Do yourself a favor and kick off the holiday TV season not with heavy drama or days-long binges, but with Netflix's potently excellent Astronomy Club: The Sketch Show.
From executive producer Kenya Barris and sketch comedy vet Daniel Powell (I Think You Should Leave, Inside Amy Schumer), Astronomy Club is a breezy six episodes of half sketch show, half faux reality show of the cast living together while ostensibly making the show.
It's a fun way to get to know this top-tier UCB talent, even as heightened reality personas, in a cast that never shows even the slightest trace of a weak link. The team — Shawtane Bowen, Jonathan Braylock, Ray Cordova, Caroline Martin, Jerah Milligan, Monique Moses, Keisha Zollar, and James III — has been performing together since 2014, including a digital series at Comedy Central.
Sketch is one of the rarer forms of televised comedy. Standup specials now release regularly and improv is woven into most sitcoms behind the scenes. A single episode of Astronomy Club or I Think You Should Leave or a weekly Saturday Night Live takes intense plotting and a wealth of entirely different, original ideas before it takes off. This is exactly why sketch is so much less prevalent, and why it hits so hard when of this caliber.
Among the dozens of deranged and delightful premises are sketches about a boy whose parents encourage him to watch only black porn, a support group for fictional characters shoved into the "Magical Negro" trope, Robin Hood and Mary Poppins having to answer for why they treat white and black people differently, and both Victorian and medieval spins on modern blackness including the phrase "a gaggle of thots."
A teenage boy has to have an adult conversation with his parents about watching porn — white porn.
Image: Lara Solanki/Netflix
Barris has said that he finds universality in specificity; Astronomy Club has cheeky jokes about a "white edit" of the show, but no intent or need to explain itself to nonblack audiences. If you get a joke, you get it, and if you don't, you'll learn, and you'll laugh a whole damn lot in the process. An ASMR award broadcast and game show "What You Shoulda" (in which male participants can win 100 million dollars if they just don't buzz in telling women what to do) are just as niche, and the show as a whole benefits from it. Sketch thrives in hyperspecific scenarios — think SNL's "Diner Lobster" or the enduring weirdness of Monty Python.
After a couple episodes, the brilliant sketches aren't all that keeps you in. Astronomy Club's reality show counterpart grows increasingly silly (Monique and James' birthday is a highlight). It's easy to grow invested in the cast, and this is a gift unto itself. The moment episode 6 ends, there are the immortalized YouTube sketches, the group's website, the opportunities to catch up on their individual work after appreciating their capacity to create as well as perform. There's enough good comedy out there that anyone with a TV deal could phone it in, but to this group that was clearly never an option. The finished product, in all its glorious eccentricity, is out of this world.
How to watch: Astronomy Club is now streaming on Netflix.
