Update: Jerrod Carmichael said in a Chelsea interview posted Thursday that he didn't support NBC's decision not to air the episode.
"What it says is you don't think that America is smart enough to handle real dialogue," Carmichael said on Chelsea. "And something that reflects real family conversations."
This story was originally published at 11:20 a.m.
Last night's episode of The Carmichael Show wasn't originally supposed to air this week. Following shootings this week in San Francisco and Alexandria, The Carmichael Show delayed an episode about mass shootings and their effects. Instead, NBC aired an episode of the sitcom that was originally slated for June 28.
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In the episode, "Shoot-Up-Able." Jerrod (Jerrod Carmichael) witnesses a mass shooting, in which four people died, including the shooter, according to The A.V. Club.
"These things happen, okay, unfortunately this is the society we live in," Jerrod tells Maxine (Amber Stevens West) in the episode. "Some places are just shoot-up-able."
The episode focuses more on how the shooting affects Jerrod than on the shooting itself, which isn't shown onscreen. "The family tries to get Jerrod to talk about his feelings about it," Carmichael told Entertainment Weekly of the episode in a May interview about the show's third season.
NBC hasn't revealed whether the episode will air at a later time.
Current events like mass shootings are never easy to address on TV, but it's vital that they're talked about on screen. In the first episode of the fifth season of Orange Is The New Black, there's a storyline that involves various COs naming plenty of recent mass shootings in the United States when trying to describe a potential active shooter at Litchfield. As Jerrod says, mass shootings are all too common in America, and we need to talk about them.
In the incidents this week that led to the episode's delay, GOP Congressman Steve Scalise, along with three others, was shot in Virginia, and a UPS employee in San Francisco killed three people, as well as himself, injuring an additional two people.
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