Larry Wilmore builds comedies that watch people behave rather than push them through plots, then hands them over to someone else's name. The Bernie Mac Show and Insecure are the proof, and the second is the one we rate highly.
Fi1m perspective
Insecure opens on two friends in their late twenties in Los Angeles and spends most of its energy on how they talk: to each other, to the men around them, and to the people at work who mean well and get it wrong. That is Larry Wilmore's habit, and it is older than Issa Rae's show by two decades. He writes comedies in which what people do in a room matters more than where the story is going, an approach he traces to French New Wave films and to reality television, which is not a pairing you hear from many sitcom writers.
He started as a stand-up and an actor in the 1980s and moved to writing in the 1990s, on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air among others. Then came the shows with his name on them. The PJs (1999), made with Eddie Murphy, was a prime-time animation. The Bernie Mac Show (2001) was the one that changed things: shot single-camera, built around behaviour rather than set-ups, and run on a principle he put to his star plainly. "I always said, Bernie, this is just the script. If you wanna change this, then do it." The network was less keen on the style than the critics were, and he left while the show was still doing well.
He was a writer and consulting producer on The Office from 2005 to 2007 and appeared on screen as Mr Brown; our review of that show does not single him out, and a writers' room is a room. He then spent the better part of a decade in front of the camera, as the Senior Black Correspondent on The Daily Show from 2006 to 2014 and hosting The Nightly Show in 2015 and 2016, delivering the material with the understatement it needed. He was also an executive producer on black-ish.
Insecure (2016), co-created with Rae, is where the method pays off best and it is the work of his we rate most highly. Our review found it sharp, warm and exact about how people talk, and thought the office scenes broader than the rest; that is the one place the old sitcom reflex shows through. What got us was the turn. Across forty-four episodes and five seasons the show became something closer to a drama with jokes, and by the later seasons we minded what happened to these two women far more than a half-hour comedy usually manages, because the writers had spent years letting them simply talk without steering them anywhere.
He has said he wanted Black comedies to be considered smart and not only funny, and the shows he started have mostly been remembered under someone else's name, Mac's or Rae's or Murphy's. That is partly the cost of telling your star the script is only the script. If you want to see what Wilmore does, watch Insecure, and watch the scenes between the two friends rather than the ones at work.
Biography
Larry Wilmore (born 30 October 1961) is an American actor, comedian, writer and producer from Los Angeles. He began his television career as a writer on series including In Living Color and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Wilmore created The Bernie Mac Show (2001–2006), for which he won an Emmy for writing the pilot. From 2005 to 2007 he was a consulting producer and writer on The Office, appearing in the series as Mr. Brown. He later served as a correspondent on The Daily Show (2006–2014) and hosted The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (2015–2016). He is co-creator of the series Insecure (2016–2021).
