82 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
ON TELEVISION
ODD JOBS
“South Side,” on HBO Max.
BY DOREEN S T. FÉLIX
ILLUSTRATION BY GUSTAVO MAGALHÃES
I
suppose it’s accurate to refer to “South
Side,” a series set in the Chicago neigh-
borhood of Englewood, as a workplace
comedy. Simon (Sultan Salahuddin) and
Kareme (Kareme Young) are best friends
who grudgingly clock in at Rent-T-Own,
a shady furniture-and-appliance-rental
service. Its name, a parody of Rent-A-
Center, is the bitter, primal joke of the
show: a retail center where the true prod-
uct is debt. “South Side” derives a great
deal of its Black black humor from the
encounters between its protagonists and
the delinquent renters: the physical as-
pect of product repossession allows for
so much slapstick. The tang of the show’s
critique brings to mind other satires of
workplace culture, such as “Reno 911”
and the genre-shifter “The Office.” But
the creators of “South Side”—Salahud-
din, his brother, Bashir, and Bashir’s writ-
ing partner, Diallo Riddle—cast a wider
net: they have crafted a fun-house por-
trait of Black life in the Second City.
“South Side” is now an HBO Max
original; its second season premièred on
the platform last month. But the show
débuted, in 2019, on Comedy Central,
where it joined a slate of excellent and
underwatched indie-ish sitcoms, includ-
ing “Workaholics,” “Detroiters,” and
“The Other Two.” (“The Other Two”
has also moved to HBO Max.) In re-
cent years, Comedy Central has become
an incubator for joke auteurs—willful
classicists who prize, above all else, elic-
iting belly laughs. Bashir and Riddle are
straight-up comedy and TV geeks: the
same month they blessed us with “South
Side,” the duo put out “Sherman’s Show-
case,” on IFC, a loving and layered
sendup of seventies variety shows.
Although Riddle-Salahuddin pro-
ductions are entertaining to viewers of
any race, make no mistake—the fun
and the farce are pitched to please Black
American audiences. You either get the
references—to primping culture, to fu-
neral culture—or you don’t. Such glee-
ful specificity is a rarity, and so, after the
first seasons of “South Side” and “Sher-
man’s Showcase,” fans steeled them-
selves for the shows to enter the hal-
lowed bin of single-season greats.
The first season of “South Side” can
certainly stand on its own. The giggles
come early, and easily. In the pilot, Kareme
and Simon ditch their jobs at Rent-T-
Own to pursue higher ambitions: Kareme
dreams of a career in astronomy, and
Simon yearns for the white-collar life.
But neither of them makes it; Simon
can’t pass a background check, and
Kareme discovers that astronomers are
racist. The guys come slinking back to
their old jobs, and their boss, Quincy,
Kareme’s twin brother (Quincy Young),
punishes them with a dreaded task: they
must recover an Xbox from the terrifying
Shaw (LaRoyce Hawkins), a hottie gang-
ster with a toothpick lodged in his teeth.
“When you was a little homie, did you
always dream of harassin’ Black people
for their appliances?” Shaw asks Simon,
inducing an identity crisis in the upward-
striving schlemiel. “You succumb to the
system,” Shaw continues. “I circumvent
the system. I circumcise the system.”
American sitcoms are notorious for
their own kind of circumvention: skirt-
ing issues of money. Even when lower-
class characters are depicted, you never
have to worry about their houses being
repossessed. The stakes in “South Side,”
however, are tangible: Simon spends a
night in jail, for instance, because he
owes child support. The steadiness of
the show’s hilarity is therefore a mira-
cle. Bashir Salahuddin and Riddle, ob-
sessed with the sharper edges of seven-
ties pop culture, bring the bite of Norman
Lear to outlandish reflections on Amer-
Kareme and Simon engage in a number of get-rich schemes, such as shilling Viagra. ican inequality. “The Day the Jordans
