I'm gong to check these out...
Writer's Circle: Why is it so difficult to write a BLACK show?
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
I'm gong to check these out...
Just create your own Youtube web series.
Black and Sexy TV is an interesting channel.
Money and Violence is doing it, but is seems like a bad mix of the wire and Straight otta Brooklyn.
youtube seems to be the way to go. Get the following, stack the ad money, then maybe do a kickstarter to fund a full movie.
Black and Sexy TV is an interesting channel.
Money and Violence is doing it, but is seems like a bad mix of the wire and Straight otta Brooklyn.
youtube seems to be the way to go. Get the following, stack the ad money, then maybe do a kickstarter to fund a full movie.
I don't have a lot to offer but I just realized I have a producer in my pocket. She's in Atlanta...
...please lay this out in detail. I would love to attempt to be a part of this when I am able.
...please lay this out in detail. I would love to attempt to be a part of this when I am able.
that's good, bro. Every little bit of person can offer will help. Some ideas came together just as I was thinking about something to write. My brain works like a Trivia Crack wheel, it just keeps spinning and spinning and to let it lands on something tangible which becomes palpable and then grows like weeds
The ‘Empire’ Effect: Netflix Orders Its First Ever Hip-Hop Drama For 2016
Feb 5, 2015 By bjosephsny
It’s hard to argue that Netflix isn’t at the top of the online streaming game. So why not add a little hip-hop drama into the mix?
Fox has the bizarre opera of the Empire going for it, and soon, Netflix will have its own drama based in the genre. The service has announced a 13-episode order for The Get Down, a drama that’s been in development since 2013. The upcoming series comes from renowned screenwriter/director Baz Luhrmann who’s known for his work in 2013’s The Great Gatsby, 2001’s Moulin Rouge! and 1996’s Romeo + Juliet.
Luhrmann’s project is one of a few upcoming series based in hip-hop culture. Spike Lee is working on a television adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It and Q-Tip is working with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill to produce a series based on his experiences as a Native Tongues member.
Check out the teaser for The Get Down above. It’s a little under 20 seconds. That’s admittedly not much, but hey, there’s some dancing.
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Netflix Orders Hip Hop Drama Called “The Get Down”
“The Get Down” comes from renowned film director Baz Luhrmann and is set to premiere in 2016.
Continuing on from the success of Fox’s Empire and Starz’ 50 Cent-produced show Power, streaming service Netflix has ordered it’s own 13-episode Hip Hop drama series titled The Get Down, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The show — set to premiere in 2016 — comes from famed director and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann, who is scheduled to steer the wheel on the first two episodes as well as the series finale. In addition, Luhrmann is slated to executive produce the show alongside Shawn Ryan.
“The Get Down will focus on 1970s New York — broken down and beaten up, violent, cash strapped — dying,” The Hollywood Reporter says. “Consigned to rubble, a rag-tag crew of South Bronx teenagers are nothings and nobodies with no one to shelter them — except each other, armed only with verbal games, improvised dance steps, some magic markers and spray cans. From Bronx tenements, to the SoHo art scene; from CBGBs to Studio 54 and even the glass towers of the just-built World Trade Center, The Get Down is a mythic saga of how New York at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk and disco — told through the lives and music of the South Bronx kids who changed the city, and the world … forever.”
Speaking on the project, which acts as his debut television series and first musical venture since 2001’s Moulin Rouge!, Baz Luhrmann says The Get Down is something he has been envisioning for over a decade.
“The Get Down [is] a project I have been contemplating and working on now for over 10 years,” Luhrmann says. “Throughout, I've been obsessed with the idea of how a city in its lowest moment, forgotten and half-destroyed, could give birth to such creativity and originality in music, art and culture. I'm thrilled to be working with my partners at Sony and collaborating with a team of extraordinary writers and musicians, many of whom grew up with and lived the story we've set out to tell."
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.32468/title.netflix-orders-hip-hop-drama-called-the-get-down
bgol talks things into fruition...
this man gets it
Making $ off of YouTube ain't that easy. Their splits greatly favor Google.
My personal recommendation. Host it on Vimeo or Blip.tv or Daily Motion. As long as it's on a video platform and you promote, you're good.
Now in order to make your capital investment back at the very least, you need to find a brand or brands to integrate into your content so you can subsidize the cost of production.
In order to get to this stage, write a treatment of your idea, and then go out and shoot a sizzle reel of it. It can be a great scene or a montage of what will eventually be the pilot. Take that, create a deck and go pitch it to brands for the sponsorship money, and then if you don't have the means to handle production yourself, pitch to production companies to come on board and handle the entire production process. Or go guerilla and shoot the whole shit on iPhones, etc.
Create all your social media accounts and start promoting the shit out of it from jumpstreet. Build your following as that will help sell the whole thing. Try to utilize talent that has a big social media following as you can leverage that.
Work hard. Stay the course. Get lucky. And pray.
At this point I am trying to binge watch the shows that ya''l recommended that are already doing it so I cane see whats already out there...
because what I was originally envisioning which may be crazy is actually coming out with a few concepts at one time damn near like Fox did back in the day as a new network.
literally create a family of like 3-5 shows with some type of cross promotion between them
Debut a network with a clever name and create manageable cheap current smart content...
because what I was originally envisioning which may be crazy is actually coming out with a few concepts at one time damn near like Fox did back in the day as a new network.
literally create a family of like 3-5 shows with some type of cross promotion between them
Debut a network with a clever name and create manageable cheap current smart content...
Shanebp1978 aka Micheal Quentin Alexander (RIP) GoFundMe donations for his family!
http://www.gofundme.com/mkopps
http://www.gofundme.com/mkopps
There are multi-faceted problems with writing for Black people. First, we have to reject the premise of positive and negative images. To say, I am going to write a show that promotes positive images of Black people is light-weight propaganda. The goal of any writing is to write a story that you love that has a powerful central character and conflict. Remember the central character has to go through some sort of conflict, or unwanted occurrences, so by definition, a show will fail if it simply seeks to promote positivity.
Secondly, we have to reject the premise of writing for Black people. There are nearly 55 million, black and/or mixed with black people in America. No show in the history of television has tried to reach and audience that large. Why, because it is simply impossible. 50 million people are not going to like and agree with the premise of your show. As a writer, you have to decide on what you want to portray and allow your audience to embrace you.
I dont have a problem with the rachet shows, because there are rachet people who the show fits there viewing preferences. I dont mind bourgeois shows as their are snootty people that like it. And so on!
I think the Cosby show has ruined the Black TV viewer and skewed expectations of Black TV. Anytime a black show airs, there is always more hate than love. And rightfully so, because regardless of how successful you are, black people will criticize it an ultimately bring it back to the Cosby show. The problem with this is that, (outside of being quality TV) the Cosby show benefited from the Black Messiah complex (you know, dont say nothing bad about my pastor complex) and the Cosby show was race-neutral.
How can a Black show be race-neutral, you ask? I dont know, but that was the expressed comments of Cosby when the show was created and the "clean" images brought white audiences along.
The Cosby Show wouldn't last 5 episodes in todays environment.
As a aspiring black-story-focused screenwriter, I think the goal of any black show should have unconscious experiences that the masses can appeal to (i.e. love, hate, heartbreak, disappointment, happiness, lust, anxiety, fear, etc.). This is the easy part. The hard part with Black shows, is tapping into the collective consciousness of black folks so that the story has some semblance of cultural authenticity. I call this multi-conscious writing and it is a body of knowledge that I an developing and trying ti further.
With that said, I love the state of Black TV. I think the rachet shows are fine. I love Black-ish, Power, Empire, Survivors Remorse, Being Mary Jane, Scandal, How to get Away with Murder, Hoes of Lies, etc.
I understand that everyone doesnt/wont like them and everyone shouldnt. The new black screenwriter has to approach their journey in writing knowing and being comfortable with being heavily critiqued, being called a sellout/coon/bourgeois and getting 20x's the hate than love.
The solace that I take is that the person who hates has likely never stepped through a creative process in their lives. And my story, regardless of how you felt about it, engendered an emotion. This is the true pursuits of a writer! The more emotion you engender, the more indispensable you'll be!
So to answer the question, It's not difficult to write a universally appealing black show, its impossible! Jesus will return before you have a show that all or even the majority of black folks will fuck with!
Secondly, we have to reject the premise of writing for Black people. There are nearly 55 million, black and/or mixed with black people in America. No show in the history of television has tried to reach and audience that large. Why, because it is simply impossible. 50 million people are not going to like and agree with the premise of your show. As a writer, you have to decide on what you want to portray and allow your audience to embrace you.
I dont have a problem with the rachet shows, because there are rachet people who the show fits there viewing preferences. I dont mind bourgeois shows as their are snootty people that like it. And so on!
I think the Cosby show has ruined the Black TV viewer and skewed expectations of Black TV. Anytime a black show airs, there is always more hate than love. And rightfully so, because regardless of how successful you are, black people will criticize it an ultimately bring it back to the Cosby show. The problem with this is that, (outside of being quality TV) the Cosby show benefited from the Black Messiah complex (you know, dont say nothing bad about my pastor complex) and the Cosby show was race-neutral.
How can a Black show be race-neutral, you ask? I dont know, but that was the expressed comments of Cosby when the show was created and the "clean" images brought white audiences along.
The Cosby Show wouldn't last 5 episodes in todays environment.
As a aspiring black-story-focused screenwriter, I think the goal of any black show should have unconscious experiences that the masses can appeal to (i.e. love, hate, heartbreak, disappointment, happiness, lust, anxiety, fear, etc.). This is the easy part. The hard part with Black shows, is tapping into the collective consciousness of black folks so that the story has some semblance of cultural authenticity. I call this multi-conscious writing and it is a body of knowledge that I an developing and trying ti further.
With that said, I love the state of Black TV. I think the rachet shows are fine. I love Black-ish, Power, Empire, Survivors Remorse, Being Mary Jane, Scandal, How to get Away with Murder, Hoes of Lies, etc.
I understand that everyone doesnt/wont like them and everyone shouldnt. The new black screenwriter has to approach their journey in writing knowing and being comfortable with being heavily critiqued, being called a sellout/coon/bourgeois and getting 20x's the hate than love.
The solace that I take is that the person who hates has likely never stepped through a creative process in their lives. And my story, regardless of how you felt about it, engendered an emotion. This is the true pursuits of a writer! The more emotion you engender, the more indispensable you'll be!
So to answer the question, It's not difficult to write a universally appealing black show, its impossible! Jesus will return before you have a show that all or even the majority of black folks will fuck with!
^^^
appreciate this post...
appreciate this post...
This whole post was great.
Its that first step that's a killer...what direction to go into.
my PM is full as usual and I love the energy but its the focus and knowledge that is needed most. There is no dearth of ideas on here and the knowledge is available but its that first step. Its the research on exactly HOW and WHAT to do first that is key.
Again I think the bluntbit model would be a great blueprint to get started.
And wouldn't want anyone's time creativity or energy wasted one bit.
So anyone actually ever DONE this?
Created a podcast or an on-going youtube show no matter how small?
my PM is full as usual and I love the energy but its the focus and knowledge that is needed most. There is no dearth of ideas on here and the knowledge is available but its that first step. Its the research on exactly HOW and WHAT to do first that is key.
Again I think the bluntbit model would be a great blueprint to get started.
And wouldn't want anyone's time creativity or energy wasted one bit.
So anyone actually ever DONE this?
Created a podcast or an on-going youtube show no matter how small?
your post is on point but I think the issue for black writers is right where I bolded..
you said ealier in the post a black writers job is to show love, hate, heartbreak, disappointment, happiness, lust, anxiety, fear, etc...well if you start the journey by thinking youre writing from a BLACK POV then what does the BLACK version of love, hate, heartbreak, disappointment, happiness, lust, anxiety, fear, etc.look like?? how is it DIFFERENT from whites, hispanics, asians or any NON-black person because your supposed to be writing a BLACK story thats BLACK centric thats for BLACK audiences (another fallacy IMO).
I saw an ad for writers but it was specific in what they wanted which was writers who can tell stories from a "black and latino perspective"... I thought I don't know how I would consciously write a story from a BLACK perspective..I'm black so ANYTHING I do is inherently from that perspective all I know is the protagonist is gonna be black and the circle of people he or she most likely will run in will be black people and thats it. Everything else will be the whatever genre the story is in.
I believe that a ETHNIC/RACIAL driven story is where stereotypes get perpetuated in society. Storytelling in general tends to inherently be more exaggerated than real life. Characters and their actions and reactions tend to be bigger than how it would really play out in the real world. Thats why vigilante Bruce Wayne is a billionaire who has ninja training and access to cutting edge technology when ANY schmo walking the street can be a vigilante but thats not as exciting.
Now apply that to a race/ethnic context and what you get is a black person whose character, emotions and actions are very exaggerated for effect. So if youre writing a BLACK story you don't have a black man you have a hypermasculine, slang talking, swagger walking every black trope on steroids black man. The same with a females you don't write a black woman you write a neck and eye rolling, attitude having, hypersexual, loud talking black woman. Because this is written from a BLACK perspective and thats what black people DO and how WE ARE right?
So if youre a Black writer and you go into a story thinking "this has to be from a "BLACK perspective" youve already started off on the wrong foot IMO.
And we go back to the Cosby show..it wasn't that it was race NEUTRAL..it just wasn't race EMPHASIZED. Cliff and Claire Huxtable were middle class professionals raising a family. How would you make that BLACK specific without delving into stereotypes and cliches?
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To the OP it's not difficult to write or create one.
It's hard to get support for anything black in the western world due to the ethos of anti-blackness
It's hard to get support for anything black in the western world due to the ethos of anti-blackness
To the OP it's not difficult to write or create one.
It's hard to get support for anything black in the western world due to the ethos of anti-blackness
It's hard to get support for anything black in the western world due to the ethos of anti-blackness
understood but look at the recent criticism of empire
(which is pretty much deserved)
but look at it this way.
As a black writer (unlike your white counterparts) you have to or at least should be aware of the long history of Black people being portrayed negatively in Hollywood.
Empire is essentially a soap opera.
but because they are Black and we have ROUTINELY been portrayed this way the satire and exaggeration can be EASILY taken the wrong way.
Especially if executed poorly.
So when Marlon and Sean do a lot a lot of physical comedy its considered cooning but Jim Carrey could do the SAME THING he is called the next Jerry Lewis.
I think something like that can effect the writing.
but isn't that just US being overly sensitive to shit and OVERLOOKING the positive portrayals and images of black people in tv and movies?
And there have been positive portrayals of blacks in tv and movies..we weren't the star of the project but we were positive characters. But then theres a problem with that. Sidney Poitier and Morgan Freeman have complained that they get parts where the character is perfect. Our over sensitivity permits no grey area.
This recent episode of the Scriptnotes podcast is a damned good listen for aspiring Black writers:
Screenwriter Malcolm Spellman joins Craig and John to talk about his big break, blown opportunities, and getting momentum back. Now part of the smash hit Empire, he talks about the changes and challenges African-American writers face both on the small screen and the big screen.
http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat
Screenwriter Malcolm Spellman joins Craig and John to talk about his big break, blown opportunities, and getting momentum back. Now part of the smash hit Empire, he talks about the changes and challenges African-American writers face both on the small screen and the big screen.
http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat
truth
I wholeheartedly agree. That was a great post
us not being the ones coming up with, and writing for these characters is what permits the grey area.
all most of these white writers know about us is the negative stereotypes, so when they attempt to write a positive black character, they just write the EXACT opposite of one of those stereotypes. That's why the character appears to be "too perfect" as you said.
^^^ great observation
I AGREE 1000%While you may hear some white folks complain about Sex or violence on TV you will never hear about them worried about how "White people " are portrayed on TV. White actors are allowed to portray full spectrum of humanity. Given our unique situation in American culture one can understand our sensitivity and while we should always be vigilant about such matters we can't stifle creativity. A classic example is the Old "Amos n Andy" TV show which was ground breaking in that it was the 1st TV SHOW with a Largely all black cast. It was canceled in 1953 after a couple seasons due to controversy and protest from the NAACP. The show had pretty good ratings at the time of it's cancellation. There wouldn't be another TV show with an all black cast on network TV until the mid season premiere of Sanford and Son in 1972. Nearly twenty years after Amos N Andy went off the air. I really don't know how bad Amos n Andy actually was because I have never seen it. I have run into other black folks who think it was funny. Clearly there must have been something wrong with it if the NAACP protested it. Another show that would have had an all Black cast but the network vetoed it was "Married with Children". Co-created by a brother, MWC was huge hit but can you imagine the backlash if you had a black family with a lazy sex crazed wife , trashy dumb daughter not to mention a Black version of Al with Cosby still on the air? That shit would have been canceled during the 1st commercial break. As a community we have to thicken our skin a little give our Actors & writers the same space to create as White folks.
Kingdom Came: Notes on ‘Empire’ and the State of Black Television Drama
It’s not quite true that I’ve never seen anything like Empire. The centuries are plump with art and popular culture driven by tales of crime and power. Even on network television, not too long ago, there were lurid stories set within the music industry brought to us, in part, by the man who made The Godfather. But I’ve never seen anything that gets away with everything Empire gets away with — murder, basically. I’ve never seen anything on network television this shameless; this overwritten yet perfectly plotted; this ludicrously costumed, art-decorated, choreographed, soundtracked, acted, and directed; this hormonal, this … black. Believe me, at the moment, that’s an achievement against some competition: Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots on the Oprah Winfrey Network; BET’s Being Mary Jane and The Game; Single Ladies on VH1; and, arguably, ABC’s Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. Empire is different.
The show is a soap saga about a thriving record company: Empire records! It’s under siege from the inside and out. Its founder and CEO, Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), was a thug who rose from the streets of Philadelphia to the top of the charts, then to the top of a skyscraper. Howard — like the show — operates within some alternate prefab universe of lubricious glamour and lugubrious plotting: It’s Aaron Spelling’s The Godfather. Lucious is newly diagnosed with ALS. He’s also engaged to Empire’s head of A&R, a haughty biracial Swedish speaker named Anika (Grace Gealey). His ascent has come at the expense of his ex-wife, Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), who took the rap for Lucious on a drug-dealing charge and served 17 years in prison. She’s just been released, wants to better know her three adult sons, and demands a share in a business she helped create. The sons — bipolar Empire CFO Andre (Trai Byers), gay singer-songwriter Jamal (Jussie Smollett), hotheaded horndog rapper Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) — resent Cookie, until they come to resent Lucious. But no child’s parental loyalty lasts. The tide turning among them can induce seasickness.
In the first episode, Lucious, aware that’s he’s dying, explains his intentions. Upon his death, one of the sons stands to inherit stewardship of the label as it goes public. Jamal hears this plan, has a gander at the competition, and smells Shakespeare. “What is this? King Lear?” Abstractly, yes. But, even after a single episode, the allusion felt a little off. Lear is a stormy old megalomaniac. He’s irrational and petulant and possibly demented. When his youngest daughter, Cordelia, articulates ambivalence about her love for him — after her two sisters have feigned unconditional adoration — he explodes with insult. In Lear, absolute power faces its natural twilight, and its heirs connive for the benefits. Empire seems aware of that lineage, and with Lucious conniving for his sons’ love, it’s Lear in reverse. It’s also a department store of Shakespearean moral dilemmas and their consequences. Floor 1: Hamlet. Floor 2: Romeo and Juliet. Floor 3: Macbeth. The penthouse restaurant? Good evening, and welcome to Othello.
The show situates these timeless themes of lust, ambition, and corruption in a rich, richly paranoid fantasy world populated by a range of black faces and personalities and backgrounds. Some of the fantasy really does involve having the street sense, money, and good screenwriting to afford to get away with murder. (More than half of the main cast contemplates killing someone or actually does, on purpose or by accident.) Empire doesn’t just portray a world of privilege. It’s about what privilege means once you’re inside that world. It’s self-conscious without being excessively neurotic, nuts without being exactly psychological. It’s resoundingly, flamboyantly black without being about blackness. Here, black simply is.
This is what separates Empire from most of its black-melodrama peers. It’s the first one that doesn’t feel ghettoized or defensively assembled. The money is new but seems old on the Lyons — even for Cookie, who accustomed herself to lavishness without ever splurging or spreeing. The show celebrates particular flavors of blackness even as it paints each one a single emotional color: brash. It’s also a cooking show: The key to all the comedy and drama is the easy, fantastical commingling of all of those flavors of brashness. Aspirations here have already been achieved. What you see, largely, are its spoils.
♦♦♦
Television had previously hinted at something like Empire. As a boy, I watched ABC’s Dynasty for Diahann Carroll the way some people eat trail mix for the raisins. She played the shocking black addition to the white Carrington-Colby galaxy. Like Lucious, she was a concoction. (“Dominique Deveraux” was her nom de classy white people.) Like Lucious, she also had in her a bit of Milton’s charismatic, accursed Lucifer. She, too, ran a successful record label — from Denver. But Dynasty kept Dominique on a figurative island in its chic Colorado climes. As black people went, she was pretty much the only game in town, so the show kept backing her into interracial hot water. Would she ever admit, for instance, that Garrett is really the father of Dominique’s daughter, Jackie?
Most of America understandably watched for Joan Collins’s superbitch, Alexis. Everyone at my house wanted to see Dominique, in part because she was a fancy black lady who didn’t apologize for her fabulousness, and in part because that lady was played by Carroll, who eyebrow-raised her way through the show. (During the climax of one unforgettable, ecstatically advertised night of television, Alexis and Dominique proceeded to brawl their way around a mansion.) I could never get enough of Dominique because there was not actually enough of her to get. We watched Dynasty because in the 1980s there were scarcely any other even semi-serious black people on television’s three networks. But Dominique pointed a way forward for extravagant black soapiness, much as the less glamorous Angie-and-Jesse romance plots did on ABC’s All My Children.
Other mostly black soaps came — well, one: NBC’s stillborn Generations. But prime time was a desert. Middle-class and upper-middle-class blacks lived on sitcoms: Huxtables and Bankses and Winslows. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the richest treatments of black drama came by way of comedic satire. Robert Townsend imagined a black soap-opera universe with “The Bold, the Black, the Beautiful,” sketches that ran on his HBO variety show, Partners in Crime. The sketches followed Townsend’s Lake Arrington, a soul food magnate; Lake’s wife, Chandelier; and their many exploits with tramps, gigolo congressmen, and rival food purveyors. The whole thing now feels like a coming attraction for both the entirety of Tyler Perry and the spate of black dramas currently on television.
What wins Empire the gold for both uniqueness and a kind of greatishness is that its struggles are not ones of race and class, of respectability and propriety, of how to be bourgie in the conference-room seats and ghetto between the sheets (for the record: No one properly uses sheets on this show). With Empire, struggles are absorbed into the world of the show and neutralized. Political upheavals are in the past. The show operates at an almost paradisiacal remove from capital-C concerns. Poverty, murder, anti-gay prejudice, sexism, snitches, bitches, and feds all exist. So do biracial gay Australian photographers, Latin men, and characters played by Naomi Campbell and Courtney Love. But the show is pitched at canted angles of normalcy. And that struggle-free normalcy creates the luxury you want from soap operas.
Everything about Empire is luxurious — not only the apparently infinite affluence, but also its ability to throw the high and the low, the tasteful and the obscene, into a Cuisinart and pulse away. Only in the final episode does a touch of racial strategy figure into anything. The Lyon boys, having learned which of them will run their father’s label, debate Lucious’s decision. An heir, they say, will make it hard for an outside party to take over or for white shareholders to back out. In the same episode, Patti LaBelle announces that some of the proceeds from Empire’s big melisma jamboree will go to #BlackLivesMatter — but only 10 percent, and the gesture is presented as an afterthought, befitting certain hashtag activism.
Empire’s innovation is the way it installs its assemblage of stereotypes — sassiness, thuggishness, ghetto-ness, bourgie snobbery — inside an unassailable, high-class, high-gloss world. The Lyon boys were reared as rich kids. They’re all spoiled in different ways. But the show presents its spoiled black children in a fresh vernacular. They’re the pampered young adults from Frank Ocean’s songs “Sweet Life” and “Super Rich Kids.” They see the streets from Town Cars and penthouses, and yet they’re kept “real.” Hakeem’s smooth, gangster braggadocio begins as a fraud, then turns into luxury-brand disses and navel-gazing. Empire doesn’t turn Andre, with his Wharton education and pretty white wife, Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday), into a running gag of over-assimilation. It doesn’t make him into Carlton Banks, a mis-mocked caricature of black success that equates wealth and education with having sold out. Andre has demons and shaky mental health, but none of that is predicated upon being not black enough.
Stereotypical whiteness, which on this show also means being born well-to-do, remains grist for throwaway putdowns. Anika appears fluent in both black and white European worlds and might be the second snakiest, most laughable person on the show. And at some point, one of the sons asks Lucious’s cheery, dark-skinned, platinum-blonde executive assistant, Becky (Gabourey Sidibe), about her name. My mom is white, she basically says. Who knows if she’s kidding?
But the world of Empire distrusts easy assimilation. Lucious, with his light skin and glittering eyes, is a hero, a villain, and an enigma. The show deftly conjures an atmosphere of bratty ignorance, artistic sophistication, and racial suspicion. After all, it’s Rhonda who has to assert how hard she’s worked to get what’s she got. It’s her husband and brothers-in-law who’ve had everything handed to them. They’re loosely equated with a white rapper who’s the grandson of the potential shareholder in — never mind. What matters is that his richness and whiteness give him access to the Lyons’ creative juices. The show doesn’t have to laugh at these ideas and characters. There’s a way in which the campiness is its own force of self-mockery. Twitter reactions are baked into the ideology.
Empire’s ideas about race operate at a higher degree of difficulty than even Scandal, one of the most sexually and racially adventurous shows ever to appear on television. Like Scandal, Empire brings a crazed racial odyssey to a major network. Unlike Scandal, it’s not situated in a world of delicately maintained façades. Washington politics requires a kind of politesse, a brand that the show’s architect, Shonda Rhimes, has polished to perfection. Empire has no reliable sense of decorum. This is a world in which people peep and creep, but mostly they barge into rooms and blast the truth with an alacrity that would appall Scandal’s heroine, Olivia Pope. Secrets are a form of currency on Scandal. They’re a cancer on Empire. And bluntness appears to be a form of chemotherapy.
If Cookie and Olivia switched cities, it’d make for fascinating, funny television, but neither world could remain intact for long. Cookie would expose a whole city’s skeletons and be immediately out of a job. Olivia would provide withering scrutiny of the record label’s business plan, then disinfect all the tabletops, desktops, and backseats. That such a hypothetical, fan-fiction switch would fail indicates the diversity of blackness currently on dramatic television. There’s a relative wealth where 30 years ago there was only impoverishment.
♦♦♦
Cookie’s big mouth and Henson’s paint-bomb acting steal the show. But Lucious is the real piece of work. Over the course of the 12 episodes, he behaves in appalling ways: He kills Cookie’s cousin. In a flashback, he catches young Jamal sashaying in heels and stuffs him into a garbage can. He cheats on Anika with Cookie, then tells Cookie he’s leaving Anika, but doesn’t tell Cookie he’s changed his mind until Cookie arrives, in a bustier, at the dinner where Lucious and Anika announce their engagement. He refers to one of his artist’s girlfriend as a “thot.” He berates nurses and employees and his own sons, all while suffering tremors, cold sweats, and one of those talking-in-your-sleep jags that another character is shocked to overhear. He calls Rhonda all kinds of “white bitch,” and he turns out to be the father of the gay son’s surprise daughter.
To watch a nutty narcissist like Lucious in television’s current landscape — whose final shot puts him, for the moment, behind bars — is to be able to place him alongside Robert Durst of The Jinx and any of the other evil, so-called antiheroes who’ve been hogging the plots on series television for years. This is remarkable only in the sense that Lucious is a black male who behaves with what a district attorney might call impunity. He’s unfazed by his crimes and by Cookie’s seething return. I don’t know how long a show this over-the-top can continue to clear the bar. I don’t know that the writing will ever culminate in a role for Howard as good as James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, or Clive Owen’s John Thackery. But Lucious Lyon has more in common with them than with the men you’re also inclined to think about as you watch Empire: Wesley Snipes in New Jack City, say, or Denzel Washington in Training Day, or Howard himself in Hustle & Flow. There’s a cool about Lucious that explains his magnetism. The last TV character as blithely contemptible and contemptuous as Lucious was 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy. It’s an amazing irony: In being unapologetic for its blackness, Empire enters unsavory territory typically reserved for white male characters and often played as comedy.
On Scandal, blackness functions as an exhilarating third rail. On Empire, it’s the entire power source. Race trips up many a work of popular culture. You can feel the second half of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s pretty wonderful Netflix show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, trying to untangle the messes it makes in the first half. Most American television is white television. Whatever else that means, it suggests that most of the characters and writing are focused on stories in which no one of color is even near the center of the action. Sometimes those stories actually unfold at the expense of characters of color. Occasionally, that awareness of what often gets called privilege becomes part of a show’s sense of self, as it has on FX’s Louie.
For four years, Lena Dunham’s Girls has been unfairly under fire for training its focus on young white women. To me, that never felt like a problem of Dunham’s making. She’s a beneficiary of a system that values women like her. The fault lies, in her case, with HBO, which remains an unchallenged bastion of whiteness across time and realities. Nonetheless, the charge of privilege stuck to her and the show, and by its jumpy second season, it seemed to sting. But Girls just completed a smart, strong, mature fourth season in which it became a comedy about privilege and its discontents. The show doubled down on the traits that outraged its critics, but its creators are now seasoned enough to understand how to treat cluelessness, entitlement, and ignorance as sport. Dunham shifted the burden away from the show and onto the culture in a way that felt new.
An argument against Girls is that it’s another show by, about, and perhaps for white people. You can feel it justifying its right to continue to exist. There’s less of a cultural burden with Empire. What, really, has come before it? So much of its properties involve conflating and remixing the familiar that it feels fresh.
And it’s true: Compared to the general TV landscape, there’s not a lot that looks like Empire. So it’s possible to know the math and give its loudness and venality a pass. Some black people I know refuse to watch the show. They think it makes fools of black people. That seems fair. But what’s happening among these characters in this particularized world is more complex.
Anyway, there are lots of fools on television. It’s only once there’s a critical mass of different types of black and brown people that their crass and inane depiction ceases to represent a race or a condition and begins to feel like one of any number of options. I think audiences can sense that. The ratings for Empire started strong and got stronger every week. Most of that viewership was black. It’s a show that, unlike Scandal, feels free to speak directly to all black audiences. It doesn’t care for propriety. It doesn’t care that you don’t know what a “thot” is.
The show is a partial creation of Lee Daniels, the director of such way-out-there works of delirium and flagrancy as Shadowboxer, Precious, The Paperboy, and The Butler. Daniels is a showman director who cares not for the politics of respectability. It makes him an offensive, dangerous talent, but it also makes his art daring, necessary, fun, and refreshingly vulgar. That dangerousness and vulgarity light up this show. It is black, bold, and beautiful — stupid, too. That would be an insult to almost any other work of drama. With Empire, it feels like a major point of pride.
http://grantland.com/hollywood-pros...pire-and-the-state-of-black-television-drama/
It’s not quite true that I’ve never seen anything like Empire. The centuries are plump with art and popular culture driven by tales of crime and power. Even on network television, not too long ago, there were lurid stories set within the music industry brought to us, in part, by the man who made The Godfather. But I’ve never seen anything that gets away with everything Empire gets away with — murder, basically. I’ve never seen anything on network television this shameless; this overwritten yet perfectly plotted; this ludicrously costumed, art-decorated, choreographed, soundtracked, acted, and directed; this hormonal, this … black. Believe me, at the moment, that’s an achievement against some competition: Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots on the Oprah Winfrey Network; BET’s Being Mary Jane and The Game; Single Ladies on VH1; and, arguably, ABC’s Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. Empire is different.
The show is a soap saga about a thriving record company: Empire records! It’s under siege from the inside and out. Its founder and CEO, Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), was a thug who rose from the streets of Philadelphia to the top of the charts, then to the top of a skyscraper. Howard — like the show — operates within some alternate prefab universe of lubricious glamour and lugubrious plotting: It’s Aaron Spelling’s The Godfather. Lucious is newly diagnosed with ALS. He’s also engaged to Empire’s head of A&R, a haughty biracial Swedish speaker named Anika (Grace Gealey). His ascent has come at the expense of his ex-wife, Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), who took the rap for Lucious on a drug-dealing charge and served 17 years in prison. She’s just been released, wants to better know her three adult sons, and demands a share in a business she helped create. The sons — bipolar Empire CFO Andre (Trai Byers), gay singer-songwriter Jamal (Jussie Smollett), hotheaded horndog rapper Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) — resent Cookie, until they come to resent Lucious. But no child’s parental loyalty lasts. The tide turning among them can induce seasickness.
In the first episode, Lucious, aware that’s he’s dying, explains his intentions. Upon his death, one of the sons stands to inherit stewardship of the label as it goes public. Jamal hears this plan, has a gander at the competition, and smells Shakespeare. “What is this? King Lear?” Abstractly, yes. But, even after a single episode, the allusion felt a little off. Lear is a stormy old megalomaniac. He’s irrational and petulant and possibly demented. When his youngest daughter, Cordelia, articulates ambivalence about her love for him — after her two sisters have feigned unconditional adoration — he explodes with insult. In Lear, absolute power faces its natural twilight, and its heirs connive for the benefits. Empire seems aware of that lineage, and with Lucious conniving for his sons’ love, it’s Lear in reverse. It’s also a department store of Shakespearean moral dilemmas and their consequences. Floor 1: Hamlet. Floor 2: Romeo and Juliet. Floor 3: Macbeth. The penthouse restaurant? Good evening, and welcome to Othello.
The show situates these timeless themes of lust, ambition, and corruption in a rich, richly paranoid fantasy world populated by a range of black faces and personalities and backgrounds. Some of the fantasy really does involve having the street sense, money, and good screenwriting to afford to get away with murder. (More than half of the main cast contemplates killing someone or actually does, on purpose or by accident.) Empire doesn’t just portray a world of privilege. It’s about what privilege means once you’re inside that world. It’s self-conscious without being excessively neurotic, nuts without being exactly psychological. It’s resoundingly, flamboyantly black without being about blackness. Here, black simply is.
This is what separates Empire from most of its black-melodrama peers. It’s the first one that doesn’t feel ghettoized or defensively assembled. The money is new but seems old on the Lyons — even for Cookie, who accustomed herself to lavishness without ever splurging or spreeing. The show celebrates particular flavors of blackness even as it paints each one a single emotional color: brash. It’s also a cooking show: The key to all the comedy and drama is the easy, fantastical commingling of all of those flavors of brashness. Aspirations here have already been achieved. What you see, largely, are its spoils.
♦♦♦
Television had previously hinted at something like Empire. As a boy, I watched ABC’s Dynasty for Diahann Carroll the way some people eat trail mix for the raisins. She played the shocking black addition to the white Carrington-Colby galaxy. Like Lucious, she was a concoction. (“Dominique Deveraux” was her nom de classy white people.) Like Lucious, she also had in her a bit of Milton’s charismatic, accursed Lucifer. She, too, ran a successful record label — from Denver. But Dynasty kept Dominique on a figurative island in its chic Colorado climes. As black people went, she was pretty much the only game in town, so the show kept backing her into interracial hot water. Would she ever admit, for instance, that Garrett is really the father of Dominique’s daughter, Jackie?
Most of America understandably watched for Joan Collins’s superbitch, Alexis. Everyone at my house wanted to see Dominique, in part because she was a fancy black lady who didn’t apologize for her fabulousness, and in part because that lady was played by Carroll, who eyebrow-raised her way through the show. (During the climax of one unforgettable, ecstatically advertised night of television, Alexis and Dominique proceeded to brawl their way around a mansion.) I could never get enough of Dominique because there was not actually enough of her to get. We watched Dynasty because in the 1980s there were scarcely any other even semi-serious black people on television’s three networks. But Dominique pointed a way forward for extravagant black soapiness, much as the less glamorous Angie-and-Jesse romance plots did on ABC’s All My Children.
Other mostly black soaps came — well, one: NBC’s stillborn Generations. But prime time was a desert. Middle-class and upper-middle-class blacks lived on sitcoms: Huxtables and Bankses and Winslows. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the richest treatments of black drama came by way of comedic satire. Robert Townsend imagined a black soap-opera universe with “The Bold, the Black, the Beautiful,” sketches that ran on his HBO variety show, Partners in Crime. The sketches followed Townsend’s Lake Arrington, a soul food magnate; Lake’s wife, Chandelier; and their many exploits with tramps, gigolo congressmen, and rival food purveyors. The whole thing now feels like a coming attraction for both the entirety of Tyler Perry and the spate of black dramas currently on television.
What wins Empire the gold for both uniqueness and a kind of greatishness is that its struggles are not ones of race and class, of respectability and propriety, of how to be bourgie in the conference-room seats and ghetto between the sheets (for the record: No one properly uses sheets on this show). With Empire, struggles are absorbed into the world of the show and neutralized. Political upheavals are in the past. The show operates at an almost paradisiacal remove from capital-C concerns. Poverty, murder, anti-gay prejudice, sexism, snitches, bitches, and feds all exist. So do biracial gay Australian photographers, Latin men, and characters played by Naomi Campbell and Courtney Love. But the show is pitched at canted angles of normalcy. And that struggle-free normalcy creates the luxury you want from soap operas.
Everything about Empire is luxurious — not only the apparently infinite affluence, but also its ability to throw the high and the low, the tasteful and the obscene, into a Cuisinart and pulse away. Only in the final episode does a touch of racial strategy figure into anything. The Lyon boys, having learned which of them will run their father’s label, debate Lucious’s decision. An heir, they say, will make it hard for an outside party to take over or for white shareholders to back out. In the same episode, Patti LaBelle announces that some of the proceeds from Empire’s big melisma jamboree will go to #BlackLivesMatter — but only 10 percent, and the gesture is presented as an afterthought, befitting certain hashtag activism.
Empire’s innovation is the way it installs its assemblage of stereotypes — sassiness, thuggishness, ghetto-ness, bourgie snobbery — inside an unassailable, high-class, high-gloss world. The Lyon boys were reared as rich kids. They’re all spoiled in different ways. But the show presents its spoiled black children in a fresh vernacular. They’re the pampered young adults from Frank Ocean’s songs “Sweet Life” and “Super Rich Kids.” They see the streets from Town Cars and penthouses, and yet they’re kept “real.” Hakeem’s smooth, gangster braggadocio begins as a fraud, then turns into luxury-brand disses and navel-gazing. Empire doesn’t turn Andre, with his Wharton education and pretty white wife, Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday), into a running gag of over-assimilation. It doesn’t make him into Carlton Banks, a mis-mocked caricature of black success that equates wealth and education with having sold out. Andre has demons and shaky mental health, but none of that is predicated upon being not black enough.
Stereotypical whiteness, which on this show also means being born well-to-do, remains grist for throwaway putdowns. Anika appears fluent in both black and white European worlds and might be the second snakiest, most laughable person on the show. And at some point, one of the sons asks Lucious’s cheery, dark-skinned, platinum-blonde executive assistant, Becky (Gabourey Sidibe), about her name. My mom is white, she basically says. Who knows if she’s kidding?
But the world of Empire distrusts easy assimilation. Lucious, with his light skin and glittering eyes, is a hero, a villain, and an enigma. The show deftly conjures an atmosphere of bratty ignorance, artistic sophistication, and racial suspicion. After all, it’s Rhonda who has to assert how hard she’s worked to get what’s she got. It’s her husband and brothers-in-law who’ve had everything handed to them. They’re loosely equated with a white rapper who’s the grandson of the potential shareholder in — never mind. What matters is that his richness and whiteness give him access to the Lyons’ creative juices. The show doesn’t have to laugh at these ideas and characters. There’s a way in which the campiness is its own force of self-mockery. Twitter reactions are baked into the ideology.
Empire’s ideas about race operate at a higher degree of difficulty than even Scandal, one of the most sexually and racially adventurous shows ever to appear on television. Like Scandal, Empire brings a crazed racial odyssey to a major network. Unlike Scandal, it’s not situated in a world of delicately maintained façades. Washington politics requires a kind of politesse, a brand that the show’s architect, Shonda Rhimes, has polished to perfection. Empire has no reliable sense of decorum. This is a world in which people peep and creep, but mostly they barge into rooms and blast the truth with an alacrity that would appall Scandal’s heroine, Olivia Pope. Secrets are a form of currency on Scandal. They’re a cancer on Empire. And bluntness appears to be a form of chemotherapy.
If Cookie and Olivia switched cities, it’d make for fascinating, funny television, but neither world could remain intact for long. Cookie would expose a whole city’s skeletons and be immediately out of a job. Olivia would provide withering scrutiny of the record label’s business plan, then disinfect all the tabletops, desktops, and backseats. That such a hypothetical, fan-fiction switch would fail indicates the diversity of blackness currently on dramatic television. There’s a relative wealth where 30 years ago there was only impoverishment.
♦♦♦
Cookie’s big mouth and Henson’s paint-bomb acting steal the show. But Lucious is the real piece of work. Over the course of the 12 episodes, he behaves in appalling ways: He kills Cookie’s cousin. In a flashback, he catches young Jamal sashaying in heels and stuffs him into a garbage can. He cheats on Anika with Cookie, then tells Cookie he’s leaving Anika, but doesn’t tell Cookie he’s changed his mind until Cookie arrives, in a bustier, at the dinner where Lucious and Anika announce their engagement. He refers to one of his artist’s girlfriend as a “thot.” He berates nurses and employees and his own sons, all while suffering tremors, cold sweats, and one of those talking-in-your-sleep jags that another character is shocked to overhear. He calls Rhonda all kinds of “white bitch,” and he turns out to be the father of the gay son’s surprise daughter.
To watch a nutty narcissist like Lucious in television’s current landscape — whose final shot puts him, for the moment, behind bars — is to be able to place him alongside Robert Durst of The Jinx and any of the other evil, so-called antiheroes who’ve been hogging the plots on series television for years. This is remarkable only in the sense that Lucious is a black male who behaves with what a district attorney might call impunity. He’s unfazed by his crimes and by Cookie’s seething return. I don’t know how long a show this over-the-top can continue to clear the bar. I don’t know that the writing will ever culminate in a role for Howard as good as James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, or Clive Owen’s John Thackery. But Lucious Lyon has more in common with them than with the men you’re also inclined to think about as you watch Empire: Wesley Snipes in New Jack City, say, or Denzel Washington in Training Day, or Howard himself in Hustle & Flow. There’s a cool about Lucious that explains his magnetism. The last TV character as blithely contemptible and contemptuous as Lucious was 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy. It’s an amazing irony: In being unapologetic for its blackness, Empire enters unsavory territory typically reserved for white male characters and often played as comedy.
On Scandal, blackness functions as an exhilarating third rail. On Empire, it’s the entire power source. Race trips up many a work of popular culture. You can feel the second half of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s pretty wonderful Netflix show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, trying to untangle the messes it makes in the first half. Most American television is white television. Whatever else that means, it suggests that most of the characters and writing are focused on stories in which no one of color is even near the center of the action. Sometimes those stories actually unfold at the expense of characters of color. Occasionally, that awareness of what often gets called privilege becomes part of a show’s sense of self, as it has on FX’s Louie.
For four years, Lena Dunham’s Girls has been unfairly under fire for training its focus on young white women. To me, that never felt like a problem of Dunham’s making. She’s a beneficiary of a system that values women like her. The fault lies, in her case, with HBO, which remains an unchallenged bastion of whiteness across time and realities. Nonetheless, the charge of privilege stuck to her and the show, and by its jumpy second season, it seemed to sting. But Girls just completed a smart, strong, mature fourth season in which it became a comedy about privilege and its discontents. The show doubled down on the traits that outraged its critics, but its creators are now seasoned enough to understand how to treat cluelessness, entitlement, and ignorance as sport. Dunham shifted the burden away from the show and onto the culture in a way that felt new.
An argument against Girls is that it’s another show by, about, and perhaps for white people. You can feel it justifying its right to continue to exist. There’s less of a cultural burden with Empire. What, really, has come before it? So much of its properties involve conflating and remixing the familiar that it feels fresh.
And it’s true: Compared to the general TV landscape, there’s not a lot that looks like Empire. So it’s possible to know the math and give its loudness and venality a pass. Some black people I know refuse to watch the show. They think it makes fools of black people. That seems fair. But what’s happening among these characters in this particularized world is more complex.
Anyway, there are lots of fools on television. It’s only once there’s a critical mass of different types of black and brown people that their crass and inane depiction ceases to represent a race or a condition and begins to feel like one of any number of options. I think audiences can sense that. The ratings for Empire started strong and got stronger every week. Most of that viewership was black. It’s a show that, unlike Scandal, feels free to speak directly to all black audiences. It doesn’t care for propriety. It doesn’t care that you don’t know what a “thot” is.
The show is a partial creation of Lee Daniels, the director of such way-out-there works of delirium and flagrancy as Shadowboxer, Precious, The Paperboy, and The Butler. Daniels is a showman director who cares not for the politics of respectability. It makes him an offensive, dangerous talent, but it also makes his art daring, necessary, fun, and refreshingly vulgar. That dangerousness and vulgarity light up this show. It is black, bold, and beautiful — stupid, too. That would be an insult to almost any other work of drama. With Empire, it feels like a major point of pride.
http://grantland.com/hollywood-pros...pire-and-the-state-of-black-television-drama/
I can see his point the two male leads essentially played themselves the quirky friends and neighbors crazy mixed up adventures. But Martin playing other characters made it a mix of a few different styles. But I understand his point. At least Martin had semi-regular white characters.
Bump for the key & peele thread
