watch mind your language season 1 episode 1

But neither of them makes it Simon can’t pass a background check, and Kareme discovers that astronomers are racist.

In the pilot, Kareme and Simon ditch their jobs at Rent-T-Own to pursue higher ambitions: Kareme dreams of a career in astronomy, and Simon yearns for the white-collar life. The first season of “South Side” can certainly stand on its own. Such gleeful specificity is a rarity, and so, after the first seasons of “South Side” and “Sherman’s Showcase,” fans steeled themselves for the shows to enter the hallowed bin of single-season greats. You either get the references-to primping culture, to funeral culture-or you don’t. Bashir and Riddle are straight-up comedy and TV geeks: the same month they blessed us with “South Side,” the duo put out “Sherman’s Showcase,” on IFC, a loving and layered sendup of seventies variety shows.Īlthough Riddle-Salahuddin productions are entertaining to viewers of any race, make no mistake-the fun and the farce are pitched to please Black American audiences. But the show débuted, in 2019, on Comedy Central, where it joined a slate of excellent and underwatched indie-ish sitcoms, including “Workaholics,” “Detroiters,” and “The Other Two.” (“The Other Two” has also moved to HBO Max.) In recent years, Comedy Central has become an incubator for joke auteurs-willful classicists who prize, above all else, eliciting belly laughs. “South Side” is now an HBO Max original its second season premièred on the platform last month. The tang of the show’s critique brings to mind other satires of workplace culture, such as “Reno 911” and the genre-shifter “The Office.” But the creators of “South Side”-Salahuddin, his brother, Bashir, and Bashir’s writing partner, Diallo Riddle-cast a wider net: they have crafted a fun-house portrait of Black life in the Second City. “South Side” derives a great deal of its Black black humor from the encounters between its protagonists and the delinquent renters: the physical aspect of product repossession allows for so much slapstick.

Its name, a parody of Rent-A-Center, is the bitter, primal joke of the show: a retail center where the true product is debt. Simon (Sultan Salahuddin) and Kareme (Kareme Young) are best friends who grudgingly clock in at Rent-T-Own, a shady furniture-and-appliance-rental service. I suppose it’s accurate to refer to “South Side,” a series set in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, as a workplace comedy.

Watch mind your language season 1 episode 1