommate setup — with T. Murph as Keef’s wannabe-womanizer best friend Clovis and Blake Anderson as their whiter-than-milk third wheel Gunther (Blake Anderson) — add to the broadcast-sitcom air, except that Black-ish has been doing what Woke thinks it’s doing on ABC with more bite, nuance, flair and actual humor for seven seasons and counting.
Because neither the creators (series inspiration Keith Knight and Marshall Todd) nor the showrunner (Jay Dyer) seem interested in crafting a believable universe, we’re stranded in a world where a freelance cartoonist is constantly recognized on the street; a man named “Keef” doesn’t have to repeat and over-enunciate his name every time he meets a new person; and a woker-than-thou journalist named Ayana (Sasheer Zamata) works for a publication called “The Bay Arean” (pronounced exactly like “Aryan”) with no sense of irony. A self-righteous social-justice warrior like Ayana working for a racially bumbling paper that sounds like “The Bay Aryan” could be a darkly funny gag — but Woke doesn’t even allow her that slightness of depth.
Before his brief but terrifying brush with the cops, Ayana is the only one to see the subversive potential in Keef’s comic strip about “bored breakfast food.” (He’s not a fan of her interpretation, retorting calmly but firmly, “Why is it that as people of color we’re always having to stand for something?”) Keef’s encounter with law enforcement leaves him sensitive to microaggressions that wouldn’t have bothered him before — and sabotaging a syndication deal that would have set him up for life in a scene that presages the eight-episode season’s tonal ping-ponging between the goofy and the serious.
The rest of the season finds Keef searching for his artistic voice (hence the heart-to-hearts with his marker) while tackling the racial issue of the episode, some of which arise because of his white love interest Adrienne (Rose McIver). A provocative but ultimately ill-advised art piece that Keef plasters all over San Francisco is probably the highlight of the season, especially since its divided reception within the city lends a frisson so direly missing from the more debate-oriented episodes.
A visit to a Black artistic salon in Oakland, where a racially anxious Keef is pop-quizzed on the pronunciation of “Ta-Nehesi Coates,” provides another respite. But the crossing of the bay mostly recalls the truly visionary work we’ve had about Black Oaklanders in recent years: Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station and Black Panther, Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. It’s fine to make space for a milquetoast’s rebellion, but there’s no reason why the results have to be so bland.
Cast: Lamorne Morris, Blake Anderson, T. Murph, Lara Goldie, Sasheer Zamata
Creators: Keith Knight, Marshall Todd
Showrunner: Jay Dyer
Premieres Wednesday, Sep. 9, on Hulu
