Re: 50 Cent's New Show, POWER season premier
A Boss Who’s Open to Suggestions
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/a...gboh-runs-power-with-50-cents-input.html?_r=2
Courtney Kemp Agboh Runs ‘Power,’ With 50 Cent’s Input
By ROBERT ITO
JULY 25, 2014
Courtney Kemp Agboh, the show runner of the Starz series “Power.”
LOS ANGELES — In the first few episodes of “Power,” a new series from Starz, one man is shot in the forehead; another is beaten to a bloody pulp; a third is doused with rubber cement and set ablaze. At the center of the mayhem is James St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick), better known as Ghost, a husband and father who manages a swanky nightclub when he’s not stepping out on his beautiful wife, Tasha (Naturi Naughton), or running one of New York City’s most powerful drug empires.
At first blush, little on the résumé of Courtney Kemp Agboh, the series creator and show runner, gives any indication that she’d be behind such a show. Her TV credits include “The Good Wife” and “Beauty and the Beast,” and growing up, she said, she was a bookish child, obsessed with presidential politics and learning Yiddish. Seated in a small office here at the Sunset Gower Studios, she unbuttoned her blazer to reveal a T-shirt that read “Black Nerds Unite.”
So when she had questions about what it would be like to inhabit her main character’s world — the drugs, the violence, the insane riches — she often called on one of the show’s executive producers, Curtis Jackson, for guidance.
Ms. Agboh, center, working with members of the writing team. Credit Therese + Joel for The New York Times
Mr. Jackson, after all, had dealt crack cocaine in South Jamaica, Queens, had nine rounds fired into his body at close range in 2000. (A bit of one bullet is still lodged in his tongue, he says.) Just as important, as the Grammy Award-winning rap artist 50 Cent, he has earned plenty of cash himself.
“He really helped me build Ghost,” Ms. Agboh said. “Because I am not actually a superrich, urban human. I’m kind of middle of the road.”
Ms. Agboh was speaking recently about how she came to create the series, which concludes Saturday and has been renewed for a second season. (“It’s surprisingly enjoyable,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New York Times, calling it “a lively premium-cable riff on ‘Law & Order.’ ”)
One of the few African-American female show runners in television — Shonda Rhimes (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal”) is the most familiar name in that elite club — Ms. Agboh is also, at 37, one of the greenest. Though she received an Emmy nomination for her work on CBS’s “The Good Wife” in 2011 and has served as a producer on several other shows, “Power” is her first as a show runner, not to mention the first series she ever pitched or sold.
The show is set in New York, the type of place Ms. Agboh dreamed of escaping to when she was growing up in the affluent suburb of Westport, Conn., a community that her father, a successful advertising executive, selected for the family because of its good schools. “The only black folks in town when I was growing up were me and my cousins and one other family,” she recalled. “I got called the N-word a lot.”
Ms. Agboh became a voracious reader, plowing through her older brother’s college textbooks at the age of 8 and Shakespeare plays at 10. Books about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and nuclear holocaust soon followed. When she wasn’t reading, she’d pull out her chess set and weave stories about the different pieces.
After graduating from Brown in 1998, Ms. Agboh earned her master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University. Stints at GQ and Mademoiselle pulled her away from her original dreams of becoming a university professor; for a year, she wrote copy for J. Crew catalogs. In June 2004, she moved from New York to Los Angeles. Within two months of arriving, she was hired as a staff writer on “The Bernie Mac Show,” which led to writing and producing jobs on other series.
“Power” grew out of a coffeehouse meeting in Los Angeles between the executive producer Mark Canton (“300”) and Mr. Jackson, who were batting around ideas for a TV show. The concept was nebulous: something music centered, set in New York, with a focus on crime, drugs and hot clubs. When they met with Ms. Agboh, they were struck by her vision of the show’s lead character. “People want people to stay as they are, because if you’re successful and you change, it’s like, uh-oh, what does that mean for us?” said Mr. Canton. “Courtney came up with this idea about a guy who would be so good at being bad that nobody in his world would really want him to be good.”
The character of Ghost is an amalgamation of Mr. Jackson and Ms. Agboh’s father, Herbert Kemp Jr., who died in 2011. From 50 Cent, Ms. Agboh got insights into Ghost’s nefarious past and, perhaps more important, his glamorous present. “He really helped me create this idea of what it’s like to go home with Jay Z and Beyoncé,” she said.
From her father came the story of a man who started with nothing and hustled like mad to provide for his wife and kids. “It’s a tough situation,” Mr. Jackson said, discussing Ghost via email. “He sees a glimmer of hope and wants to change his life in a more positive direction. I think most people can relate to that situation of wanting something better for themselves and their family.”
As the series unfolds, Ghost is being pulled in every possible direction: His drug-dealing partner and old pal Tommy (Joseph Sikora) wonders why he’s spending so much time at the club, which was only started to launder their ill-gotten gains. Angela Valdes (Lela Loren), Ghost’s first love newly returned, only remembers the young, innocent “Jamie” and is inspiring him to be a better man, or at least a less felonious one. She is also, unknown to him, an assistant United States attorney going after, yes, drug dealers.
And then there’s Tasha, who wants Ghost to continue running his drug empire because, among other reasons, she has an enviably large walk-in closet to maintain. Unlike, say, Carmela Soprano, she has no moral qualms or pipe dreams of his going legit. “Part of the reason I wrote about Tasha is that I’m fascinated by the idea of women who make a man their job,” Ms. Agboh said.
Mr. Jackson, she added, helped in fleshing out that character, too. “I’ve encountered some Tashas along the way,” he said.
As one might expect, the show is packed with music, from 50 Cent’s “Big Rich Town” (in the spirit of classic television theme songs, Ghost’s back story is delivered in one supremely catchy ditty) to Mary J. Blige’s 1992 hit “Real Love,” an evocative song from Ghost’s past that symbolizes the innocence he lost soon after he started selling large quantities of cocaine and shooting people.
“50 Cent and I really started to bond over our love for music,” Ms. Agboh said. “The first conversations we had were about Curtis Mayfield.”
Going from writer to first-time show runner has been a big adjustment. “Writers are, for the most part, crazy people,” Ms. Agboh said. “We’re like Hephaestus of the forge. We’re gnarled, we’re curled over, we walk with a limp. And then you take that person and say, ‘Hey, writer person, you had a great idea. Go manage a thousand people.’ The two skill sets are not compatible whatsoever.”
Even so, colleagues praise Ms. Agboh’s abilities. “We call each other G.M. and QB,” said Mr. Hardwick, who played football for the University of Georgia. “She knows that I’m an athlete underneath all of this, so I like to be directed.” For Ms. Naughton, Ms. Agboh “is like a horse running a race with its blinders on, and we’ve just got to get to the finish line. She’s extremely focused, extremely strong.”
Of course, even the most focused of show runners can’t do everything. “The show runner’s the boss until the network shows up,” Ms. Agboh admitted. “And then they’re the boss, because it’s their money.”
