How do Jerrod Carmichael's previous specials look in wake of him coming out on HBO's Rothaniel?

Slate

The 2019 specials Home Videos and Sermon on the Mount form a trilogy about family with Rothaniel, says Lili Loofbourow, even if the earlier specials are a bit contradictory. "Rothaniel is short, fascinating, mildly claustrophobic, and pleasurably loose," says Loofbourow. "There’s a jazzy feel to it that matches the special’s opening sequence. You get the sense that you’re watching Carmichael thinking in real time, and if some of his choices are remarkably confident (like wearing an homage to Richard Pryor’s red shirt), others rely on a winsome vulnerability that works by informing the crowd he needs them back on his side. The game here isn’t to alienate them and win them over—as it was in 8—but to bring them closer. What I’m getting at is this: Rothaniel is, in the end, a deeply personal document that’s less interested in the stand-up it purports to be than in the family story he’s long been struggling to tell. It’s the most nakedly memoiristic of Carmichael’s specials in that it focuses on him—on Carmichael—even if it depends on the family story for much of its punch. Here, too, working backward through Carmichael’s archive is unexpectedly enriching. In 2019, the comic put out two complementary documentaries about his family: Home Videos and Sermon on the Mount. I watched them after watching Rothaniel. They’re notable for how little they bother to orient the viewer. Stand-up is a comparatively bossy genre: It requires constant narration and directs the viewer’s attention aggressively. These two projects do the opposite: He’s not at the center, he doesn’t introduce the different members of his family, and it’s sometimes not clear who exactly certain people—like a particularly loathsome pastor—even are. There are no captions, no chyrons. Just scenes of his family talking about some silly stuff and some of the biggest rifts of their lives." ALSO: One of Rothaniel's gifts is that it compels viewers to reckon with someone different from whom they expected.