LOS ANGELES, CA.- “He has kaleidoscope vision that impairs his precision. … ”
It’s November 2020, and Diallo Riddle and his creative team are crafting material for the second season of “Sherman’s Showcase,” the musical comedy series he created with his writing partner and co-star, Bashir Salahuddin. They are punching up the lyrics to “Diamond Eyes,” a James Bond-spoofing theme song about a movie villain with a few too many quirks.
The dozen comedy writers and staffers, seated 6 feet apart from one another beneath a large tent erected in a Santa Monica, California, parking lot — a COVID-19-compliant writers’ room — are shouting out suggestions that are muffled by face masks. They giggle and clap as the ideas grow increasingly ridiculous.
“His jawbone is glass and he has leather thighs … ”
This kind of unabashed goofing and pop culture deep-diving are what endeared audiences and critics to “Sherman’s Showcase” when it debuted on IFC in July 2019. The show presents a parallel universe in which fictitious media mogul Sherman McDaniels, played by Salahuddin, has for decades hosted a musical variety show that rivals “Soul Train.”
Sherman, an Afro-sporting megalomaniac, spends each episode paying tribute to himself — rolling snippets of his low-budget films and TV shows, plugging products and showing highlights of his past musical guests (parodies of artists such as Mary J. Blige, Prince and Blondie). A Black History Month special, which aired in June 2020 (yes, the summer airdate was part of the gag), further solidified Riddle and Salahuddin’s comedic brand of jubilantly sending up and celebrating Black culture.
More than three years after it debuted, “Sherman’s” is finally back, returning to a world that, though well past the direst days of the pandemic, could still very much use a laugh or two. Although COVID-19-related issues were primarily responsible for the show’s long hiatus, Season 2 — which premiered Wednesday with two episodes on IFC and AMC+ — is treating the intervening years as if they never happened.
Preferring to focus on the fabled world of Sherman, as part of their overall goal to make a show that feels timeless, Riddle and Salahuddin stuck to their Season 1 approach of almost entirely eschewing real-world issues. (They save their more topical humor for their other joint venture, the HBO Max sitcom “South Side.”) The entire new season of “Sherman’s” includes only one Easter-egg allusion to COVID-19.
Of course, when it came to actually making the episodes, the real world kept getting in the way.
On that November afternoon in 2020, the day’s to-do list included dissecting popular ’90s hip-hop songs for a posse-cut bit and working out the kinks in a Jodeci-inspired R&B jam. COVID-19 protocols had limited studio time, so some songs had no vocals yet. When there were no instrumental tracks, Riddle created beats by banging his hands on the table and simulated horns with his mouth. The season’s final writing session was scheduled for the next day.
“We’re 100% shooting in the first three weeks of February,” Riddle said energetically as the writers started to break for lunch. His declaration was partially correct — if you add a year.
‘If You Know, You Know’
Riddle and Salahuddin met while attending Harvard University in the 1990s and honed their writing skills working at “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”
They began conceiving “Sherman’s Showcase” because they wanted to create a vehicle for songs they had written that didn’t suit the talk show. After they saw the Talking Heads-inspired episode of the IFC mockumentary series “Documentary Now!,” a comedic musical spoof seemed like the perfect solution.
Riddle likes to think of “Sherman’s” as “silliness for smart people,” citing “In Living Color,” Robert Townsend’s “Partners in Crime” specials and “The Muppet Show” as inspirations.
To make what they called their “pseudo time capsule,” they mash up the wide variety of pop culture passions they cultivated in their formative years — “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” Marvin Gaye classics, Transformer action figures — with their music nerd proclivities and zeal for exploring Black history. No reference is too niche, whether it’s an alternative version of Berry Gordy’s 1985 karate comedy, “The Last Dragon,” that is sympathetic to the film’s bad guy, Sho’nuff, or a take on Washington, D.C.’s go-go music.
“Where can we go where no Black person has ever gone before?” Riddle said in a March video interview. “That’s so important to the mission of ‘Sherman’s.’ If it’s something that we haven’t seen before with people of color, chances are it’s something our audience hasn’t either.”
John Legend, an executive producer, said the duo’s eagerness to lean into their eccentricities is the key to the show’s appeal.
“It’s just so weird and funny,” he said in a video interview. “The references are so specific and have such ‘if you know, you know’ vibes.”
It’s a formula that, anchored by Salahuddin’s sly, smooth-as-silk performance as Sherman, landed the show on many best-of lists at the end of 2019. It was renewed for a second season in June 2020, and they began working on material four months later.
For eight weeks, the writers worked wrapped in coats and blankets beneath the tent, at folding tables topped with boxes of tissues and containers of antibacterial hand gel. Amid the constant Los Angeles hum of leaf blowers, garbage trucks and planes flying in and out of Los Angeles International Airport, they met their goal of finishing writing the season in November.
But a January 2021 spike in Los Angeles County’s COVID-19 cases and a subsequent round of restrictions delayed shooting. By March, some pandemic protocols had eased and vaccinations had become more widespread. But by then, Riddle and Salahuddin were in Chicago filming the second season of “South Side.”
Salahuddin knew the heartbreak of having a show become a pandemic casualty. He was a regular on Netflix’s period wrestling comedy “GLOW,” which was abruptly canceled in October 2020 during filming for a planned fourth and final season. He never feared such a fate would befall “Sherman’s Showcase” despite the forced hiatus, he said, because AMC Networks, the parent company of IFC, remained enthusiastic throughout the delays. “Every month we’d get an email talking about: ‘We should get this thing going again,’” he said.
The creators’ affection for the show never wavered either. They treasure it as a potential venue for nearly any offbeat idea that might pop into their heads while they are, say, in the shower or stuck in LA traffic.
“We actually have a platform where a song that I love can get translated into something that I get to perform,” Salahuddin said. “We get to have a lot of wish fulfillment.”
It’s also a family affair. A cluster of Riddle’s and Salahuddin’s relatives work on-screen and off, including the show’s choreographer, Brittany Riddle, and animator, Songe Riddle — Diallo Riddle’s wife and nephew — as well as Salahuddin’s sister, Zuri, who writes, acts and sings.
“The show feels like a scrapbook of my life,” Riddle said. “It’s like I get to go to an amazing costume party with my best friends.”
A Million Hoops
When Riddle and Salahuddin finally returned to their year-old Season 2 scripts, in the fall of 2021, they realized they had a slew of changes to make because some ideas felt stale; others would be impossible to pull off under COVID-19 protocols.
“We had to jump through a million hoops,” Riddle said. “It costs more to shoot during COVID, so some things that would’ve required more elaborate sets to be built, we had to walk away from.” (They declined to share cost specifics.)
The restrictions also limited how many people could appear within scenes. And celebrity cameos, which in the first season included appearances by the likes of Quincy Jones, Mario Van Peebles and Common, were harder to book.
“Some people didn’t want to travel, even in ’22, so that hit us hard,” Riddle said.
The production also had to find roomier soundstages that allowed for social distancing, necessitating a move from Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb that is the butt of a running joke on the show, to a different studio in the nearby neighborhood of Pacoima.
A February visit to the new soundstage found the crew wearing transparent face shields and masks as they worked on an assortment of whimsical settings. They assembled a mock department store set and lit the circular platform where the Showcase Dancers perform, before turning their attention to the hull of an emerging spaceship.
“Within these four walls, we can transport viewers to several different countries and even outer space,” said art director Natalie Groce, who is responsible for bringing the creators’ fantastical ideas to life. “Sometimes we’ll have to whip up something on the fly, like an origami hat for a sea gull. It’s a little crafty, never stagnant and constantly evolving.”
As performers arrived on the lot, they reported to the outdoor rapid-testing tent before heading into a wardrobe department filled with dashikis, patchwork embroidered top hats and platform boots a la P-Funk. (Ariyela Wald-Cohain, the costume designer, earned the show its sole Emmy so far for the Black History Month special.) Out of about 150 cast and crew members, only one person tested positive for COVID-19 during the show’s four-week shoot.
The extra effort and occasional setbacks don’t show in the finished product; the new season finds the Shermasphere recognizably intact and as mirthfully metatextual as ever. The show’s nonlinear, nostalgia-based format proved to be its greatest asset in weathering the three-year break.
“Because it’s not a narrative show — even taking the long gap in between — we didn’t have to pick up with characters in any particular place,” Riddle said. “We got to come in and meet the characters wherever we wanted them to be.”
That creative freedom allowed them to work in a swashbuckling subplot in which Sherman’s beleaguered producer, Dutch Shepherd (played by Riddle), takes the showcase on the road to Africa. A different episode includes an animated sketch that resembles an eight-bit video game. The latest songs chart new genre territory, too, including an Afrobeat bop, a trap nursery rhyme and a post-punk anthem. The creators also managed to secure some cameos after all, including Issa Rae and Chance the Rapper.
As for that “Diamond Eyes” idea conceived two years ago, the number made it into a scene in which Legend, playing a 007-wannabe named Agent 187, prowls through a schlocky spy-flick trailer.
Reflecting on the pandemic hiccups during a final joint video interview, in September, Salahuddin had an easy time putting the last two years into perspective: “I just think about the 20 years that we couldn’t do our own stuff, all those nights and days working for other people’s shows.”
Riddle said that “some of the challenges of shooting during COVID actually made some things better.”
“I remember one day in particular,” he continued. “My wife was in the driveway of our house practicing with dancers with masks on, our kids were in one room listening to some of the roughs of the music that Bashir and I had recorded, and I was up in my room reading over a script the night before we were shooting something.”
“We made some miracles happen,” he said, referring to the “Sherman’s” cast and crew as a whole. “And I think that sort of closeness made us feel like more of a family.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
