Sets for a TV series do yeoman’s work in setting tone and mood — but they’re also lived in and familiar after a few episodes. The sets for a sketch comedy series? Those have to hit every mark immediately before the show jumps to the next set-up and location.
On “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” it was the job of production designers Michele Yu and Cindy Chao to create settings that spotlighted the heightened comedy or contributed to ridiculous(ly funny) worlds in themselves — and to do it about 40 times a season.
The number of sketches that Yu and Chao worked on during Season 4 of the Robin Thede-led HBO comedy was actually higher; about 10 sketches get cut over the course of production each season. What stayed in was as wide-ranging as an ancient desert town, a Victorian mansion, a church that could double as a basketball court, a high-end hotel, and everything from a celebrity mansion to a podcast studio. Unlike a variety series like “Saturday Night Live” with a number of stages at its disposal, “A Black Lady Sketch Show” relied primarily on dressing locations to serve multiple purposes.
“A common thing to do when scouting is to try and find locations that can accommodate varied looks, so that we are shooting a cluster of multiple sketches in one location,” Chao and Yu told IndieWire via email. “Oftentimes, the locations were empty and we needed to build in modifications, installing wall plugs, painting and/or wallpapering, doing greens work, et cetera.”
Yu and Chao brought experience from the independent film world, where they were no strangers to the necessity of getting creative with the limitations of a space, using every inch of it, and moving very quickly. That inventive ethos leads to a kind of joyous absurdity in some of the “Black Lady Sketch Show” spaces, like the supernatural riff on music battle show “Verzuz,” here called “Curzuz.”
“We leaned into a witchy glam aesthetic with a palette of dark blues, deep violets, and lots of black in different textures, highlighted with chrome metallics. Post supervisor Gwyn Martin-Morris collaborated with us to create moody visuals on the LED screens, which provided the perfect spooky landscape collage for the battle. The screens featured slow swirling purple smoke and creepy images of a full moon with swaying trees that played continuously on a loop. It was all very hypnotic and complemented the heavy beats and booty shakin’ tracks,” Yu and Chao said. “So much of this set was a dance between light, smoke, shapes, and silhouettes. It started as the dark, empty corner of a soundstage and turned into something magical.”
Collaboration is core to how Chao and Yu are able to build out each and every one of the spaces, whether they’re more ambitious or meant to look more anodyne. The series had an extended pre-production period, with Thede, director Bridget Stokes, DP Kevin Atkinson and other department heads meeting each Friday to present ideas and shape the look and feel of each sketch. They’d go for hours, prepping a dozen sketches at a time in the five or so weeks leading up to the start of shooting. This is, according to Chao and Yu, wildly different from the norm.
“It’s kind of a feature-style approach that effectively allows us to see the big picture before we start any of our design process,” the production designers said. “At each of these meetings, which tended to run for hours, we’d talk in length about the production design and present color palettes, ideas about textures and patterns and how they’d interact with wardrobe, what style of furnishings to incorporate, and any ideas we wanted to pitch to fill in backstory for our characters. We’d also talk about shots, blocking, and ideas for lighting and any SFX or VFX needs. Everyone comes out of those meetings knowing exactly what the plan is for each sketch.”
Having scripts in hand for the entire series at the top of their design process also helped Chao and Yu be both fast and thorough when it came to transforming locations, often with only a day to prepare. Despite the lightning-fast turnarounds, both Yu and Chao said that “the defining feature of the latter seasons of ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’ has been that it has had the most organized and methodical pre-production period of any show we’ve worked on.”
Still, the rare times the production design team had to pivot to a Plan B has led to some of the most fun and vibrant sets on Season 4. For “Girls Trippin’” a music video set in the cabin of an airplane where almost every conceivable rule of the girls trip (and air safety) gets broken. Chao and Yu originally set out to look for an airplane set that “A Black Lady Sketch Show” could shoot in, with the kind of walls that could fly out (in the moveable set sense; not the airplane sense) to allow for group choreography and sweeping camera movement. But all of those were booked. So they decided to build the set themselves.
“We were using the same small soundstage to shoot three other sketches, including one that needed to land in the same spot where ‘Girls Trippin’’ would be built. And we had maybe two or three days to shoot all those sketches out, maybe a day on either end to prep and strike. So even with a build on a stage, we were still running like a locations-based show — we were in and out of there,” Chao and Yu said.
The production design team worked with Standard Scenery to build out the airplane cabin with the kind of deep blue lighting and purple-pink interior that Jet Blue wishes it could get away with, as well as a set of lightbox signs that hammer (pun intended) the various activities that the girls get up to. “Those are the kinds of set pieces that are scripted, but might refine a bit as we get closer to shooting and new ideas come into play, so Robin or a writer would be coming up with these hilarious, dirty phrases and we’d be sending them to get made,” Yu and Chao said.
“A Black Lady Sketch Show” had to balance an intense level of planning with openness to improvisation for every single one of their sets over the course of its four-season run. While they’re rarely meant to be the viewer’s focus, Yu and Chao treat each sketch as an exercise in world-building: coming up with backstories, seeding little easter eggs for the cast to riff off of, and making the necessary color, texture, and architectural choices to suggest how (un)real each world they build really is.
“What we’re really doing is providing a playground for the actors to come in and go wild, to create magic together. It’s always amazing to watch our sets come alive with the performances,” Yu and Chao said.
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