DAVE (FX)

It's weird to consider Lil Dicky a rapper even though that is where his origins as a public figure begin, rapping for five to six minutes at a time over other rappers' instrumentals. He was very technically capable, occasionally funny and oddly interesting. I appreciated it for what it was but didn't think much of it.

Then things took off. A video went viral. He moved to LA. He signed a deal. He was managed by Scooter Braun. At this point the music had shifted into comedy sketches in song form and it was all much less enjoyable. Somehow a dude that made rap music for fun pivoted to a full time career making songs that parodied that very genre. These were songs that made it to radio and curated playlists, feats close to impossible for any new artists. It seemed insulting to anyone taking this seriously. National conversations about cultural appropriation and racial injustice as he played naive about his own success in interviews didn't help with optics, but that didn't stop his success. His fame grew. His music was successful and now he has a TV show. 

DAVE centers around Lil Dicky as a rapper whose career moves forward as outrageously quickly as it did in real life. It's also the least interesting part of the show. DAVE follows several characters – his girlfriend, his engineer, his hypeman and his manager – who make up quite the ensemble. Each characters are given emotional cruxes and sometimes even entire episodes dedicated to backstories. Those stories are funny and sweet and charming and technically all are tangential to the Dicky storyline. The show is much better than it has any right to be. And while there's several points to be made here about how and why this random white man got his own television show, the people involved really pulled it off.

There's so few half hour comedies on currently. Almost none of them reference any modern culture in any way. The fact that there haven't already been ten shows about the rap industry is an abomination. Almost none of those shows star people in their 20s. So I do appreciate this show's existence.

The finale puts on display all the pros and cons to the existence of someone like Lil Dicky. At one point Gator says, "Do you know how many people would kill for a record deal and you're about to waste it on some jokes?" It does a pretty decent job establishing what the criticism is. But the episode closes with him rapping for several minutes. Sure it's doing the same thing he did over those Drake instrumentals, but he's not that guy anymore. That's not what his music sounds like. That's not why he's famous. If that's supposed to be the closing argument to the why Lil Dicky debate, it's not an effective one.