‘Reggie Dinkins’ & Erika Alexander Lead TV’s 22-Minute Comedy Reset
The ‘Living Single’ icon and serial scene stealer is back as the antidote to bad vibes
With the return of Euphoria to HBO last night, it’s a good time to lean into bad vibes on television. There may yet be some kind of happy ending in store for Rue and company, but for now it’s all about sex, drugs and mayhem — and despite the mixed reviews, a chance to bid a stressed-out farewell to the show that minted so many enormous stars.
But I’d like to propose a moment to celebrate something that feels way too rare on TV — straightforward laugh-a-minute comedy, with episodes that get in and out in 22 minutes. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve treasured NBC’s midseason comedy The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, which had a splashy launch after an NFL divisional playoff game in January and wraps up its 10-episode season tonight. It’s not only a gem, but the show also marks the long-awaited TV comedy return of ’90s icon Erika Alexander, who spent five seasons playing hard-charging attorney Maxine Shaw on Fox’s Living Single. On the influential Fox sitcom, Alexander’s silent reactions to her castmates’ most outlandish moments would often get as many laughs as the scripted jokes themselves.
That style of reaction shot, an opportunity to layer one laugh on top of another, evolved as the mockumentary-style sitcom emerged in the 2000s; you may now think of it as the Jim Halpert shot. And now, with The Fall and Rise and Reggie Dinkins wrapping up its first season on NBC, that knowing and comedic glance has come full circle to the woman who perfected it before Jim raised an eyebrow.
What makes it all the more astonishing is that Reggie Dinkins is Alexander’s first comedy as a series regular since Living Single, and before that, her breakout turn on The Cosby Show. She’s been plenty busy in the past few decades, from recurring roles on everything from Bosch and Insecure to her acclaimed supporting turn as Jeffrey Wright’s warm, wise love interest in American Fiction. But Reggie Dinkins does feel like a bit of a homecoming, she tells me.
“Here I am back on NBC — it’s big,” she says of the network that was home to The Cosby Show. “And then you get the satisfaction of people actually saying they like it and they think it’s funny.”
One of the many beautiful things about Reggie Dinkins is that Alexander’s character, Monica — the business manager and ex-wife of Tracy Morgan’s titular washed-out football player — gets to be as silly as everyone else. Created by 30 Rock veterans Robert Carlock and Sam Means, with Tina Fey as an executive producer, Reggie Dinkins has that familiar rat-a-tat pace and perfectly deployed cutaway jokes, and in its 10-episode first season has built an ensemble with just as much potential as the original 30 Rock crew.
Taking a somewhat convoluted premise — Daniel Radcliffe plays a disgraced documentarian trying to stage his own comeback by making a film about Reggie’s attempted return to the spotlight — Reggie Dinkins slowly emerges into a hybrid of a found family and workplace comedy, like Shrinking, but with a faster pace and a lot less talking about your feelings. And though Alexander’s Monica is often the voice of reason, she’s also likely to get roped into the chaos. Take the revival of her frenemy relationship with Heidi Gardner’s fellow WAG in the show’s fifth episode, and don’t miss her completely silent reaction to Gardner’s dig in that flashback red carpet interview.
“The show is about reinvention,” she says. “For me, that aligns very perfectly. I recognize myself inside of comedy very well, but it’s a different type of comedy. So I am trying to make something new, and yet I’m using all my old skillsets to do it.”
‘I Don’t Want to Play a Role Model’
Alexander knows better than most people how much impact a single television character can have. She’s actually got the data to prove it. Her production company, Color Farm Media, founded in 2017, commissioned a study to prove what they called the “Maxine Shaw Effect” — the phenomenon in which people, particularly Black women, were inspired to pursue professional careers because of Alexander’s character on Living Single. The results were striking — not only do people like Stacey Abrams and Ayanna Pressley say that Maxine inspired them, but 79 percent of Black women respondents said Maxine had motivated them in some way.
“I did that character so long ago, and then over the years, people started to grow up and tell me not only ‘I really think that’s funny’ but ‘I felt I could because of that character,’” Alexander says. Maxine lives on through the educational curriculum Alexander developed with Color Farm Media and the rewatch podcast Reliving Single, which Alexander co-hosts with her former costar Kim Coles. (Alexander says the show will hopefully return to recap the second season.)
But despite all of that, Alexander says that Maxine and her inspirational status are “none of my business,” particularly as an actor eager to go to work and become all kinds of people. “I don’t want to play a role model,” she says, pointing out that she just played a villain on the Apple sci-fi series Invasion. “I want to play a person that ends up being a role model only because the person was authentic.”
That ability to create an authentic person, even if with just a few lines of dialogue, has made Alexander an indispensable screen presence for decades, even when she has just a single scene or a few lines to make an impact. Take her one scene in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, playing what could be an anonymous cop character and spending most of the scene just silently reacting to Lil Rel Howrey — then landing one of the movie’s best jokes before the scene’s end.
As an actor for hire on a wide range of projects, Alexander describes herself as “a tool in someone else’s toolbox.” But as a self-described control freak, she also admits, “I don’t just want to be a hammer sometimes — I want to be the architect.” That’s part of the origin story of Color Farm, which backed the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble, the Reliving Single podcast, and the true-crime Audible Original Finding Tamika.
“We made a neo-noir ghost story,” Alexander says proudly of the award-winning project, about the disappearance of a 24-year-old Black woman in 2004. “Nobody believed that I could do that at the time. I’m glad I got a chance to work that muscle out.”
Her work at Color Farm continues, but she’s also happily back in someone else’s toolbox for Reggie Dinkins, challenging her comedy skills in ways she never could have imagined back on the Living Single set.
“Living Single felt like I was on stage — this feels like I’m in a kitchen which just happens to have cameras in it,” she says of the single-camera comedy, which mostly takes place in Reggie’s New Jersey mansion. With the faux-documentary cameras capable of following them anywhere, she says, “There are no rules. I don’t know what Tracy’s going to do — I’m waiting with bated breath sometimes.”
Reporting to set every day with Saturday Night Live veterans like Morgan and Bobby Moynihan, each of whom is capable of seemingly anything, Alexander says she and Radcliffe sometimes catch each other’s eyes to marvel at what they’re witnessing.
“Daniel and I get along very well because I think sometimes we look at each other like, ‘Mate, you all right?’ We don’t know what’s coming next.”
Right now, that’s literal. Reggie Dinkins has strong ratings — its premiere episode was the most-watched television comedy broadcast of the 2025-26 season — but has yet to be renewed for a second season. In the meantime, the cast group chat is going strong, with everyone wearing the custom necklaces that were gifts from Morgan; Alexander does an exceptional impression of the actor greeting people on the set, “Your first time you visit the set, you’re a visitor. The next time, you’re family.”
I tell Alexander I’ll do my best to spread the word and make that second season a reality, and she responds by describing the Reggie Dinkins team with a phrase she’d earlier used to describe her own work: “They come in peace.” She continues, “They’ve put a lot of time and energy into their craft, and they are very intentional in trying to share something in the world, the only way they can.”