The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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“T.G.S.” was a kind of cataclysm. Mor-

gan was riveting in the part, which

fixed a popular perception of him that

he has alternately relished and chafed

under ever since. “30 Rock” ended its

run in 2013, but people still call out the

name Tracy Jordan when they see Mor-

gan on the street.

In June, 2014, Morgan was in a limo

bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, headed

home after a standup date in Delaware,

with several other comedians—includ-

ing one of Morgan’s best and oldest

friends, James McNair, better known by

his stage name, Jimmy Mack—when a

Walmart tractor trailer slammed into

the vehicle. McNair, who was sixty-two,

died in the crash; Morgan fell into a

coma that lasted for eight days. When

he awoke, he had to relearn how to walk

and talk. He sued Walmart, and the

company settled. The terms are confiden-

tial, but Morgan has said that he now

has enough money that he no longer

needs to work. Even so, he has, if any-

thing, become more ambitious.

“Tracy was primed for a comeback,”

the actor and filmmaker Jordan Peele,

who is an executive producer on “The

Last O.G.,” told me. During his rehab,

Morgan watched a lot of Peele’s sketch-

comedy series “Key & Peele,” and

after he recovered he met with Peele,

who, at the time, was working on his

directorial début, “Get Out.” Morgan

and Peele came up with

the premise for “The Last

O.G.,” and began develop-

ing it for FX, which passed,

before TBS picked it up.

Although Tray’s return to

civilian life has echoes of

Morgan’s return to show

business after the highway

crash, the character can

be better understood as

a counterfactual exercise:

Tray is who Morgan might have been,

given a bad—or, given the details of

Morgan’s fairly tumultuous life, a

worse—break.

Morgan often speaks in maxims.

When I asked him whether he was ner-

vous about the new season of the show,

he said, “I don’t feel pressure—I apply

pressure.” He envisages a long future for

“The Last O.G.” in syndication, he told

me. “I want Nick at Nite,” he said. “Keep

all the trophies! I want Nick at Nite. I

want my grandkids to see this.” Some-

where near the middle of the word

“grandkids”—which he had protracted

into a lengthy and lavishly vowelled pro-

duction—he began to cry. The tears fell

freely; Morgan didn’t wipe them away.

“Any more questions?” he asked. We’d

been talking for maybe ten minutes.

“Or are you caught up in the rapture?

Soaking it all in?”

By the time the sun had dried the

lines of moisture from his face, Mor-

gan was shouting out to another crew

member about his recent diet: “I told

you—I been on some flounder shit for

the past four days!”

When I had Morgan’s attention again,

I asked whether he followed any method

in his acting. The trick is to “rest your

soul,” he said. “You wanna know how it

is to act? Rest your soul!”

He’d insisted, earlier, that I accept a

bottle of water from one of his assis-

tants (“Stay hydrated,” he’d said, gestur-

ing toward the sun), and that I accept

some help in cooling down. (“Put some

ice on his neck,” he’d told somebody.

Then, to me, as the ice was applied:

“Now tell me that shit don’t feel good.”)

He looked at me as if he were ready to

offer more assistance, this time of a spir-

itual kind.

“You know how to rest your soul?”

he asked. I didn’t, and I told him so.

“Take a breath,” he said. “You know how

to relax? Or did you forget?”

I had. “Sure you did. Relax.

If you’re around me, relax.”

Now he looked more deeply

into my eyes, despite my

effort to break the stare.

“Look at me. Relax.”

Then, diagnostically,

and a bit impatiently, he

said, “The problem with

you? You don’t know how

to keep it simple.” We’d

known each other for not quite half an

hour. He wasn’t wrong. “You compli-

cate your fucking life—with things. ”

He said the word “things” with ascetic

disdain. “Stop doing that.”

He called out to another crew mem-

ber, this time to bring over his wireless

speaker. He pressed a button on his

phone, and “Human Nature,” by Mi-

chael Jackson, came flooding out.

“Wanna hear me sing?” he asked. He

began yowling along, tacking his ver-

sions of Jackson’s famous grunts and

falsettos into the space between each

phrase: “If they say why, why, tell ’em

that it’s human nature! Why, why does

he do me that way?”

“

T

he Last O.G.” employs, then con-

travenes, the familiar beats of a

family sitcom. In an early episode, Tray

shows up at the fancy private school that

his son and his daughter, Shazad and

Amira, attend, and takes them to the

housing project where he and Shay grew

up. “Me and your mother had a proper

Brooklyn love story,” he says, before tell-

ing them about the time Shay threw a

brick through a police car’s windshield

to prove her love for him. (“And then

she turned around and said, ‘Fuck the

police, Tray,’” he recalls.) “I think it’s

time for me to take y’all back to where

y’all come from,” he says. He leads the

kids to a cemetery and points to a grassy

spot. “That’s where me and your mother

made you,” he says. “I can’t believe you

all had sex in a cemetery,” Amira replies.

“Let me tell you something, Amira,”

Tray says. “The cemetery is like the

ghetto itself, full of sadness and death.

But it’s also full of life.”

The scene is one instance of the show’s

directly borrowing from Morgan’s own

life. In “I Am the New Black,” a mem-

oir he published in 2009, he describes

how his father, Jimmy—a musician and

a Vietnam veteran who split with Mor-

gan’s mother, Alice, when Morgan was

six years old—took him for a walk

through East New York, in Brooklyn,

when Morgan was a teen-ager. Jimmy

took Tracy to the metal bleachers by the

side of the field at a local high school:

“You see these, son?” he asked.

“Yeah, Dad.”

“This is where I busted a nut inside your

mother and made you,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“We were right under here. I had your

mother doggy-style and gave it to her good too.

You came right out of me right here under

these stands, little man.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, son?”

“I really didn’t need to know that shit.”

“Well, it’s true. A man should know his roots.”

Morgan adds, “My dad taught me

how to tell a story.”

Morgan was born in 1968, and he

spent much of his childhood in the

Tompkins Houses, in Bedford-Stuyve-

sant.

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