I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  The table read for “Hope” had been cathartic; afterward, Laurence Fishburne and Jenifer Lewis, who play the Johnson grandparents, made speeches thanking Barris for writing it. But Barris knew that the episode was odd—not especially funny and possibly pedantic. “I played it for friends, and no one’s going to say they don’t like it to your face,” Barris told me. “But the reactions have been mixed.” He worried that it might be perceived as agitprop, a Black Lives Matter episode; although he supported the movement, he wasn’t a fan of the idiom. “It’s alienating,” he told me. “No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.”

  These worries were intensified by some Westeros-style drama at Disney, which owns ABC. A week earlier, Barris’s strongest ally—the network’s president, Paul Lee, the British executive who had bought black-ish—had been ousted. Ben Sherwood, the president of Disney–ABC Television Group, replaced Lee, who is white, with Lee’s deputy, Channing Dungey. She became the first black network president in history, a benchmark that got gushing press. But Barris didn’t know Dungey; he had no idea what to expect. It wasn’t a great moment for an episode to misfire with the show’s audience, which is three-quarters nonblack. On Monday, Barris said, he had called ABC to make sure that its promos prepped viewers for, “as much as I don’t want to say this, a ‘very special episode.’ ” He added, “They did a good job.”

  Now that the East Coast airing was over, it was clear that “Hope” was a phenomenon: It was trending on Twitter and being GIF’d and quoted and hallelujahed for its embrace of the Norman Lear tradition of political theater. “So many people I went to school with, that I hadn’t talked to since elementary school,” Barris marveled, reading his email. He looked for negative responses, too: “On Facebook, I got scared, because I saw people saying, ‘I’ll never watch the show again.’ That’s the last thing I need right now.”

  Barris’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Kaleigh, came in, holding her phone up, and said, “I read so many comments about people crying—people saying it was one of the most inspirational shows they ever watched.” Her younger sister Leyah furrowed her brow: “But they haven’t seen it yet!”

  Barris cracked up. “On the East Coast!” he said. “Leave it to Leyah to shoot it down. This house is a hornets’ nest.”

  As “Hope” began, Kass curled against his mom on a sofa, the girls reclined in black leather armchairs, and Beau sat cross-legged near his father, eating popcorn. The show opened with a newsreel-like montage—the Iran-hostage crisis, JFK’s motorcade—that culminated with the sweet, smiling face of Trayvon Martin.

  They watched the episode, which ended with Ruby, Dre’s mother, spray-painting BLACK OWNED on the family’s garage. As the credits rolled, there was a silence. “Kaleigh, what’s the matter?” Barris asked. “I just feel sad,” she said, looking at her feet. “Did it bum you out?” “Yeah.” His daughters began unspooling their responses, with Kaleigh describing how self-conscious she felt when they were the only black family in nice restaurants—how people stared at them. She hated the fact that her younger brothers would need to learn defensive tactics to deal with cops. “I feel like I have to tell my brothers that, regardless of how they’re treating you, regardless if you’re doing anything wrong, with the police you comply, because he’s an authority—he has this gun on him, he could kill you.”

  Turning to Beau, Barris said, “What jokes did you like?” His son picked a scene in which the Johnsons bickered about takeout menus: “I liked it when we”—for Beau, there was no distinction between the Johnsons and the Barrises—“were all talking over each other.” The family laughed at how well the show nailed their raucous style. Six-year-old Kass was fast asleep, and Barris carried him up to bed.

  * * *

  —

  Barris and Rainbow first dated when he was sixteen and she was fourteen, a basketball player and a cheerleader attending sister-and-brother Catholic high schools in Los Angeles. Rainbow accidentally got pregnant by Barris when she was twenty-two and a medical-school student in Boston, after she flew out to visit him in Los Angeles. In between, they broke up and dated mutual friends while attending Clark Atlanta University. Both had been inspired to apply to the school by two intoxicating portrayals of historically black colleges: the 1987 Cosby spin-off A Different World and the 1988 Spike Lee movie School Daze. Lee’s film, especially, had jolted Barris: He’d never seen anything like its dance-off between “jigaboos” and “wannabes,” its brazen display of intra-black tension. Lee impressed him as a new kind of black artist, an impolite innovator with a voice supple enough to “talk about things that felt very personal to me but make everyone else interested in them.”

  Barris studied film, dreaming of becoming “the new Spike Lee.” But he was also drawn to black sitcoms, which proliferated after the success of Cosby. For a while, the boom seemed like a lasting phenomenon: Will Smith beatboxed as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on NBC; on A Different World, activists, premeds, and Jack-and-Jill princesses sparred and flirted. In 1990, the Fox network launched a slate of black-centered programming, including the celebrated sketch show In Living Color. In 1994, though, the show was canceled, along with The Sinbad Show, Roc, and South Central, as Fox rebranded for mainstream—meaning white—audiences. In the late nineties, black comedies were repeatedly subjected to this form of TV gentrification: They were launched on upstart cable networks, like UPN and The WB, then canceled, or shunted to BET, when the networks whitened up their programming. In 1999, the NAACP lamented a “virtual whiteout” on television. As Kristal Brent Zook writes in her 1999 book, Color by Fox, network executives were uneasy not just with black casts and writers but with “black complexity”: They bumped black creators for white producers, pushing for the most risk-free, formulaic comedy.

  In 1998, Barris, working with several other aspiring TV writers, shot footage for a documentary about this phenomenon, calling it Film Noir. Among the people Barris interviewed were Felicia D. Henderson, who wrote for the sitcom Moesha, and a co-creator of Moesha, Ralph Farquhar—Rainbow’s uncle. Before they could finish it, however, Barris and his partners ditched the project, fearful of alienating employers. “We didn’t want to fuck ourselves before we began,” he said. But Henderson became his mentor. She helped Barris get a slot in the Paramount Writers Program, a diversity initiative, and hired him to write for Soul Food, a series she created for Showtime. During the years it aired, from 2000 to 2004, it was the only black-family drama on television.

  To Barris’s mother, Tina, TV writing seemed like a crazy gamble for a college-educated black man. In fact, right after he graduated from Clark Atlanta, she’d hooked him up with a job as the press secretary for an L.A. councilman, Nate Holden. “I was wearing these Men’s Wearhouse suits, hating my life,” Barris told me, laughing. She was furious when he quit to try stand-up comedy and writing. Barris has always been devoted to Tina, who raised him and his three siblings, mostly on her own, in Inglewood, in poverty-ridden South Central L.A. Tina divorced Barris’s father, who was physically abusive, when Barris was five; six years later, his father won a settlement after losing a lung in an industrial accident. Half the money went toward supporting the children, enabling Tina and the kids to move to middle-class, integrated Hancock Park and allowing Barris to attend private school.

  Though he hung out at The Comedy Store, Barris says that he wasn’t much of a stand-up performer: “There’s a certain don’t-give-a-fuckness that you have to have as a comic. I don’t have that. At my core, I’m shy.” But he was an empathetic observer, a strong joke writer, and, as Rainbow puts it, a natural “hustler,” able to sell ideas and to crack closed systems. After working on Soul Food, he helped broker a reality-TV deal for his best friend since childhood, the model Tyra Banks. The show, America’s Next Top Model, became a hit, with Barris as its co-creator and producer. (He still gets a cut of the profits.)

  After a year, he returned t
o scripted TV. He initially wrote for shows aimed at an African American audience, such as The Game, about the wives of football stars. But when he jumped to sitcoms on The WB and NBC, with predominantly white writing staffs, he hit a wall. Barris was often the “diversity hire,” and dryly describes himself as a “beneficiary-slash-victim” of such initiatives. In some writers’ rooms, such as the one for a short-lived WB sitcom called Like Family, he made lifelong friends. But wherever he worked he was a cultural outsider—the one writer who didn’t know who Neil Young was. “Any mistake that you make is amplified,” Barris recalls of the experience. Barris quotes W.E.B. Du Bois when talking about the “double-consciousness” that a black person develops in a white world, but he also describes acquiring chops specific to comedy writers: He learned how to use jokes to build bridges and defang put-downs. “I beat ’em with funny,” he says. When a colleague kept comparing the colleges they had attended, Barris recalls, “I was like, ‘It doesn’t really matter where you went to school, because right now I’m looking at you across the table. So kudos to Harvard! Because we make the same money.’ ”

  His grimmest experience was on Listen Up, a 2004 CBS sitcom starring Jason Alexander as a sports journalist, with Malcolm-Jamal Warner in a supporting role. The showrunner was Jeff Martin, a former writer for David Letterman’s show and a Harvard Lampoon alum who wrote for The Simpsons. It was a slow poisoning; Barris knew that the room didn’t like him. When they wrote a story about the mother of Warner’s character—an educated football player from New York—the white writers pitched the mother’s lines as those of a fat black woman with a Southern accent. Barris recalls, “I was like, ‘Wait, where is she from? How much does she weigh?’ It wasn’t even done maliciously—it was just, ‘This is how a black woman sounds.’ It was such a wake-up call.”

  One day, Barris argued with Martin over the seventies Norman Lear series Good Times, which is about the Evanses, a poor black family living in the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago. Martin said that he wished he’d been born into the Evans family, because it was “rich in love.” Barris blew up: “Dude, you would not have liked to be in the fucking family on Good Times. You’re saying that from such an entitled place! You missed the whole point of the show.” Barris’s contract wasn’t picked up—the Hollywood equivalent of being fired. (Martin said that his comments were “likely ironic,” adding that he’s happy for Barris’s success. “His sensibility didn’t fit my show,” he said. “But saying someone didn’t capture the voice of Listen Up isn’t much of an insult.”)

  Barris wrote pilot after pilot, trying to crack the formula that would put him in charge. Black-ish was his nineteenth attempt. Three got produced but didn’t make it to air. By this time, he and Rainbow had married. She’d moved back to L.A., restarted med school—she couldn’t transfer credits—and had two more daughters. The marriage was sometimes strained, and many of Barris’s pilots mined tensions at home. One was about a married man torn between his wife and his partying friends; another came out of a marriage-therapy session in which the counselor told Barris and Rainbow that they needed to reboot their relationship, as if they’d never met, to suit their adult, not adolescent, selves.

  Barris calls black-ish his best and most honest iteration of these pilots. Dre and Bow, former high school sweethearts, have four kids: the Instagram-addled Zoey, the proud nerd Andre, Jr., and the mismatched twins Jack and Diane (who are named for the John Cougar Mellencamp song—one of Barris’s favorites). Dre’s parents are divorced; his mom, Ruby, is fiery and smothering, and his dad, Pops, judges him for not “whupping” his kids. Despite his success, Dre feels ill at ease living in an upper-middle-class, largely white suburb—and at sea as a father. Andre, Jr., is obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and wants a “bro mitzvah”; Zoey is a queen bee whose white friends use the N-word. Bow is an Ivy League graduate with a white hippie dad. If blackness is so easily detached from Dre’s prized codes of urban authenticity, what does that make him?

  In the show’s original conception, Dre was the diversity hire on a network sitcom, which Barris based on Listen Up. ABC asked him to change the workplace to an advertising agency, in part, Barris acknowledges, to facilitate product integration. (He says of an episode in which Dre buys Zoey a Buick, “It was a commercial, dude.”) Tyra Banks calls Barris one of the most nostalgic people she knows, and, though black-ish isn’t set in the past, it’s studded with flashbacks to Dre’s Jheri-curled childhood—brief scenes with the stinging clarity of Chris Rock’s Everybody Hates Chris. The show’s psychic engine is Dre’s sense that the past isn’t past, for him and for all African Americans. In an episode about Dre’s yen for high-end sneakers, he explains, “Think about it. If you didn’t get a paycheck for four hundred years, when you did finally get one, you might want to spend it.” At the same time, black-ish pokes fun at Dre’s tendency to see antiblackness everywhere. He fumes that it is racist to ask if he can swim—but he can’t swim.

  Barris worked on the pilot with the African American comic Larry Wilmore, whom ABC proposed as a co-showrunner. Wilmore, who wrote for In Living Color and created The Bernie Mac Show, knew plenty about what he calls the “ethnic cleansing” of nineties TV. But by 2014, TV executives were biting again. Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland empire was a ratings machine, led by Scandal, the first network drama since 1974 to star a black woman. Racial critiques of Girls—and the simultaneous rise of Black Twitter—had scared executives into at least paying lip service to diversity. On cable and streaming, shows like Orange Is the New Black, with an ensemble that was black and brown (and, just as shocking, butch, fat, and trans), were thriving; creators like Mindy Kaling were becoming popular brands. A Nielsen report found that black viewers watched 37 percent more TV than other demographics. It seemed like the right moment for an idea-driven sitcom about race that, as Wilmore saw it, felt daring and distinct, with “brilliant colors, flashy character choices, bold strokes.”

  There was a bidding war for black-ish. Barris, who’d imagined placing the show in the cable-prestige jewel box of FX, went for the money and the mass audience—and the pressure to produce twenty-four episodes—of ABC. When Comedy Central offered Wilmore a talk show, Barris asked to partner with the white writer Jonathan Groff, an executive producer on Happy Endings, a cult sitcom that featured an interracial couple. For Barris, Wilmore’s departure was scary but also an opportunity. “People knew I was the voice behind this,” Barris said. “That’s how you make yourself invaluable.”

  * * *

  —

  A writers’ room procrastinates as much as a writer. On a recent Monday afternoon in Burbank, black-ish staffers stared at a monitor on the wall, giggling at a YouTube video of a cheetah eviscerating an ostrich. They spent ten minutes talking about the difference between Iceland and Greenland. But this aimlessness was a pose, as the table kept looping back, struggling to “punch up” bad dialogue in the season ender.

  A high-concept finale was becoming a tradition for black-ish: Season 1’s featured a flashback to the Cotton Club of the 1920s. This year’s installment, “Good-ish Times,” included a meticulous parody of the seventies sitcom that Barris had argued about with his old boss. When the show starts, Dre is anxious about corporate layoffs, especially because Bow is expecting their fifth child. He falls asleep watching a rerun of Good Times and dreams that he’s Keith, the football-playing boyfriend of Thelma, the show’s teen daughter, and that he is terrified to tell her parents (played by Pops and Ruby) that he’s got their daughter pregnant. Andre, Jr., plays J.J., the pencil-necked geek famous for shouting “Dy-no-mite!” Black-ish is filmed in the modern single-cam style, but the dream sequence would be a multi-cam shot, before a live audience. The conceit played off Dre’s terror of falling back into poverty and his nostalgia for both his childhood and the sitcom that reflected it. Not coincidentally, the plot mirrored Barris’s adult life, which was bookended by two unplanned pregnancies—the one that led him t
o marry early, and Rainbow’s current pregnancy, which had come after nearly two decades of marriage.

  The table read had been a dud, possibly because the writers felt uneasy constructing multi-cam jokes, with their hard, vaudeville beats. There were false starts; there were worries that some gags were mere “high-jinksing.” Someone pitched a diabetes joke: Maybe Florida, the Good Times matriarch, could say about a dog that bit her, “I would have lost my big toe, had the sugar not already taken it.” Another writer wondered if nonblack viewers would get it. “Is that too deep a cut?” Barris said, polling the room. It was fine, he decided: 30 Rock made jokes about the same subject.

  A writers’ room, in Barris’s experience, is the “cool kids’ table,” an aggressive display of social prowess, disguised in jokes. He and Groff were joined by such veterans as Gail Lerner, who worked on Will & Grace, and Yvette Lee Bowser, who created Living Single. It was far more diverse, in gender and in race, than most sitcom rooms; down the street, the black-ish set had a crew dominated by people of color.

  Still, Barris had his own diversity hire, whose salary was drawn, in part, from a Disney corporate fund: Damilare Sonoiki, nicknamed Dam, a twenty-four-year-old African American Harvard alumnus and former Lampoon editor. Like Barris, Sonoiki had grown up in a violent neighborhood, in Houston, and transferred to a private school. He had just submitted his first script, which showed promise, but he wasn’t entirely at home in the room. As the work dragged into the night, Sonoiki, who had a jacket on, tugged its hood over his head and pulled its collar up, until only his eyes peeked out. At one point, he suggested capping some banter with a sour punch line: “Unlike you, bitch.” When the other writers brushed it off, Barris turned his head to Sonoiki. “You just had a win,” he chided him, sotto voce, referring to the script. “Feel the room. Don’t say something like that.”