How 'The Rundown' Helped Robin Thede Be 'Fearless' in Creating 'A Black Lady Sketch Show'

It's rare to read the name Robin Thede without also reading a line about how she is breaking ground in the entertainment industry.

And that's how it should be because it is essential to not only acknowledge, but also celebrate the history-making roles she has had in only a decade and a half. From being the first Black woman to hold the position of head writer on a late-night talk show (on The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore), to creating, running, and starring in the only series to be nominated alongside the historical in its own right Saturday Night Live for the last two years (A Black Lady Sketch Show), Thede's accomplishments are important and impressive, but she is more focused on making sure she evolves as an artist.

Reflecting on her transition from working in the late-night format to creating her own sketch series for HBO, Thede says, "It was Van Gogh going from painting self-portraits at 14 to going on to paint more abstract as he got older. For me, in my artistic journey, the nightly talk shows are self-portraits: You want to give your opinion, you want to reflect your views and the views of others and challenge them in new ways of thinking. But when you start painting with a broader brush and more abstract art, then people can interpret it their own way, and it's not so heavy-handed."

With A Black Lady Sketch Show (which has been Emmy-nominated in the Outstanding Variety Sketch Series category three times overall — one for each season so far — including this year as one of its five total noms for the 2022 awards), Thede has the freedom to present commentary on the Black female experience and pop culture in a comedic, original, and unique way. She shares that some of the characters she enjoys playing the most are the ones where she only has a couple of lines, further backing up her statement of wanting to move beyond self-portraiture. 

But the "abstract" analogy may not be 100-percent perfect because although the world on the show is wide, the ideas it presents are very concrete. Episodes not only include five to six individual sketches each, but they also further an important narrative through line about four Black women who appear to be the sole survivors of an apocalyptic event. That through line, as revealed in the third season finale, connects the seemingly contained sketches and the characters within them in an extremely detailed and well-thought-out way.

Thede performed with a live sketch comedy group in the early aughts, and when she began working professionally in Hollywood she leaned into scripted comedy in a variety of forms, including writing and starring on sitcom Clunkers, writing two seasons of single-camera comedy Real Husbands of Hollywood, acting on sketch series Second Generation Wayans, and acting and writing on sketch series In The Flow With Affion Crockett.

But The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, which she worked on from 2015 to 2016, put her in the spotlight in a much bigger way, as did her own late-night series, The Rundown With Robin Thede, which she hosted and ran from 2017 to 2018. And it also set her up for success with A Black Lady Sketch Show.

"I loved doing late night. I loved working for [Larry] and with him, and I loved doing The Rundown. I am so endlessly proud of those 24 episodes of television," Thede tells Metacritic. "I was starting to do sketches there that were pretty cinematic. It set me up in earnest to be fearless and to take all of the shackles of formatting off."

Here, Thede looks back on how her time on The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore and The Rundown With Robin Thede influenced what she wanted to do with A Black Lady Sketch Show, as well as how she develops and breaks her HBO sketches, and why Dr. Haddassah is a character she considers personal.

While there were sketches on The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore and The Rundown With Robin Thede, so much of the focus of late-night talks shows is delivering political news in a comedic way. How did you have to adjust your sensibility and style for that format, both in writing the actual content and in running the writers' room?

At The Nightly Show, my concern was about serving Larry Wilmore's voice: What does Larry want to talk about? What's in the news? What does Larry think about those things? How does he want to tackle those things? And then from there, how are we going to use our second act green screen or field pieces or musical performances? The third act was always a panel, and what are we doing with the panel who's coming on tonight? What are they going to have to say about these things? Typically for the panel, because we would have to book guests in advance, we'd be writing those the week of but not the day of because if Don Cheadle was coming and then something happened in the news that he didn't want to comment about, it would get dicey. So, we always had more of a current topic, but it wasn't the news of the day.

The way that I ran that room was to play to the strengths of the writers we had. That was definitely the biggest room that I've ever run because it was 14 to 17 writers at any time. So, you have writers who are doing field pieces, you have writers who are doing the monologue, you have writers who are doing the sketches [and] the comedy rooted in the news. Larry would come in, we'd talk about the news of the day, Larry would give his opinion on it, and then writers would, in the moment, pitch. They would come that day knowing what happened in the news: We all got up at 5 or 6 in the morning and then our pitch was at 8 or 8:30, which was brutal, but by then we all had takes on the news. Larry was also really great about letting us as correspondents — because I was head writer and a correspondent — get our own opinions out about something even if it very much disagreed with what he wanted to say.

We were making a new episode of television every day; you had to write insanely fast. We had about two hours to write all of that content, and then we would do a read through, we would have lunch, we would do a rehearsal, and then we would get into rewrite — that would be another couple of hours — and then we'd be live at 6. And if we didn't have it that day, sometimes the audience had to wait a little bit, but we had to hit a certain time where we had to finish recording in order to get it on TV that night.

Even though The Rundown was more fully your show because you were also hosting it, you still had to serve a familiar format. What was most important to you about making that more your own?

The Rundown was a weekly show, so we were working on field pieces, sketches, and musical performances, and they were all evergreen, so we were working on them for months, closer to the way John Oliver does it and Sam Bee and those kinds of folks. We would have long meetings about those, usually on Mondays, to talk about the field pieces, the sketches we were shooting. Monday, Tuesday we'd walk on those things, and then Wednesday we'd start delving into the news because the show taped on Thursdays and aired on Fridays, and if we were going into the news any sooner than that, it just would be a waste of time. We were obviously tracking it and I was watching a 24-hour news cycle at that time. But on Wednesday we would start formulating the rundown part, which was the first two acts of the show where I would stand in front of a screen and go through the list to break it down Sports Center style. That became a lot because of the graphics load. We had a larger graphics team on The Nightly Show than we did The Rundown. [Also] I only had six or seven writers on The Rundown at any given time, and I had a head writer — Lauren Ashley Smith was a fantastic head writer.

With The Rundown, it was more about, "OK, how can I merge politics and pop culture in a way that no other late-night hosts are going to say this joke?" There was an article in 2018 when there were a lot of stories about the porn star and Trump, [the broadcast late-night hosts' made the same Stormy Daniels joke, and I made a very different joke that merged Black culture, popular culture, and politics. And the writer was saying how refreshing it was because all four of the white, male late-night hosts made the same joke. And that doesn't happen a lot, but it was a testament to the ability that we had to stand out. I remember also saying something about Mike Pence jumping to more conclusions than Dru Hill in the "Tell Me" video. Those were the kinds of jokes we did on that show because it was important to bring the community into the politics we were talking about, but also make it relatable and make it fun and make it entertaining.

Dr. Haddassah is such an important through line in the show, as we've previously talked about, but another notable one is haircare because of how many individual sketches you have done on the topic. How many of those come out of personal stories in the writers' room, and how do you make sure they have a magical realism spin worthy of the show?

A hundred-percent, especially that weather forecast where people are like, "Oh my god I wish this was my weather woman." Or "Product Purge" in the first episode — we knew we were going to open with that big sketch and have 100 women running down the street wanting to take advantage of those 15 minutes to return all their unused haircare products for a full refund. I mean, I would have thousands of dollars back a year!

We basically go, "What's the thing we want to comment on? What's the thing that annoys us or is a problem or the things we as Black women experience? And how do we do the wish fulfillment — a positive thing?" Yeah, we spend all this money on haircare, and we could do a sketch about a woman being like, "I'm homeless." "Why?" "Because I bought too much leave-in conditioner," but that's the sad, kind of negative version of it.

We ask, "What if...?" a lot on the show. I tell the writers all the time, "Don't be confined to how the world has been for you. We live in a Black lady cinematic universe where anything can happen. Take all those limitations off." I told them all to watch Lovecraft Country: "See a world where you can see yourself differently." And that's why I think the sketches do become so high concept because we don't see that reality. Things like a weather woman taking over and giving us a haircare forecast could really happen, but it still seems like fantasy.

Speaking to the high-concept nature, you also have the ball sketches, which feel even more high concept because it relies so heavily on visuals and emoting through movement, rather than a more traditional story structure. Are there differences in how you break those sketches and place them in episodes because of that style and tonal shift?

"Funeral Ball" was very easy because we already knew "Basic Ball." So, as long as we knew the environment, the formula is there. It's like "Res-herrection," too: I wrote it in like 45 minutes because "Last Supp-her" already existed. As long as we figure out the sequel that's going to top the last one, once we break that idea, it's very easy to write because it's a formula. Everybody wants it to be the same thing. You want Bob to go, "It's the whatever ball!" And then we're off and running. With "Last Supp-her," you know you're gonna get them complaining and then you're gonna realize where they're at — Jesus' resurrection or the last supper, there's all these biblical stories that you can use. The hardest part is breaking the world and making sure that it's ripe enough with jokes and the stuff that we need. We did the basic ball [and] it wasn't tied to a specific place, it was tied to a specific community. Now, what's the other community that has lots of characters for Black people? Oh my God, a funeral because there's already an aisle and we already got to dance down it, but there's so many things happening at Black funerals that you get to really expand that too.

In Season 3 you also had more pop culture homages, especially in the Emmy-nominated episode "Save My Edges, I'm a Donor," which features both "Bad News or Whatever," which plays with Grey's Anatomy, and "Didn't Figures," inspired by Hidden Figures. How do you determine how much pop culture is the right amount for the show and what periods of pop culture to pull from?

In Season 1, I was like, "We're writing a show that's nine months out, everything has to be evergreen." So we did "Rome and Julissa" and "Motown Meltdown" and stuff like that that was classically funny. Season 2, we were like,"Oh it isn't that old by the time it airs," so we started incorporating more. Season 3 we incorporated some more [and] I think I can say this, Season 4 will have a lot more. Every season we push it further with how much we can do, and I'm excited about doing more of that and more current stuff, too.

Do you set rules about how recent something has to be?

Oh no, I just won't do stuff about slavery, but that's not for current reasons; that's just because I don't think there's anything funny about it.