IFC's Sherman's Showcase is wildly specific and wildly funny

The Hollywood Reporter

Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle's eight-episode takeoff on a fictional music and variety special, premiering Wednesday, fits rights in with IFC's unusual programming, says Daniel Fienberg. "I can't necessarily tell you if you, in particular, are hungry for a parody of Soul Train, American Bandstand or The Midnight Special, one whose voice ranges from broad mockery to sardonic satire to near-sincere homage, but if you are — and maybe if you didn't even know you were — the series offers a lot to laugh, and occasionally marvel, at," he says. Fienberg adds: "My favorite thing about most of my favorite recent IFC comedies is that, on the surface, they sound like they might have material enough only for a single sketch themselves. Brockmire started as a wonderful one-joke Funny-or-Die gag and has become an impressive portrait of addiction and recovery. I'm eternally amazed at how Documentary Now! is able to keep digging deeper and deeper into the non-fiction catalogue. Sherman's Showcase has already, after eight episodes, proven how many variations Salahuddin and Riddle can find in this format, and I'm looking forward to seeing more outtakes from this 23-DVD set."

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• It's an understatement to call Sherman's Showcase a "sketch show": "For a show about an infomercial for a fake show—and as has become the norm for this type of thing, there is an episode that’s just an episode of the show-within-a-show—the series’ attention to detail and its own internal logic is absolutely brilliant," says LaToya Ferguson. "Without spoiling the season, Sherman’s Showcase rewards paying attention to details, no matter how strange they are or seemingly inconsequential they seem. Not even just aesthetically like the show-within-a-show’s opening credits and stages, which of course change through the decades."
• The bizarre allure of Sherman’s Showcase is that it’s a spoof that takes itself seriously, just like Documentary Now!
• At first glance, Sherman’s Showcase requires unraveling several meta layers
• How did Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle end up with South Side and Sherman's Showcase premiering a week apart?: "We pitched them at different times," says Riddle. "It’s just the nature of this business, sometimes things come around fast and some things come around not as fast, and it’s just sort of a happy accident that we have two shows debuting (that) couldn’t be any more different."
• Salahuddin and Riddle pitched IFC on a show “about 40 years of black music and black culture": “A lot of the content just came from us having funny conversations in the writers room. It was just such a weird idea to begin with, but we needed to make this unlike any other show on TV right now," says Riddle.