Chappelle's Show Review

Chappelle and Brennan earn the S on density and nerve, not on volume. Twenty eight episodes exist, two of them seasons in any real sense, and the hit rate inside them is absurd. The news magazine parody about a blind Black white supremacist is a premise most writers rooms talk themselves out of by lunch, and the show plays it for a full segment without blinking.

Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories turns a secondhand anecdote into a two-hander with Chappelle's Rick James, and people quote it who have never seen the episode it comes from. Black Bush, the Racial Draft, the Playa Haters Ball, the Wayne Brady turn: each takes a thesis about race, celebrity or class and dramatizes it inside four minutes rather than announcing it.

The Television Academy nominates the show in its variety series and comedy writing categories in 2004, and the first season moves DVDs at a rate no television release had managed. The complaint is real and it belongs here. Sketch comedy is uneven by construction, some segments run well past their idea, and the third season never finishes, because Chappelle leaves a reported fifty million dollars on the table and goes to South Africa, later telling Oprah Winfrey that some of what he was making felt socially irresponsible to him.

Comedy Central airs the leftovers in 2006 as three Lost Episodes, with Donnell Rawlings and Charlie Murphy introducing material their star never signed off on. A grade this high on a body of work this small is a bet on peak over run. The peak is the highest sketch television has reached, and the walkaway is now inseparable from what the show means.