In Janelle James: How Romantic, the Emmy-nominated actor and comedian gets right into it.
The hour opens with James’s take on American politics, from the physical attractiveness (or the lack thereof, as the case may be) of the GOP’s key operators to more pointed, cross-party digs at, say, Hunter Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell. (“He died four times. He died so much, it just became a thing.”) There isn’t much about Washington that she doesn’t find “weird.” (The special may have gone a little differently had she taped it after this month’s midterm elections.)
“The show is written in four chunks,” James explains over a Zoom call from Los Angeles on November 2. “My political segment, my fame segment, my dating segment, and a segment on violence—and I can switch them around at will. A day before taping, I thought, I’m going to open on politics and get that out of the way. On the road, actually, I was ending with it.”
James says she developed How Romantic over about 70 sets, with a break last year to film Season 6 of the hit television series Abbott Elementary, in which James plays the endlessly chaotic school principal Ava Coleman. “I built the hour somewhat in that first stretch,” she says. “It marinated in my brain when we went back to shooting. Then when we were on hiatus again, I went on a little mini tour, multiple weekends, Thursday to Sunday, often with double shows.”
James stresses that How Romantic is no “Abbott revue.” “This special is an introduction for a lot of people to me as a stand-up,” she says. A stand-up and, well, a real, raw person behind the outsized television personality. “I start the show out sitting down on purpose, so people get a sense of what the vibe is going to be. I’m not really loud. I’m not really doing act-outs. I don’t really have props. This is me performing as myself, and this is how it’s going to go,” she says. “Those who’ve been following me as a comedian since I started are like, ‘People have no idea how dark you are.’”
