When the first episode of Woke begins, cartoonist Keith Knight (New Girl’s Lamorne Morris) is on top of the world. His comic strip Toast N’ Butter, featuring an anthropomorphic breakfast food duo, is about to be nationally syndicated. He’s the featured guest at an upcoming comic-con in San Francisco, where he lives. He’s about to move out of the apartment he shares with a pair of slacker roommates and into a nice house with his beautiful lawyer girlfriend. When local journalist Ayana (Sasheer Zamata) stops him at his favorite comics shop and praises his strip for its subtle commentary on racial politics, he stops her. He doesn’t want the obligation of representing all Black people in his art. He just wants to “keep it light.”
And then he’s tackled and handcuffed by aggressive cops while innocently posting flyers for his comic-con appearance, mistaken for a robbery suspect who of course looks nothing like him. Although he’s not ignorant of the prevalence of racism in America, he never thought something like that would happen to him, and it shatters his entire world. Keith starts hearing inanimate objects talk to him, berating him for his apathy and his willingness to have his art co-opted by corporate interests. He finally has a full-on breakdown onstage during his comic-con appearance, trashing his own creations and torpedoing his career in the process.
It’s an extreme and sometimes off-putting introduction to what quickly shifts into a more low-key comedy about the struggles of a Black creator in the Bay Area, and the real-life Knight, who co-created the show with Marshall Todd, pushes his namesake a little too far in order to make a relatively basic point. The show’s Keith doesn’t need to have a mental breakdown to become aware of societal inequality, and the apparent equation of mental illness and social responsibility is a little disingenuous.
Luckily, the show tones down the presence of the talking objects in subsequent episodes, without losing its sharply observed social commentary. Keith still hears voices from trashcans and paper bags and his own ever-present marker (voiced by J.B. Smoove), but it’s more of a stylistic choice for the show than a representation of a man losing his grip on reality.
There’s a lot to like about Woke, which is inspired by Knight’s autobiographical comics (including long-running strips The K Chronicles and The Knight Life), and it settles into an entertaining groove pretty quickly, with a sitcom-style ensemble including Keith, Ayana, Keith’s roommates Clovis (T. Murph) and Gunther (Workaholics’ Blake Anderson), and Keith’s new artist love interest Adrienne (iZombie’s Rose McIver). Once Keith tanks his chances at syndication success with Toast N’ Butter, he struggles to reinvent himself as a socially conscious artist, not entirely comfortable in Ayana’s world of activism or in Adrienne’s world of high art, but unable to just sit back and let the easy money roll in, as Clovis suggests he should. Instead, he works to combine his audience-friendly cartoon style with a more explicitly political point of view, with mixed results.
He also navigates relationship difficulties and works to make ends meet, in more familiar kinds of storylines. As the eight-episode season goes on, the supporting characters get their own subplots as well, and the central ensemble has fun, relaxed chemistry. The female characters start out as plot devices for Keith to expand his horizons in various directions, but Zamata and McIver make them vibrant and memorable right away, and the show later develops deeper personalities for them while retaining their humor. Stand-up comedian Murph gets the showiest role as the brash, womanizing Clovis, but he eventually shows a vulnerable side as well.
Throughout, various celebrities lend their voices to the objects that Keith hears talking to him, and it’s an amusing device, if never quite as effective a metaphor for political awareness as the creators seem to think it is. The likable Morris holds the show together as an insecure but well-intentioned creative type who’s still finding his voice, and while Keith is the show’s most subdued character (even when he thinks he’s going crazy), Morris is never overwhelmed by the wackier supporting performances. As in fellow Hulu comedies Shrill and Ramy, both based on the real-life experiences of their artist creators, Woke sometimes shifts awkwardly from the personal to the goofy, but it has more genuine laughs than a lot of overly serious streaming TV “comedies.”
Knight has decades of experience delivering social commentary in a funny, easy to digest format, and he makes a strong transition to another medium here. Woke may not give viewers the kind of jarring wake-up call that its main character experiences in that first episode, but it provides thoughtful analysis along with humor, and that’s probably more effective in the long run.
Starring Lamorne Morris, T. Murph, Blake Anderson, Sasheer Zamata and the voice of J.B. Smoove, the eight-episode first season of Woke premieres Wednesday, Sept. 9 on Hulu.
September 05, 2020 at 04:45AM
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REVIEW: Woke Is a Funny Take on the Struggle Between Art and Activism - CBR - Comic Book Resources
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