The Limitations of Sharing Your Sins on TV

On a day that began like any other, the unwitting star of The Truman Show saw something that changed his entire world. For a few, unnerving seconds, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) came face-to-face with his father—a man he believed to be dead. In the 1998 film, this implausible encounter catalyzed Truman’s realization that the small beach town he called home was really a suburb-size production studio designed to confine him. After decades of being secretly surveilled as part of a never-ending reality show, Truman found freedom when his broadcast finally ended.

More than 25 years and countless reality-TV franchises later, The Truman Show remains a prescient meditation on the creeping dangers of a ceaseless entertainment cycle that ruthlessly commodifies real people’s lives. “I’m trying to self–Truman Show myself,” the comedian Jerrod Carmichael says early in a new unscripted series about his life around the time of his Emmy win for Rothaniel, the 2022 stand-up special in which he publicly came out as a gay man. Carmichael’s growing pains, as captured on Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, reflect existential and interpersonal turmoil: fractured familial ties, strained friendships, self-destructive behavior that threatens his first real relationship with a man. But his allusion to the Carrey film is one of many explanations he gives for wanting to expose so much of himself to audiences: Early on, he claims that cameras put him at ease, and that their constant presence may help him overcome his damaging tendency to lie in his real life.

In this way, Reality Show actually inverts the original Truman Show premise, which hinged on Truman being unaware of the elaborate artifice required to sustain his televised life. Carmichael, by contrast, co-created and co-executive-produced his new series, a level of involvement that makes it fundamentally impossible for the show to exist as an impartial record of his transgressions, which he seems to want to acknowledge and make amends for. The comic does repeatedly acknowledge this key tension: He often addresses the camerapeople during scenes, drawing attention to the literal production of his narrative. Still, pointing out this artifice doesn’t diminish its creative interference. As my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2020 about the 20th anniversary of Survivor, viewers “understand that reality, a postmodern genre in a post-truth culture, turns the logic of fictional entertainment on its head: It demands a willing suspension of belief.” For the most part, Carmichael’s series presents itself as a refreshing, experimental corrective to such farce. The comedian likens the camera to God; he knowingly inundates viewers with a litany of his sins. But publicly admitting one’s flaws isn’t inherently virtuous, and more often than not, Carmichael’s eagerness to divulge the unpalatable details of his life ends up turning the act of seeking forgiveness into voyeuristic spectacle.

The stakes of the show’s storytelling choices are high for the comic’s loved ones, who don’t necessarily stand to profit directly from his HBO deal. (In fact, one friend who appears on the series, a fellow comedian, told Vulture he had to push just to get paid $1,000.) And despite Carmichael’s stated desire to use the cameras as a truth-telling agent, everyone around him is clearly aware that the comic can still manipulate the final product to privilege its creator. Throughout the series, many of those people articulate that power imbalance: “Dude, this is not a neutral eye,” says one of his friends, who only appears on-screen wearing an anonymizing mask, in the first episode. Shortly afterward, the friend implies that Carmichael’s project risks being “masturbatorily public.” It’s an astute observation: If Rothaniel sublimated the agony of keeping secrets, then Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show revels in the fantasy of finding absolution through public confession.

Carmichael’s approach to confession differs from the way it appears on most reality TV shows. Generally, producers lead a cast member into an isolated studio, where they’re encouraged to speak candidly—and, ideally, confrontationally—about their peers, in order to sow the kind of chaos that boosts ratings. Carmichael, though, reserves the bulk of his self-taped, lo-fi confessionals for disparaging himself. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to witness. Early in one episode, during a stand-up bit sandwiched in the middle of a scene where he shops for sex toys, Carmichael offers up this blithe assessment of his sexuality: “In gay years, I’m 17,” which he explains means he wants to have sex with “a lot of people, all the time.” Later, after one of the many times he cheats on his boyfriend, Carmichael takes an entirely different tone as he speaks into a camcorder. “I want God. I feel spiritually unclean. I feel dirty,” he says, sitting on the floor in a literal closet. With his head in his hands, he adds, “Sex offers me power and control. It’s an escape.” Such scenes instead underscore how stuck Carmichael is—yes, he’s not actually in the closet anymore, but he’s nowhere close to having a healthy relationship to sex, or to being reliably honest with his partner.

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These moments also highlight the tremendous emotional toll that unscripted projects can take on participants who aren’t running the show. Carmichael’s quest to become a better person doesn’t happen in a vacuum; a constellation of real people with real feelings are affected when he acts with selfish, reckless abandon. Nowhere is this more unsettling to watch than in how he treats the men he’s drawn to, especially his boyfriend. Whatever hope for accountability might have been seeded during Carmichael’s post-infidelity self-flagellation is undone by a wrenching scene where Carmichael and his boyfriend, Mike, attend relationship counseling. Carmichael tells their therapist that he’s feeling “pretty good monogamy-wise,” and jokes that he doesn’t have the time to cheat. But when the cameramen suddenly move closer to Carmichael’s face, Mike suspects something is off. “I knew then, like, that they know something that I don’t,” he says later—and, of course, Carmichael actually is still being unfaithful. In the short but devastating segment, it’s hard to hear the palpable hurt in Mike’s voice and not wonder whether the audience is somehow implicated in Carmichael’s decision to prioritize a public performance of confession over being honest with his partner in private.

And it’s especially curious that Carmichael identifies the camera as God. Seen through that lens, his navel-gazing starts to look similar to the suffocating shame that fear-based religious dogma can stoke beginning in childhood. Of course, most adults who still struggle with that shame don’t do so in front of an HBO audience. Still, Reality Show is most compelling when the comic seriously wrestles with the residual pains of being raised in a conservative Christian household—dynamics that are familiar to many other Black queer people. In the latest episode, titled “Homecoming,” he brings Mike home to meet his family. Carmichael and his devout mother remain on shaky ground, an uneasy détente that affects everyone around them. The episode doesn’t end with a neat ribbon, but by its conclusion, Carmichael and his mother have had multiple frustrating, important conversations about what they need from each other.

These vignettes are striking because other people’s feelings aren’t entirely out of focus, and Carmichael’s voice isn’t the only one we hear. After several family members attempt to mediate, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine Carmichael and his mother building toward some kind of off-screen resolution. “Could my mom change?” he asks in a stand-up bit toward the end of the episode. He pauses for a moment, then answers his own question: “It’s reason to keep fighting.” I hope, for Carmichael’s sake, that he invests more time in that journey than in devising ways to make sure the rest of us watch.