Just beyond the midway point of its first episode, The Varnell Hill Show delivers its thesis via Rachel Perkins, an exasperated studio exec played by Wendy Raquel Robinson. “Your show is stuck in the past and your ratings are down,” she tells Varnell (Tommy Davidson). “It’s dated, it’s stale, and nobody wants to tell you this to your face.” She’s referring to the fictional talk show Rachel’s been tasked with whipping into shape. She could just as easily say the same about the very Paramount+ spin-off she exists within.
Varnell, a 30-year late-night veteran with seemingly zero interest in what draws a modern-day viewer, rejects the notion. “I can admit that I’m old,” he tells his studio audience a few episodes later. “But that also means I’ve been doing this for a long time. That’s called longevity. That’s called staying power.” The distance between staying power and stale is the entire show. The alarming thing, across eight episodes, is that the series never lands on the thoughtful side of it. Its hero can’t perceive that the world has moved past him. Neither, it turns out, can the show around him.
If the name rings a remarkably faint bell, that’s by design. Varnell Hill began as a two-episode antagonist on Martin in 1993. Back then, Davidson’s high-energy charisma served him well as a slick, LA-polished talk-show host and crossover-famous foil against Martin Lawrence’s grittier Detroit everyman, there to ignite Martin Payne’s career aspirations and then vanish from the series for good. Over 30 years later, that single-arc personality is now the center of a workplace comedy set in Studio 69, the fictional home of Varnell’s eponymous show. (And yes, they briefly point to the studio’s name, because it’s sure to still earn giggles from a few stuck in deeply arrested development.) The series is built around an ensemble of comic ringers and a rotating carousel of guest stars; every storyline is built to question whether an aging host can survive a network that wants him modernized or gone. Unfortunately, the first season never makes a convincing argument for why Varnell deserves to stick around.
The show also reunites EP Martin Lawrence and former Martin showrunner Bentley Kyle Evans (whose credits also include The Jamie Foxx Show) as co-creators of what reads as a well-meaning sendup of the kind of multi-camera sitcom that made their careers in the ’90s. The flat bright wash of the lighting, the broad physicality and exaggerated character archetypes, the raucous, canned laughter liberally deployed at every attempt at a joke. It’s all rendered with real affection and fluency from two men who helped define a whole era of TV comedy. But a sendup implies distance from the thing it’s sending up, and Varnell Hill has none. It isn’t commenting on the ’90s multi-cam or saying anything new about late-night culture. It’s just a ’90s multi-cam, arriving 30 years too late.
Comedy has changed drastically since Martin signed off in 1997, and in nearly every aspect, Varnell Hill rejects the notion that it has any reason to keep up. The protest goes beyond throwaway jokes about pronouns and queerness—though there’s a steady drip of both, including the return of “PAUSE,” the memeified disclaimer meant to ward off any perceived homosexuality, which The Boondocks already lampooned as regressive back in 2010. It runs throughout the show’s most heavily revisited devices, crampant, unmotivated breaking of the fourth wall chief among them. The self-awareness gets most egregious whenever Rachel relaxes her own code-switching for the audience, rarely with any insight into why the switch from polish to barely concealed cheek is necessary. Black audiences who navigate corporate spaces already understand code-switching as a tool of protection against corporate racism. The (perfectly achievable) challenge is to take that experience and make it funny. Here it just produces cringeworthy, clunky dialogue signaling Rachel’s dormant ability to eviscerate someone when they say something unacceptable. But in those moments she, like most of the characters roaming Studio 69, gets flattened into a caricature.
This is a symptom of one of Varnell Hill‘s greatest tragedies: an otherwise capable cast, mostly left adrift with material that doesn’t showcase their strengths. Davidson built a career as a sharp-tongued, charismatic force; the very quality that made Varnell a fan favorite in the first place. Here, he’s dialed back so far he could be mistaken for simply playing himself, his muted register lost against a cast of near-cartoonish personalities. One of those big personalities is Kym Whitley, who plays Varnell’s assistant of the same name. Longtime fans know Whitley is capable of real precision; look no further than her performance in Master Of None‘s “Thanksgiving” opposite Angela Bassett. Varnell Hill seemingly squanders that potential by giving her volume over substance or any decent punchlines. Her clear effort to make do and have fun is admirable, but not even eagerness and decades of experience can rescue scripts as fundamentally weak as these.
What stings isn’t necessarily the incompetence, but what we lose in the face of something extremely rare: a room full of performers who shaped Black comedy across four decades, from sketch to sitcom to stand-up, all seated at the same table. These are the people who built the era the show is obviously nostalgic for and instead of doing something fresh and genuinely memorable with the opportunity, The Varnell Hill Show only asks them to reenact the worst version of it.
And yet. In the first episode, Varnell sits down with Kirk Franklin at the desk and, with the confidence of a real late-night vet, asks about his creative process. When Franklin starts walking him through how a song comes together, Varnell can’t help but riff along, catching the melody with the house band. For those few bars the show simply stops straining. There’s charisma here, and something almost refreshing: real reverence, one entertainer genuinely delighted to be in another’s presence. It’s the best thing in the whole first season, and it plays less like a scripted scene than like Tommy Davidson enjoying an afternoon in the host’s chair. And that is both a blessing and a problem. The moment works because Davidson, at a base level, knows how to connect with people, not because Varnell Hill is a character still worth following for eight whole episodes. You may be able to build an actual talk show around that. It’s much harder to build a viable sitcom around. Somewhere lost in the mass of generic back-and-forth and schtick is a genuinely interesting question: What does Varnell Hill become after 30 years at the center of a culture that reinvented itself around him? The Varnell Hill Show isn’t curious enough to ask.
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