Top 5 TV: Kanye for President and ‘Hannibal”s Last Meal

2. The Carmichael Show gets old-fashioned (NBC)
You’d be silly to pretend that comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s new sitcom is “hip” in any conventional sense. It leans hard into the classic three-camera/live-studio-audience format, featuring broad performances and crowd-pleasing one-liners that would’ve fit right into primetime circa 1975. The big twist is that Carmichael and co-writer/co-producer Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) also embrace the topicality of TV from 40 years ago. In last week’s first two installments — aired back-to-back as part of NBC’s bizarrely common strategy of burning through its most promising comedies — Carmichael played an obstinately apolitical young man, stuck between his far-left-leaning activist girlfriend and his socially conservative Christian Democrat parents. For most of each episode, the characters gathered in a living room and talked, All in the Famly-style.

It wouldn’t matter much that The Carmichael Show is a bold throwback if it weren’t also genuinely funny. There’s an undeniable zing to a lot of the lines, like when the hero cracks, “No one goes to Boston for the food, you go for the enthusiastic racism,” or when David Alan Grier (as the his dad) says that he voted for George W. Bush after the first stimulus check, because, “You can bomb whoever you want so long as you send me $1600.” Rather than using these jokes to score easy political points, the characters argue fairly with each other, displaying a mix insight and ignorance that puts them right in line with most ordinary Americans. It’s just too bad that they’re only going to do this four more times over the next two weeks, and then probably never again. Speaking of which….