a half-hour COmedy
created by randy mckinnon
CREATOR statement
“I took an ancestry test and found out I was Nigerian. I stared at the results for hours.
It should have felt like an answer, but instead it felt like a question I didn't know how to ask. What was I supposed to do with this information? Tell people? Change how I identified?
I felt insecure about sharing it – like I'd be pretending to claim something I hadn't earned, hadn't lived, hadn't understood. I was Black, yes. American, yes. But Nigerian? I'd never been to Africa. I didn't speak the language. I didn't know the culture beyond what I'd seen on screen or sampled in songs.
There was this ocean between my Blackness and my African roots, and I had no idea how to bridge it.
Then I went to Africa.
Not as research. Not for the show. Just... to see. To feel. To figure out what that ancestry test result actually meant in practice. But here's what hit me hardest: the jet lag. Not just the physical exhaustion of time zones, but the disorientation of being Black in a place where Blackness meant something completely different.
I had to confront how much I'd romanticized Africa from a distance, how much I didn't know, how much work it would take to truly connect.
In that fog, that in-between space of not quite here and not quite there, I found clarity. About who I'd been. Who I wanted to become. What it meant to honor roots I was just beginning to understand.
JET LAG was created from that feeling.
That beautiful, uncomfortable, hilarious, heartbreaking space between two worlds. It's the show I needed when I held that ancestry test in my hands and didn't know what to do next.
It's for every Black American who's wondered what "going back" actually means. It's for Africans tired of being mythologized by a diaspora that doesn't know them. It's about the music that connects us, the culture that divides us, and the work it takes to build bridges to connect us.
This isn't a show about having all the answers. It's about finally asking the right questions…”
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