Everything was going according to plan for A Black Lady Sketch Show at the end of 2019. Fresh off an Emmy-nominated first season that spawned a bevy of viral moments—like “No Makeup” and “Bad Bitch Support Group”—the cast and crew of the HBO series were ready to get back to creating comedy about Black women, starring Black women. Then 2020 happened. The show “became this sort of phenomenon,” said Black Lady Sketch Show creator, showrunner, and star Robin Thede. “And then it was just this grind to a halt.”
During the shutdown, Thede and head writer and executive producer Lauren Ashley Smith put their heads together to figure out how to get the show up and running again as safely as possible—and brainstorm what might still be funny in a post-pandemic landscape. “It was just Lauren and I grinding it out over Zoom and me writing all night having fever dreams, which is when I do my best writing,” said Thede. On Friday, April 23, those fever dreams will become a reality when the second season of A Black Lady Sketch Show hits HBO Max and airs at 11 p.m. EST on HBO.
Earlier this week Vanity Fair Zoomed with Thede, Smith, writer and cast member Ashley Nicole Black, and cast member Gabrielle Dennis about their glamorous guest stars, the expansiveness of Blackness, and making comedy during tragic times.
Vanity Fair: The first season of A Black Lady Sketch Show featured interstitial sketches about a catastrophic event that ended the world and forced the cast to effectively quarantine together in Robin’s house. That aired in the summer of 2019. So can you predict the future?
Robin Thede: [Laughs] Look, I saw Trump installed as president—not elected. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before the end of the world actually happened. I was like, Oh, he’s going to kill us all. So I worked with the writers to come up with this interstitial story line that featured four women quarantining at a house at the end of the world, which felt very stupid and weird at the time to many. And yet it was quite prescient. It is an interesting framing device for the show that ended up being very, very timely, unfortunately.
So much of season two felt timely and topical without being exploitative of the moment regarding coronavirus and Black trauma.
Thede: We started writing two weeks after season one ended in the fall of 2019. And so the interstitials and what was going to happen in season two was already written, again, prior to the pandemic…You know, we don’t really address coronavirus. There are two jokes in the first episode in passing, but that’s it. We did make a conscious effort to not do it when we had to rewrite when we came back after the industry shut down in the spring.
Lauren Ashley Smith: I think the cool thing about working on this show, and having the ability to really celebrate Black womanhood and Blackness, is that if you think about the “today-ness” of whatever our experience may be, it’s not ever that new. Like, COVID is probably the newest part, but none of the rest of it is super new. So it feels topical by nature of the fact that stuff doesn’t change.
I think that for COVID, we just were like, you know, if it comes up, it comes up. But for me there was always going to be a disconnect, because we wrote the season before it hit. If I’m seeing people living in a world where COVID doesn’t exist, but I’m speaking about it, then I start to have a time-space reality rift that I don’t want to think about as a viewer. So from our end we were like, let’s take that burden off of them and let them laugh.
Thede: And we knew no one would want to see that. We knew we were coming out in the spring. And so we were like, okay, we’re going to be 19 months off the air. The last thing people want to see is us in masks doing characters. It’s not going to be funny. As Black people, we’ve all lost people to COVID. It’s very serious. We don’t deal with it seriously because in this world, we don’t want those women to have suffered from that. We just don’t want to traffic in trauma. This is a show about Black joy.
Tell me about how far into season two you were when you shut down.
Smith: We had kind of just finished the writers room. Robin and I think about this moment—we talk about it probably once a week—because it was right as COVID was starting. There was a press conference on the TV. It was eerily quiet in the office.
Thede: Remember, Gabrielle [Dennis] had come in in that yellow jumpsuit? She had just come from a fitting. Ashley [Nicole Black] may have been in the building.
Smith: We were excited [for season two], but we weren’t really acknowledging or understanding what was before us. And then outside on the street, a woman screamed, and we both jumped out of our seats. We were like, “Oh, my goodness!”
Thede: “We gotta go!”
Smith: The woman’s scream was like the canary in the coal mine. It was like, “Get out. Go home. It’s a pandemic.”
Thede: And then we got a call from HBO that was like, “Everybody’s shutting down for two months.” And here we are, 19 months later or whatever it is. Twenty years later? I have no idea anymore.
Gabrielle Dennis: I recall we were doing our table reads and rehearsing, and we’re sharing germaphobia notes on where do you find sanitizer and toilet paper and Lysol. Starting in January, we’re getting the inklings of [COVID] and we’re seeing it happen, but we’re like, “Okay, our government isn’t doing anything, so maybe we’re okay? But no, let’s go ahead and order some stuff just in case.” And then cut to two weeks later—it was like, “Oh, this is real.” And I remember getting the call on Friday the 13th, literally heading to a friend’s birthday party. And I’m like, “Uhhh, don’t nobody hug me. I don’t want to touch anybody. Stay away.” It was a surreal situation.
Clockwise from top left: Robin Thede, Ashley Nicole Black, Lauren Ashley Smith, and Gabrielle Dennis
(Binary data 27 bytes, use -b option to extract)What was it like coming back to work after the shutdown?
Thede: We were one of the first shows back for HBO. So we were able to learn from a couple of the other shows who had been back. I took endless, endless meetings and conversations with medical experts, and with HBO and WarnerMedia we were able to figure out how to put the show back up. And then in August, Lauren and I came back together and said, “Okay, let’s get into these 300 pages of scripts and see what’s still going to fly.” And luckily, I would say, like, 75% of it was pretty much fine.
However, that other quarter had to be replaced or rewritten in a lot of ways. And then at the same time, our love Quinta Brunson had a scheduling conflict because we got pushed six months. She had to go shoot her pilot for ABC and work on that, so we lost her as well for this season. We had to get a new cast member and rewrite all the interstitials and replace Quinta in sketches. It was a very big task.
How did you decide which characters and sketches to bring back for season two?
Ashley Nicole Black: I think we paid attention to what the fans really responded to and what people would want to see again. Like one thing that we knew was that people were going to want to see Courtroom Kiki again. The number of tweets that we would get, it was like, “Oh, we had a Black lady surgeon! We had a Black lady dentist!” So we knew people were going to want to go back to that environment. And then secondly, there are just always those characters that you’re like, “I want to know where she went next. I want to know what this lady is like in a different environment.” Like Dr. Haddassah. We know she’s going to have some other scheme. So what’s the next scheme gonna be?
What was it like incorporating new cast members Laci Mosley and Skye Townsend into the show amid a pandemic?
Black: Well, it’s funny because Skye and Laci are so funny, but they’re also a little bit younger [than us], so they’re so energetic.
Thede: Don’t make us sound tired [laughs].
Black: I’m talking about me. I will own [it]. I’m tired [laughs].
Speaking of new faces, the first season had a ton of great guest stars, and this season is no exception. Do you write specifically with people in mind?
Thede: I will say in season one, we wrote only for Patti LaBelle and Angela Bassett and no one else. But in season two, no, we didn’t write for anyone.
Smith: We did write for one person.
Thede: Oh, who?
Smith: Gabrielle Union.
Thede: Oh, yes, we did. Yes, we did.
Smith: But other than that, it’s almost a game to play. How do we take this character and this cultural moment, or person that we love, or person we think doesn’t ever get a chance to show this side of them, but we know they can do it? Who would fans scream [for]?
Thede: And when those people tell us no, I open my phone and start texting people [laughs].
The show covers the Black experience in such a specific yet expansive way. Is there anything Black you feel you haven’t tackled yet?
Thede: There’s a lot more Blackness and Black community-ness to explore. There’s so many more things that we’ll never run out of material. I mean, there’s a sketch in season two that is literally the consequences of what happens when you touch a Black woman’s purse. It’s such a weird, weird way to tell that story. But there are things like that that are so iconic in the Black community but you wouldn’t ever see told that way.
We can’t be in SNL territory, because they’re making a show weekly, and we’re making a show nine months from now. We always ask, “Why is this on A Black Lady Sketch Show?” And if you cannot answer that very succinctly, very clearly, we cut it, no matter how good the sketch.
Black: I feel like there are certain stories of Blackness that get told over and over and over again. Blackness was always a wide spectrum, and we’ve been focused on one part of it. We’re just turning the focus to another part. And the great thing about sketch is that we’re only going to live in the sketch for five minutes anyway. So it can be absurd. It can be silly. It can be science fiction. And those things have really been missing for representation of Black people and Black women, specifically. But what’s great about it is we’re already seeing that people are doing more and more. Because they now see, like, oh, people will sit and watch a plus-sized Black spy [laughs].
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