Tracy Morgan Is a Survivor. And ‘a Better Man Now.’

Tracy Morgan doesn’t go anywhere quietly. Even on a morning in August, when he was called to the set of his new TBS comedy, “The Last O.G.,” two blocks from the trailer where he was being fitted in the fake cornrows of his character, Tray, he had to arrive with emphasis.

The message he had for his audience was simple: Tracy Morgan is back.

As he had told me earlier that morning, while he sat at a folding table and waited to film a scene at the nearby Gowanus Houses: “This show’s about redemption. It’s about getting second chances. I believe everyone deserves one.”

Four years ago, it seemed unthinkable that Morgan, the 49-year-old comic actor, would be performing, speaking or walking again, let alone starring in his own sitcom. In June 2014, he was a passenger in a horrifying multivehicle crash in which he sustained a traumatic brain injury. He was in a coma for eight days and underwent months of physical rehabilitation and cognitive therapy.

If Morgan today seems not the least bit incapacitated by this ordeal, it is hardly the first time he has beaten the odds. He grew up in a volatile and broken family, a child of housing projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and sold drugs before finding his calling in stand-up comedy and on shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock.”

These painful personal details are built into the premise of “The Last O.G.,” a gritty, funny comedy that makes its debut April 3. The show, whose creators include Jordan Peele, casts Morgan as Tray, a Brooklyn drug dealer who gets busted in 2002. After serving time in prison, Tray returns in the present day to find that his old neighborhood has become unrecognizably gentrified — and that his former girlfriend, Shay (played by Tiffany Haddish), is living a much-improved life as the mother of two teenage children he didn’t know he fathered.

Now Morgan has a vast personal fortune bankrolled by a settlement from his accident; he has a wife and a young daughter and another chance to make TV viewers laugh again.

He is more than ready to move forward, as feisty, as fiery and as occasionally prone to fly off the handle as he has ever been. Still, he cannot help but take stock and wonder how the experience — just the latest in a series of tests that life has hurled at him — has made him who he is.

As he said to me that morning, “I have to ask myself, because of what I’ve been through, was I better then or am I better now?” Almost immediately, he answered himself: “I’m a better man now,” he said. “I’d rather be a good man than a funny man, any day.”

If your most recent memory of Morgan is his emotional entrance at the 2015 Emmy Awards, where he tearfully told his peers how much he had missed them, or his “SNL” monologue later that year, when he pretended to talk with impeded speech, be assured that he lives a different, more exuberant life now.

One morning in late January, Morgan showed me around his home in Alpine, New Jersey. This past fall, he and his wife, Megan, moved into the 31,000-square-foot, 19-bedroom mansion, which they have outfitted with a personal gym, hair salon, screening room and two separate garages — one for their Rolls-Royces, the other for the Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini and Range Rover. Downstairs are the indoor basketball court and bowling alley. Upstairs is the master bedroom (“where the magic happens,” Morgan said), outside of which sits the plastic Batmobile bed favored by the Morgans’ 4-year-old daughter, Maven.

Even when conducting a private tour of his home, Morgan is still, well, Morgan; he’s calmer and quieter, but always on the lookout for an opportunity to drop an out-of-nowhere joke that might be at your expense, and might not be a joke at all. When I went to put my shoulder bag on one of his couches, he warned me, “You want my wife to put her foot in your ass?”

And despite the many fish tanks displayed throughout the house, populated with all manner of marine life — from his youth, Morgan was a fan of Jacques Cousteau’s undersea explorations — he expressed mild disappointment that construction was not yet complete on the aquarium he is building, just across the yard, for his collection of sharks, currently residing in Australia. He pointed this out to me from his private office, which he modeled on Vito Corleone’s shadowy study from “The Godfather.”

“I believe in America,” Morgan said, reciting the first line of that film as he slipped behind his desk.

That he can afford this extravagant lifestyle is a strange consequence of Morgan’s highway accident, in which he was one of several people in a luxury van returning from a gig in Delaware when it was struck from behind by a speeding Walmart tractor-trailer. Two other passengers were injured and a third, comedian James McNair, known as Jimmy Mack, was killed. The tractor-trailer’s driver had been awake for more than 28 hours before the crash — he later accepted a plea agreement that required him to enter an intervention program and complete 300 hours of community service — and Walmart paid Morgan a settlement of an undisclosed amount.

To this point, Morgan already had plenty of experience overcoming tumultuous events. He got sober after drunken-driving arrests and a struggle with alcoholism. He survived a kidney transplant, continues to live with diabetes and has taken to heart the lessons of a 2011 controversy in which he was widely criticized for a stand-up set in which he said he would stab his son if he were gay.

“I never want to use the stage as a bully pulpit,” Morgan told me. “That’s not my job. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I never wanted to do that.”

During his convalescence from the car accident, he said, the crash was an unavoidable, all-encompassing subject. “I would look at it on TV, on YouTube, every day,” he said. “And I’d say, I walked away from that?”

But now, Morgan said, “The accident was three years ago — that’s behind me.” He said he had no further rehab or therapy to undergo and just meets with a trainer when he can, and while he doesn’t relish people’s continued questions about the crash, he understands their curiosity. “Some people think it just happened last week,” he said. “To them, it’s like seeing a ghost. Of course they’re going to say, ‘Are you OK?’ I say, thank you, I’m fine. And I keep it moving, graciously.”

He doesn’t love feeling that his critics are quick to attribute his intermittent displays of sentiment — a public moment of tearfulness or a flash of temper — to his past trauma. “Every little mistake we make, every time we get emotional or whatever, they say it’s because of your brain injury,” he said. “No, it’s not. I’m human.”

And he said he had forgiven the truck driver in the crash — at least, in his heart. When I asked if he had met the driver in person, Morgan answered: “No. Why? That nigga put me in the hospital, man, in a coma. He killed my friend. What I meet him for? He did something good? We’re going to keep moving on in life.”

While his multimillion-dollar estate and all its trappings could be a daily reminder of Morgan’s suffering, he chooses not to see it that way. “This house has my wife, my daughter, my family in it,” he said. “We have all lost loved ones we will see again. And their spirits are here.”

Morgan’s history is deliberately evoked in “The Last O.G.,” a show that he started putting together while he healed from his injuries. Weeks before the crash, FX had ordered a new sitcom that was to star Morgan and be produced by the stars of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” After the accident, the network said it would wait on the series as long as Morgan needed, but the show never went into production.

Asked why, Morgan told me: “Opportunities come and go. I don’t even want to talk about that.”

Morgan, who had spent his recovery binge-watching “Key & Peele,” started taking meetings in 2015 with Peele, who had not yet begun shooting what would become his Academy Award-winning horror film, “Get Out.”

Together, the two comedians worked out the fundamentals of “The Last O.G.” Its protagonist, Tray, would be a man not unlike Morgan, who is re-entering society after a long absence, and its story would cut back and forth in time to contrast Tray’s past deeds with his efforts to readjust in the modern day.

Peele, who had not met Morgan before these conversations, told me he found him to be an introspective collaborator.

“He talks about how his life could have gone many ways, how he could have gotten killed,” Peele said. “Comedy is best when it comes from the truth, and the character of a felon getting his second lease on life worked naturally for him.”

Peele said he was a fan of Morgan’s work on “Saturday Night Live,” where he played lovably oblivious characters like animal admirer Brian Fellow, and on “30 Rock,” which cast him as reliably outrageous TV star Tracy Jordan.

But he also wanted to see Morgan expand his horizons. “He’s typically played for his eccentricities, but the part of Tracy that I hadn’t seen examined is his humanity,” Peele said. “There’s this side of him that is real and grounded, intelligent and emotionally connected.”

“He’ll talk freely about what he and his family went through, and his spirituality seems very elevated by the fact that he’s still here and not everybody else is,” Peele added. “He’s not going to take that for granted.” Seated behind an array of family photos, Morgan told me stories of his peripatetic youth spent shuttled around housing projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and of his parents, Alicia and Jimmy, who separated when he was 6.

Jimmy Morgan, a Vietnam veteran and heroin addict whom Tracy described as “funny like Richard Pryor,” left an outsize impression and provided his son with crucial lessons before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1987.

“My father always told me, be transparent,” Morgan said. “Whatever you’re going through, good, bad or ugly, just own it. People will love you and trust you when you’re that way.”

As a young man, Morgan sold crack cocaine, regarding it as a temporary occupation that could tide him over until he found his true calling.

“The money was right there,” he said. “Either you was using it or selling. I already knew I wasn’t dying for it. I was just trying to eat.” Eventually Morgan’s first wife, Sabina (the mother of his three adult sons; they divorced in 2009), encouraged him to pursue stand-up comedy, and he never looked back. “She said pull the trigger, so I did,” he said.

It is not lost on Morgan that in the time he dealt drugs, he helped fuel some of the suffering that “The Last O.G.” now mines for laughs, and he said he hoped the show would pay an appropriate homage to the people who did not make it out of that world.

“'The Last O.G.’ is part of my life,” he said, slamming his hand on his desk as his voice grew louder and his eyes filled with tears. “The people I’ve known. The people I’ve lost. The drugs I sold. The people I hurt. This is for them. I’m sorry. This is to honor you. I didn’t mean it. I was just trying to survive.” Cedric the Entertainer, who plays the manager of the halfway house where Tray lives on the new show, recalled Morgan from their earliest days in stand-up as a performer who could spin gold from harrowing personal circumstances.

“Tracy was always the extreme wild card of comedians,” he said. “His material was a slice of a real, hard-core urban life. You’re listening to it like, oh my God, this sounds dangerous as hell, but it’s so funny just to hear it.”

When they began work on “The Last O.G.” — FX passed on the series, citing creative differences, but TBS picked it up — Cedric expected that Morgan would be changed by his experiences. He was fully healed and ravenous to show viewers that he was every bit the man he’d been before the accident.

“When you have this tragedy happen, everybody assumes you’ll never be the same again, so that desire is there,” Cedric said.

Even though Morgan could simply sit on his Walmart settlement and grow old, Cedric said this was not his desire, although he could not entirely disguise how this windfall had affected him, either.

“Whenever he would get frustrated, he would be very quick to say he didn’t need it because he had this money,” Cedric recalled. “And I would say: ‘Tray, that’s not who you are. Don’t claim that as your identity. People love you because you’re funny. They don’t love you because you’re rich.'”

In these moments, Cedric said, Morgan would eventually regain his composure and his underlying generosity would shine through. “Even if he only had $100, he would be the guy to buy everybody White Castle,” he said. “It might not be Peter Luger, but whatever he’s got, he’s going to show people that he appreciates them.”

Haddish, the “Girls Trip” star, said that she saw a lot of genuine affection in the flashback scenes of “The Last O.G.” that show Tray and Shay’s life together when they were still young and struggling.

“I dated a lot of dope dealers back in my day, so it’s not hard for me to pull from that,” she said. “They need love, too. A lot of them are out of jail now, and they’re like, ‘Wow, you’re actually famous?'”

More seriously, Haddish said she found inspiration in Morgan’s steadfast efforts to resume his career. When she was growing up, her mother was involved in a car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury and, Haddish said, “We didn’t have all that money to get the best help.”

“Now,” Haddish said, “I got her the best doctors, and she’s getting better and better. Tracy showed me, if he can get himself together and be able to work, damn, maybe I can get my mom to that level, too.”

She added: “He’s a survivor. He’s a testament that if you really want to do something better for yourself or others, you can.” On a chilly February morning, a chauffeured Bentley pulled into a parking lot at the Tompkins Houses in Brooklyn, from which Morgan emerged with a bodyguard on either side. He wanted to show me around some of the places that had figured prominently in his upbringing: the weathered apartment complex on Myrtle Avenue where his parents lived, met and first raised him, and the one around the corner on Throop Avenue, where he’d moved with his mother and four siblings after a stint at the Marlboro Houses in Coney Island.

But from the moment he strode up the fractured sidewalk, Morgan was swarmed by current residents of these buildings: men of his age, in their late 40s and early 50s, who had grown up alongside him and followed his career exploits of the past 25 years and who were overjoyed to see him. They had nicknames like Boo, Trey Bags, Jim-Jim, Ox and Iron, and they gave Morgan enthusiastic hugs and handshakes as they took pictures with him and reminisced about the past.

“These are my people,” Morgan said to approving shouts of “That’s right.”

“I could get all the Hollywood love I want, but it’s only because I’m famous,” he added. “If you ain’t getting love from right here, then it ain’t real.”

As he walked the grounds with this expanding entourage, Morgan pointed out schools he had attended, apartments where favorite neighbors lived and where the best macaroni was cooked on Thanksgivings past. He indicated the apartment where a friend had accidentally fallen out a 14th-floor window to her death, the stairwell where another friend had been shot to death and the spot where still another friend ran after he was shot, only to die six days later from his wounds.

I asked him why these people had been shot. “It was what it was,” Morgan answered.

He also showed me the path he was walking the day he decided, at 13, to run away from his mother and their fractured relationship, and spend two days riding the subways before he moved in with his father in the Bronx.

Even before Morgan reached into his pocket and produced a wad of $100 bills that he instructed his bodyguards to distribute to the crowd, one of the men, Justin Monroe, told me why it mattered so much to him and his neighbors that Morgan achieved what he did and why they took pride in his accomplishments.

“He was always funny,” said Monroe, who said he had known Morgan from childhood. “We always knew that with the talent he had, eventually someday he was going to make it. If no one else was going to make it, we knew he was going to make it.”

Before he got back into his car, Morgan answered a few questions from the onlookers, one of whom asked where his sense of humor had come from.

“You want to know where it started from?” Morgan replied, pointing in the general direction of his parents’ old apartment. “Up there. When my daddy’s sperm hit my mother’s egg.”

As he exited the scene to laughter and applause, I asked Morgan what it had been like to come back here today.

“I’ve been in show business a long time, but this was surreal,” he answered. “It brought me back down to earth.”