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Season 3 goes all in on that
convention-shattering formula,
as the ongoing interstitials fol-
low the four doomsday survivors
(played by series stars Thede,
Dennis, Black and Skye
Townsend) through a mystery-
driven and Easter-egg-laden
journey of self-actualization. As
the trailer revealed, several fan-
favorite characters from the
stand-alone sketches are return-
ing as well. Among them: Thede’s
Dr. Hadassah Olayinka Ali-
Youngman, a hertep with a
fiercely misguided sense of au-
thority, and Black’s Trinity, an
ace spy who moves undetected
through a world that treats Black
women as invisible.
“It took Robin a while to really
bet on herself, but she did the
right thing by getting so much
experience,” Wilmore says. “To
me, the first show that Robin had,
it wasn’t quite there. I think she
was still trying to be something
she thought she should be, where-
as ‘Black Lady Sketch Show’ is
pure Robin.”
“When you’re marginalized
and when your voice is shut out
for so long, or when you’ve been
scrapping to get to the top,
sometimes that really just births
new ideas and fresh takes on
things,” Dennis adds. “It’s so
ingrained in her DNA at this
point that she can’t help but be
the trendsetter.”
In a tribute to not only Thede’s
hard-earned clout but the
show’s enduring appeal, this
season’s roster of guest stars —
including Ava DuVernay, Mi-
chaela Jaé Rodriguez, Wayne
Brady, Vanessa Williams and
Wanda Sykes — is loaded with
recognizable names. And the un-
precedented makeup of her
writers’ room remains as awe-
inspiring as ever.
“I just love being able to look
around a room of Black women
and to see them on their first day
also looking around, going, ‘Oh,
I’m sorry — I’m just taking in the
magnitude of what’s happening,’
” Thede says. “They’re always
kind of shook at that first meet-
ing.”
As Thede awaits a Season 4
renewal of “A Black Lady Sketch
Show,” she is working toward
getting two movies she scripted
in front of cameras: the zombie
satire “Killing It” for Amazon
and the haute couture comedy
“Fashionably Black” for HBO
Max. Although her previously
reported “Perfect Strangers” re-
boot for HBO Max fell through,
she says she has TV projects in
development that run the gam-
ut from animated series to real-
ity competitions and real estate
shows.
Peering ahead, Thede’s over-
arching vision is clear: “I just
want to keep playing with the
boundaries — and breaking
them.”takes — she shakes her characters,
heads home to learn her lines for
the next day, gets to bed around
midnight and does it all again.
“Her energy is pretty conta-
gious,” co-star Gabrielle Dennis
says. “She’s just really living out
her dream. It’s kind of hard to fall
asleep at the wheel because you’re
just full of all of this adrenaline.”
“We do the same job of writing
and performing, except she’s also
doing this other job, and I’m ex-
hausted at the end of every day,”
adds Ashley Nicole Black, who has
starred alongside Thede and Den-
nis in all three seasons of the
show. “It really can’t be overstated
how difficult what she’s doing is.
And not only is she doing it, but
she’s opening the door for so
many others to walk through be-
hind her.”
“A Black Lady Sketch Show,” the
first series of its kind entirely
written by, directed by and star-
ring Black women, returned for a
third season of its absurdist shtick
this month on HBO. Thede’s trail-
blazer bona fides have only grown
since the critically acclaimed
show premiered in 2019, with the
writer-performer inking a multi-
year deal to develop shows for
Warner Bros. and continuing to
craft Black-women-fronted proj-
ects at her production company,
For Better or Words.
“This sounds like a lot,” Thede
says through nervous laughter
during a video chat from her
Southern California home, as she
THEDE FROM E1 dons a T-shirt with the slogan
“Phenomenally Black.” “I work
seven days a week, but it’s fine
because this is what I came here
for — and there were many days
where I had plenty of time.”
T
hede comes from humble
roots: Her parents both
worked in education, and
she and her sisters grew up in a
cornfield-adjacent trailer park in
Davenport, Iowa, just off the Mis-
sissippi River. (Her mother, Phyl-
lis, later entered politics and is
now a six-term representative in
the Iowa General Assembly.) But
Thede, who got her first name due
to her father’s affinity for Robin
Williams, had a performative
edge from a young age. By the
time she was 13, she was shooting
short films with a 16mm camera.
For three summers, she toured
with a puppeteer group run by her
local church.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be
a White man who grew up with
money and went to Harvard,”
Thede says. “But I think it’s evident
in my comedy that I have a differ-
ent perspective and, I would argue,
a more relatable perspective. I def-
initely don’t come from a place of
trying to punch down or talk down
to people in any way, and it’s really
important for me that I have a
sense of fairness in what I do. I just
think that comes from being raised
by decent people.”
Influenced by such comedic
touchstones as “ComicView,” “Sat-
urday Night Live” and “In Living
Color” — a program she still callsher “holy grail” — Thede joined
the campus sketch group Out Da
Box at Northwestern University
in Illinois and enrolled in the
conservatory program of the ven-
erated Chicago improv troupe the
Second City.
Over the next decade, Thede
grabbed writing and performing
jobs on such scattered TV en-
deavors as Ted Danson’s “Guy
Walks Into a Bar,” David Alan
Grier’s “Chocolate News” and
Frank Caliendo’s “Frank TV” —
often as the only Black woman in
the room. She also wrote for
awards shows and penned jokes
for the likes of Chris Rock, Kevin
Hart and Mike Epps. But she
always found time to perform
onstage in sketch groups, includ-
ing the all-Black woman troupe
Elite Delta Force 3, which served
as comedian Larry Wilmore’s in-
troduction to Thede’s underap-
preciated talents.
“When Robin was onstage, she
was just funny all the time,”
Wilmore says. “It made me think,
‘Man, this type of thing should be
on television.’ And this was in the
mid-aughts, I think? Nobody was
trying to do an all-Black-lady
sketch show back in those days.”
After a stint as the head writer
of “The Queen Latifah Show,”
Thede applied in 2014 for
Wilmore’s late-night Comedy
Central series “The Nightly Show.”
She was up for only a staff writer
position, Wilmore recalls. But af-
ter arriving for her interview
hauling a binder stuffed with
countless jokes, bits and other
ambitions, Thede walked away as
the first Black female head writer
in late-night history. When
Wilmore hosted the White House
correspondents’ dinner in 2016,
she also sealed her place as the
first Black woman to lead that
event’s writers’ room. And by
hosting “The Rundown” on BET
from 2017 to 2018, Thede became
the fourth Black woman to head-
line her own late-night show.
“From the beginning of televi-
sion until Robin Thede, no one
imagined a Black woman could”
be a head writer, says Black, who
believes Thede’s breakthrough
paved the way for her own writing
job on “Full Frontal With Saman-
tha Bee” and the launch of Amber
Ruffin’s talk show on Peacock. “If
you really think about going from
‘no one’s ever done this before’ to
‘now several women get to do it
because of the example that you
set,’ it really can’t be overstated
what a tightrope that is.”Thede uses clout to boost
Black women in Hollywood
T
hede says she got a call from
just one person the day “The
Rundown” was canceled in
July 2018: her friend Issa Rae, the
star and co-creator of HBO’s “In-
secure.” Skipping sympathy, Rae
promptly peppered Thede about
what was next. When Thede said
she had been shopping around an
idea for a high-concept sketch
show featuring all Black women,
Rae offered to board the project as
an executive producer and take it
to HBO as a part of her deal with
the network.
A year later, “A Black Lady
Sketch Show” was on the air.
While centering Black women’s
perspectives was the show’s foun-
dation, Thede also knew she
wanted the undertaking to be un-
deniably cinematic, complete
with carefully composed shots,
convincing visual effects and on-
location filming. In another break
from sketch show tradition, the
framing device featured in each
episode — interstitials about a
group of Black women surviving
the apocalypse — unfolded as a
serialized story.
“I knew I wanted to make a
cinematic narrative sketch show
for Black women with grounded
experiences in a magical reality,”
Thede explains. “So it’s really
important for me to hit all of
these things — characters that
you want to come back but also
narrative, because I’ve never
seen a ‘Black Mirror’-kind of
sketch show where there’s a full
beginning, middle, twist and
end.”DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR TBSERIK CARTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTINA THORPE/HBOFREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGESCLOCKWISE FROM TOP
LEFT: R obin Thede, seen in
Santa Monica last month. From
left, Skye Townsend, Ashley
Nicole Black, Thede and
Gabrielle Dennis star in
Season 3 of “A Black Lady
Sketch Show.” Thede and host
Larry Wilmore, seen in 2015,
when Thede was a writer on
Wilmore’s late-night Comedy
Central series, “The Nightly
Show.” Thede and Samantha
Bee talk during a D.C. party
after the White House
correspondents’ dinner in 2017.television
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