Woke

It has charm, delightful actors, and an earnest appeal, but this series has a heavy hand with its messages, and the jokes aren't always sharp enough to lift the show to greatness. It's always dangerous when a show built around the supposed artistic talents of one individual actually shows us the art, and it usually falls flat: actors cast as extraordinary dancers can't dance, the poetry of so-called brilliant poets is drivel, and so on. So the viewer can and should be nervous when we catch peeks at Keef Knight's cartoon over his shoulders, and they're not so great. One panel shows a slice of bread and butter, with the caption underneath reading "Butter late than never." Really? This is the cartoon that has people approaching Knight on city sidewalks with starry eyes, that's popular enough to draw hundreds of fans to a comic-con panel event in the show's first episode? A weak pun on a cliche? Viewers may rightly suspect that they're in unreliable comedy hands.

Things don't really improve when objects begin coming to life around him to exhort him to live a more authentic life. It seems wasteful to cast comedy powerhouses like Nicole Byer and J.B. Smoove if you're going to give them material like Smoove's big line: "Make your mark." And get this: He's a marker! That is weak wordplay. There is definitely comedic hay to be made in the notion of a Black man who's radicalized by a personal trauma, but Woke doesn't find much of it. The scenes in which Knight pals around with his roommates Gunther (Blake Anderson, doing a riff on his Workaholics' character) and Clovis (T. Murph, scene stealer) have more natural charm and rhythm; one wishes that the show had stuck to the ordinary adventures of these three instead of trying to work Knight's awakening into the proceedings. As TV shows go, Woke is a pleasant-enough sitcom with a reach that exceeded its grasp.