From creator/executive producer/writer/star Robin Thede and director Dime Davis, HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show is a hilarious new sketch comedy series with a core cast of black women – including Thede, Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis and Quinta Brunson – who tell an ongoing story as hyper-versions of themselves, stuck in a house together during an end-of-the-world event, while also taking on an array of varied characters. With a slew of celebrity guests and five to six sketches jam-packed into each half-hour, the episodes touch on everything from social norms, anxiety and religion to sex, dating and relationships.

While at the HBO portion of the Television Critics Association press Tour, Collider got the opportunity to sit down and chat 1-on-1 with the very funny Robin Thede to talk about her two decade long desire to make a show like this, why taking this show so seriously was important to her, how quickly this show went from pitch to on the air, the process of coming up with so many sketches, having a hand in designing the puppets for the opening of the series (and a background in puppets!), how much fun it was to work with the celebrity guest cast, her hope for Season 2, and what she’d like to do next.

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Image via HBO

Collider: I love that this show has puppets!

ROBIN THEDE: I know!

How awesome is that?

THEDE: So awesome! It’s a dream come true.

Where do they live now?

THEDE: They live at Jax Media. I should not say where they live. Someone might steal them. They live in a vault at Fort Knox. They are in a building with security, for sure. They’re going to live there until we figure out what to do with them, but they’re under lock and key.

Was there a process of designing them and seeing them in different stages?

THEDE: Yes. Viva La Puppet, this company that did them, has done some of the best puppets, and they do all sorts of different fabrications. They came and did a 360 shoot of the whole cast. They literally shot our hair in close ups, especially for Ashley’s hair because it’s so involved. Then, we decided what materials we would use. My hair is felt. Gabrielle’s is braided t-shirts, or something. They took so much care designing those puppets, and they’re so much fun. We wanted them a certain size because I wanted them to be able to interact with humans, but still look like puppets. If they were too small, then they couldn’t make out with people. So, we made the heads bigger than the bodies. There’s a lot of thought that went into it. We were like, “Oh, the cheekbones need to be more pronounced here. The eyes need to be more almond shaped.” Everything was down to the finest detail, including their make-up. They hand-painted my eye color because they were like, “We can’t find green that color.” They were amazing.

Did you have any idea that you would be spending so much time designing puppets on this show?

THEDE: Yes. It was my dream. I wanted to. That was some of the most fun. It was easy because it was a very relaxing process. They would just show you amazing things, and they would bring you samples, and you could touch everything and pick their skin color, and all of that fun stuff. Then, once we got to the day to shoot it, it was after principal photography, so I was able to direct the open. Dime [Davis] directed the whole series, expertly, but she was onto another show, so I directed the open. It was crazy, seeing them manipulate the puppets. I was like, “Okay, I don’t want to tell you how to do it, but it should be more like this.” And they were like, “No, it’s okay.” I told them about my puppet background. I was like, “You know, I know about puppets.” And they were like, “Great!” They really took me under their wing, and it was just a really fun collaboration. Only on a sketch show, can you do that kind of silly stuff.

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Image via HBO

How do you have a puppet background? Where did that come from?

THEDE: I used to tour the country with a Christian puppet group, when I was 13 to 16 years old, and we had folks from the Jim Henson School come out and teach us how to puppeteer. It’s very taxing work, by the way. It takes a lot of strength training. Your arm has to not run out of blood because [you constantly have your arm up]. It’s really fun. And I never lost that training. I used to do sketch shows with Wyatt Cenac, and we would incorporate a puppet into our sketches because he loves puppets just as much. He used them on The Daily Show, and I think he’s done it on Problem Areas, too. So, I have a long history of loving puppets and doing sketch.

How did this show happen? Was this something that you’d thought about for a long time?

THEDE: Yeah, I’ve been wanting to do this for two decades. I’ve been performing with black women and men, doing live shows, for years, and I thought it was just time. I think that black women, for so long, have been complaining about, “We need more representation on SNL, or on this show,” or whatever. Well, why are we complaining? Let’s just make our own. I wanted to do that, and it was really important to me because I know so many black women who are so funny and so talented. After The Rundown, my late night show, got canceled, Issa Rae called me and said, “Let’s make something together. What do you have?” I said,”I really want to do this sketch show, and I’ve been out pitching it. There was some interest.” She was like, “Bring it to HBO.” They bought it in the meeting and gave us six episodes. It really was that easy, which is insane. People are always like, “I was in development for three years.” And I’m like, “I had no development. I didn’t have a pilot. I just made a show.” Amy Gravitt, to her credit, was like, “We’re gonna get this on air fast because we know that sketch gets stale.” We started writing in January, and premiered in August, which for any network, truly is insane. We’re really lucky to have the partners that we have.

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Image via HBO

The fact that this is the first sketch comedy show written, directed and starting black women is completely insane.

THEDE: I know. That’s weird. I keep setting all of these firsts, in the last couple of years, in late night, and then as head writer in late night, and as the first black woman head writer for the White House Correspondents Dinner, and the fourth black woman to host a late night show, and now I’m the first black woman to create this. To be the first of so many things, I wish there were not still firsts happening in 2019, but at the same time, the more of them that we break down, the fewer there will be, and the more we’ll be accepted into the mainstream. With this show, I just want to show that black women can do different types of comedy. That’s really important to me. We get pigeonholed that we can only do one type of loud finger snap and eye-rolling kind of comedy, which has its own place and I laugh at, all the time, but there’s just so much more. There’s so much more that we do in this show, so many genres that we tackle, and so many characters that we play. The guest stars wanted to come in droves. I had to beat people off with a stick. People are like, “How did you get the guest stars?” And I’m like, “It wasn’t hard.” If SNL called all of the people that we called, they would do it. We just called all of the people that they didn’t, and they were all like, “Yes, great.” It was one day of work, for most of them, so that was fun.

Is there a pressure that comes with being the first one to do so many of these things, or is it just exciting?

THEDE: It’s more exciting than pressure, but there definitely is pressure. Especially with a title like A Black Lady Sketch Show, you wanna do black ladies proud, first and foremost, but you wanna make it right and you wanna leave space for other shows to come behind you. That’s what’s exciting about the possibility of creating something that can have a legacy in comedy. The older I get and the more I do in my career, the more altruistic my creative pitches for shows tend to be. The Rundown was a show with my name in the title, and I was the only one on it. Although I was giving back to the community, through the intersection of politics and pop culture and comedy and late night, at the same time, it was a very selfish venture, in that I was the only person on the show. The next thing I wanted to do was more of a gift than featuring just myself. I’m doing fine. I can do whatever I want. Well, not whatever I want. I can’t go be on Game of Thrones, mostly ‘cause it’s not on anymore.

There are many prequels coming.

THEDE: That’s true! Maybe they’ll put me in that. Come on HBO, I’m in the family! I just want something that will live beyond me, in whatever way. I don’t mean that I’m gonna die doing A Black Lady Sketch Show. I’m very young. But wouldn’t it be nice to do what Lorne Michaels has done, and create a legacy of something that’s so strong, and has made so many people so famous and so successful. That would be really cool. Why can’t we have something like that? Not in a separate way, just in an additional way. I have some really lofty talk, for the first season of a show, but that’s the way you gotta think, and then you just move on, if it doesn’t work out. You have to think about it like that because, if I don’t take it that seriously, then the show is not gonna be as excellent as I think it is. I think people will see things that they didn’t see the first time, upon second viewing. We tried to make the show as layered and as dynamic as we could, so that everybody will take away something different. I think everybody will have a different favorite sketch.

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Image via HBO

The thing that I’m really most impressed with is that these episodes are so jam packed, which means you had to have a lot of content. How did you come up with enough sketches, or are there many more that you still have?

THEDE: We wrote hundreds of sketches, and we shot like 45. We wrote hundreds of sketches in eight weeks. It was crazy. It’s six writers, plus my head writer and I. It’s just that the people who I hired were so passionate about the show and about the project. They were so good, and they write so fast. The thing about sketch is that it doesn’t get good, until a few rewrites in. It’s not like you write it once, and then shoot it and it’s on TV. Some things had eight, nine, or 12 rewrites ‘cause we had to get it to where it needed to be. There were a lot of long days and nights. We were in the writers’ room very, very late. Then, we shot the whole series in five weeks. It was crazy. I don’t know how we’re all alive. We’re a new show that was unproven, and we definitely didn’t have a Game of Thrones budget, so we had to do what we had to do. We knew what we were making could change comedy history and could be a new benchmark in sketch history. For us, it was really important to do that, in the right way, and have the show look really cinematic, and always have some left turn or unexpected thing happening in these sketches, so the pace feels good and so you don’t get bored.

Personally, I loved the whole dance proposal.

THEDE: Oh, my god, weren’t they amazing?! Chloe Arnold, our choreographer, choreographs for James Corden and a bunch of other stuff, too. She’s amazing. We shot that in half a day. It was crazy. We shot three sketches that day, and it was raining. Kudos to our color correction team, our editors, our cinematographer, the DP, lighting, and everybody. That sketch was a crazy day, but it was also so fun. We knew we wanted to do a great big musical number. How great is Jermaine Fowler in that sketch? And Sheryl Lee Ralph, Larry Wilmore and Quinta [Brunson], dancing to her heart’s content. It’s so funny. The great thing about HBO was that they really just let us go crazy with that kind of stuff. I can’t believe they let us do the stuff that we did. I really can’t. It was really fun.

Were there any guests that came in that most surprised or impressed you, with what they did?

THEDE: No, I’m never surprised by people who say yes to comedy because I also have a good eye. I knew Gina Torres was gonna be funny as fuck. I knew Angela Bassett was gonna be fantastic and funny. Patti LaBelle has always been funny. She had a sitcom. She’s fantastic, and I’ve worked with her before. Nobody surprised me because I knew that, given the opportunity, they would rise to it. Anybody who can do Emmy Award-winning television can definitely do a stupid sketch. And because it’s a narrative sketch series and it’s shot so cinematically, it’s not that far from their acting genre. It’s just that the words they’re saying are a little sillier. We wanted everybody to act earnestly, but say ridiculous things, depending on the sketch. It’s not a super broad sketch show, across the board. We do go broad, but then there are times when we’re a little more subtle or subliminal with it, or subversive, in some ways. So, nobody really surprised me. I was just so excited. I still can’t Angela Bassett showed up and was so game and so kind. Issa and I both wrote her notes and begged her to do the show, and she was like, “Yeah, fine. You don’t have to convince me. I wanna do this.” She looked me in my face and said lines to me. I’ll never forget that. I don’t get starstruck by a lot of people, but she and Patti LaBelle, this season, were my favorites, and they were the most fun to work with. Truly, what a dream. It was crazy ‘cause we paid them nothing. They just showed up and were so game. Based on the people involved and the network involved and the concept, they knew they wanted to be a part of it, same as our writers and cast.

What was it like to put together other writers and the director? Because so many people are going to be looking to you with this show, and it’s your voice, how was it to find other people to be able to translate that?

THEDE: I definitely handpicked the writers and our director, Dime Davis. Brittani Nichols came from Take My Wife and was on Transparent. Rae Sanni came from The Good Place and Rel. I met Akilah Green, when she was a writer on Chelsea Handler’s late night show. Holly Walker was my teacher at Second City, and I brought her on as a writer correspondent on The Nightly Show. Ashley Nicole Black is from Second City, as well. She and I have known each other for years, being in the late night circuit, when she was on Full Frontal. Amber Ruffin, who’s on Late Night with Seth Meyers, used to perform and I’ve known her forever. I performed improv and sketch with her, for years. It’s all people in my circle, or if the writers were new, I knew of them and their reputations, and I knew that they would be great on this show and that they would all bring something different. Just like the cast all brings different personality types and skill sets to the show, all of our writers have really unique voices, as well. That’s really fun, and that was part of my process. Dime, our director, is phenomenal. She came in and I told her, “Grounded experiences in a magical reality, shot cinematically,” and she was like, “I’m in.” She just came with so much vision and imagination for how to make the show look like what I was articulating to her, that I’m just blown away, every time I see it. It’s really amazing.

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So, what’s the next step in world domination?

THEDE: Season 2. People see you on camera and they expect to be working on eight different things. But because I’m the showrunner, I haven’t slept since January. I don’t have anything else in my brain, right now. There’s a feature that I wanna work on. There are some other TV ideas that I have. I would like to produce some other people’s projects while I continue to make my show. So, hopefully, fingers crossed, maybe we’ll get a Season 2. At the end of the day, I just wanna continue doing things that put under-served voices at the forefront, and where black women, especially, can be seen in three-dimensional comedy. It will always be comedy. I have no desire to do any drama, or dramadies. I don’t know even what that is. I truly don’t. I’m like, “What are you? Did you just not wanna write a bunch of jokes?” I think I’ll just continue to forge new paths in the comedy space. A year to the day, my late night show was canceled, and now, I’ve got this new show for HBO that’s truly the best thing that I’ve ever done in my career.

A Black Lady Sketch Show airs on Friday nights on HBO.