‘A Black Lady Sketch Show,’ ‘Rutherford Falls,’ and Whitney Houston’s Greatest Album

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes Robin Thede, creator and star of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show” to talk about the groundbreaking show’s cinematic look and multi-layered approach to comedy. Then “Rutherford Falls” co-creator Sierra Teller Ornelas joins us to discuss some of the absurd situations she has found herself in as a Native American that have found their way into the show. And finally, for The Treat, culture critic Gerrick Kennedy talks about the impact of Whitney Houston’s 1998 album “My Love is Your Love.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.6	Welcome to The Treatment, the Home Edition.
0:16.3	I'm Elvis Mitchell.
0:17.4	My guest, Robin Thede, who has done something that we've been waiting to see on HBO for a long time.
0:22.5	We've gone from seeing Tracy Elman play Black women to seeing Black women play Black women, finally, on the Black Lady Sketch Show in his third season.
0:31.1	Robin, there's so many things that I love picking up on in it, like the sort of the constant referral to 227, from just seeing it played out in a sketch to seeing a 227 lunchbox on one of the sets.
0:42.7	I mean, that's pretty wonderful stuff.
0:44.7	Thank you.
0:45.7	There's a sort of multiverse Easter egg hunt sort of thing happening, and that's going to culminate in season three, that
0:55.5	people who watch individual sketches wouldn't really notice, but anyone who watches the
0:59.6	episodes start to finish, I hope will. The 227 through line is only one of hundreds.
1:06.5	But yeah, we do definitely like to pay homage to black women in comedy who came before us.
1:13.4	There's so much subtextual stuff, like all this stuff in the first season where we were
1:17.7	constantly seeing a Time magazine cover about the apocalypse. And the show in this way feels like
1:24.6	it's in season three, that same time cover. Yes, that's why I was bringing it up. I mean, I love seeing that because I thought about that in this way, the show in this way feels like it's in season three that same time cover yes that's why i was bringing
1:27.9	it up i mean i love seeing that because in that i thought about that in this way the show felt
1:32.0	like it was kind of predicting what we were going to be going through in the last couple of years
1:35.2	yeah that was intentional i mean people were calling me a witch or a psychic or something first
1:40.6	season because we were four black women quarantining in a house at the end of the
1:45.3	world. But I just figured back then Trump was president and of course he was going to kill us.
1:51.2	So I just figured he would cause that. And, you know, I can't fault him for COVID, but I can
1:59.2	fault him for the response and why we all had to quarantine. But yeah, I think that I can't fault him for COVID, but I can fault him for the response and why we all had to quarantine.
	...

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