I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  A few minutes later, Barris himself made a pitch that fell flat. He suggested that Florida should offer the family dessert by saying, “I want to make you something that I learned from the white people I work for—a kind of meal after dinner.” The other writers stared at Barris blankly, but he kept adding dialogue: “What? Sugar water?” The premise didn’t entirely make sense (wouldn’t poor kids know what dessert is?) and there were nervous giggles. Suddenly, Barris laughed at his belly flop—and skillfully reversed the dynamic. “So. Much. Confused!” he shouted, planting his hands on the table, then sending the room into hysterics with an instant replay: “I was looking at you, Lindsey, thinking you would save me, you would get this, you were on my side. But there was nothing.” Yet even as he mocked himself Barris kept pitching the bit, selling the surreal notion of a family so poor that they’d never had dessert. “The little meal that white people eat after dinner?” Magically, another writer offered a punch line—“Breakfast!”—and the table burst into applause. “Folks, we have one joke,” Groff announced.

  The table scrambled to craft it into a multipart “run”: “Breakfast?” “No, it’s sweet.” “Sugar eggs?”

  “Sweet night breakfast?” Barris said. Maybe the table was so tired that the writers had become slaphappy, but “Sweet night breakfast?” won a big, goofy laugh—it was the sort of curveball construction that suited black-ish. There were still doubters in the room. But the next day, when the scene was shot, “Sweet night breakfast?” killed.

  Two days later, the writers had a flare-up over “relatability,” that network bugaboo. Barris was in and out of the room, and while he was gone, the writers discussed the character of Vivian—a black nanny, played by Regina Hall, who gives Dre a case of “black white guilt.” She’d been introduced in an already filmed episode, but Peter Saji, a younger black writer, objected to her presence in future scripts: It might make the Johnsons seem too privileged. The idea began to harden in Barris’s absence.

  When he returned, one of the writers presented it as a structural issue: Wouldn’t it be more efficient to give Vivian’s jokes to Grandma Ruby? Barris argued that Ruby—a zany character who makes remarks like “Not now, hybrid!” to her biracial daughter-in-law—had begun dominating the show, even though she doesn’t live in Dre’s house. “On set this week, it was un-fucking-comfortable,” Barris said. “Nothing but Ruby! We have to be careful—she’s not the mom, she’s the grandma. Tracee has gotten us this far.”

  Eventually, Saji explained his underlying objection. His own family, he said, would find a nanny an alienating concept. Didn’t viewers prefer to think that the parents “do it all”?

  Barris frowned. “She’s having a baby,” he said flatly. “She has four kids. She’s a full-time doctor. He works full time. How are these kids getting to soccer practice?” He was bugged enough that he returned to the subject later: “That ‘accessibility’ thing, it bumps me—it bothers me.” The families on Modern Family live in multimillion-dollar houses and have nannies, he pointed out.

  “With us, it’s like, ‘How can they afford something?’ ” Barris said. “It’s the honest version of what this family would have.” If he had to present the “most palatable” version of the family, in order to be less threatening, he said, “I don’t even want to tell that story.”

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  When Barris speaks with the most passion, it’s about his mother. In a single year, he told me, Tina “left an abusive marriage, got divorced, lost her house in a fire, and my little brother died—of cancer, of leukemia, in her bed, you know?” He went on, “And she still had four kids to raise. She said, ‘If I didn’t have you guys, I would have just packed my bags and run away.’ ”

  The character of Ruby, who is so close to Dre that she threatens his relationship with Bow, was obviously inspired by Barris’s mom. But Barris told me that Tina also inspired the Laurence Fishburne character, who is impossible to please. While I was on the set, Barris talked to her at least once a day on the phone—asking after her health, letting her know that he was appearing on Nightline to discuss “Hope.” “She was like, ‘You weren’t on much,’ ” he joked. “I said, ‘Oh, really? Thanks, Mom. When have you been on Nightline?’ ” And yet he clearly adores her, admires her, and is intimidated by her—he worries about pleasing her with every decision he makes. She never accepted welfare, he told me: They took subsidies like government cheese, but she worked three jobs—bartender, selling Mary Kay and Amway, hocking insurance for Golden State Mutual—while studying for the real-estate broker’s exam. She saved up loose change in a jar, then spent it all to surprise him with a new bike. Eventually, she invested in low-income real estate, collecting the rent herself, with a snub-nosed pistol in her pocket.

  The death of Barris’s younger brother, David, nearly wrecked her. She hovered over Barris, who had asthma, keeping him home whenever the pollen index rose. (As an adult, he is a huge hypochondriac: He once called Rainbow in a panic, convinced that he had SARS.) At seven, Barris got warehoused in a special-ed class with the Orwellian name the Opportunity Room. When the school psychiatrist suggested that his mother put Barris on Ritalin, she refused, and instead got him into a progressive black private school, the International Children’s School, which was sponsored by Bill Cosby. The pressure Barris felt to succeed increased when his beloved older brother, Patrick—who had won academic and athletic scholarships to USC—began using cocaine and received a diagnosis of schizophrenia; Patrick dropped out, and now lives at one of his mother’s properties.

  When Barris was six, Tina moved her kids into a new house—one that his violent father wasn’t supposed to be able to find. One night, Barris, who was afraid of the dark, heard noises. He wanted to get in bed with his mom, but she’d been training him to stay put; she said that he’d get a spanking if he didn’t go to sleep. Barris sneaked out anyway, scared. When his mom realized there was an intruder, she yelled at Barris to go into her room and shut the door. He peeked out: His dad had broken through his bedroom window, and his mom, holding a gun, was backing up, as his father moved toward her. Then Tina took a deep breath, closed her eyes, turned her head away, and shot at his father five times. “Pow pow pow pow pow,” Barris recalls. “She kept clicking. And he, like, barreled past her—and damn near broke the door off the hinges. I hear ‘Rrrrrrowrrr’ as he tears off.” His mother sat down and sobbed. “And she’s like, ‘Go get the phone, go get the phone!’ It was one of those long cords and she said, ‘Push zero.’ ” When the police arrived, Barris remembers feeling not afraid but embarrassed. “The police officer was so nice to me. He was saying, ‘Show me your room.’ ” As many run-ins as Barris has had with the cops, he says, they sometimes are there for you “at the worst moments of your life.”

  At the hospital, his father, who’d been hit once in the stomach, was headed into surgery, handcuffed to a gurney. Too fearful of him to press charges, his mother fled, with her kids, to New York for a year. She took Barris to counseling, but he felt that the incident hadn’t actually damaged him. “I don’t know if I was just, young, whatever, but part of me felt like, He lived. You know what I’m saying? He got what he deserved. It’s almost like, ‘Good for my mom!’ Because he never messed with her again…and she kind of claimed her power back. I’m glad that I was there with her. It made us very, very close. She always was like, I’m so sorry. And she was worried that she was gonna raise, like, a psychopath! But it was—that was a story I would tell the room. And every writer would be like, ‘What the fuck did he just say?’ ” Being honest about the unsanded edges of his life, Barris says, lets others be honest, too. It’s key to good comedy. “I think it’s that aggregate of situations that make you who you are. This is a reality, and this is what happened.”

  He says of the shooting, “You don’t pull a trigger that many times unless you’re trying to—you know. I think she’d suffered through so much, and she
was so scared that she was like, ‘If I’m gonna do this, I have to do it.’ ”

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  “Good evening, I’m James Earl Jones,” Laurence Fishburne intoned in a familiar oceanic boom. “Welcome to ‘Black Omnibus.’ ” Fishburne, wearing an Afro wig and a broad-lapelled blazer, stood in front of a ceremonial African mask. Barris and an assistant director, E. Langston Craig, were nearly gasping with excitement. It was a tiny cutaway joke in the “Good-ish Times” episode, an absurdist reference to a PBS show that aired for twelve episodes in 1973—the deepest of deep cuts, a hat tip to a beautiful bit of lost black TV history.

  “Man, I don’t even care if nobody gets this,” Barris said. “I swear to God, it’s the entire reason to do this show.”

  He was less pleased at how things were going during another scene—the family fight that triggers Dre to dream that he’s in Good Times. Around the kitchen table, the Johnson kids cheerfully describe their big-ticket summer plans. The twins are going to Hunger Games Camp and need expensive bows and arrows. Dre loses his temper, telling his kids that summer is supposed to be for miserable jobs—like the ones he had.

  To goose the scene, Barris retreated with Anderson, and when they started rolling again, the actor improvised zingers. “You never had to ask a white lady if you could pump her gas!” Anderson sputtered at the kids. And then: “You never had to take care of a pigeon coop for food stamps!” As Anderson reeled off increasingly baroque variations, the crew cracked up: “You never had to take care of a pit-bull puppy!…sell baking soda to the dope house!…sell curl activator door-to-door in the Mexican neighborhood!”

  During prep for the next take, Barris told me that these riffs—none of which made the final cut—were based on stories that he and Anderson had shared. Barris used to approach white women at gas stations and ask them if he could pump their gas. (“It was a little threatening,” he told me sheepishly. “Three black nine-year-old boys on Huffy bikes.”) Anderson, whose mother grew up in the Chicago project where Good Times is set, sold curl activator. Barris frequently embeds his scripts with veiled biography: In another episode, Dre warns Pops not to give his drink to Ruby, because “she shot you the last time she had gin.”

  Later, over lunch, Anderson and I talked about his character. Andre, he said, is “a hundred percent Kenya, a hundred percent Anthony.” He and Barris had “instant kinship”: Both were born in South Central, were “first-generation successful,” and had kids in private school. “Not only is my son the only chocolate drop in his class, he was the only chocolate drop in his grade for three and a half years,” Anderson said. A notch pricklier than Barris, Anderson has a pugnacious charm and a low tolerance for nonsense: After “Hope” aired, he sparred with critics who called the show racist. As a boy, he’d loved Good Times, particularly John Amos’s portrayal of the dignified and hardworking James Evans, who reminded him of his own father.

  Like Anderson, many members of the production share Barris’s class-jumping biography. “I was born and raised on the border of Ferguson, and it’s goddamn personal,” Jenifer Lewis, who plays Ruby, said of the police-brutality themes of “Hope.” She didn’t watch Good Times growing up, because it felt painfully close to her own life. The writer Yvette Lee Bowser has a similar background, and Fishburne describes Barris as a younger-brother figure.

  Tracee Ellis Ross is the outlier: The child of Diana Ross, she was educated in Switzerland and on the Upper East Side. When the show started, her character veered dangerously close to cliché: the sighing mom-wife with the baby-man husband who gets all the laughs. After a few episodes, however, Barris and his writers tapped into Ross’s comic charisma—her goofy grin, her Lucille Ball–ish gift for being at once glamorous and ridiculous. Barris told me that Ross didn’t always agree on the direction of her character. They’d argued about her dialogue in “Hope,” in which Bow kept making the case, to an almost blinkered degree, for letting “the justice system do its job.” But Ross told me that Bow was a rewarding role, precisely because the show emphasized Dre’s perspective on the world. Her performance had to be emotionally rich enough to give Bow “wholeness.”

  Barris bridled at online criticism he’d seen directed at Dre. He said, “It was as if they were trying to say that a black man couldn’t be both blustery and lovable”—that Dre couldn’t be loved as people had loved Ralph Kramden. He saw the criticism as similar to early network notes suggesting that he make the Johnson house smaller. Wisely, these tensions had been written into the scripts. In one episode, “The Gift of Hunger,” Dre worries that his kids have been spoiled by cushy lives. Then he realizes that the children, by having a flamboyant, easily angered father like him, have been dealt a different kind of obstacle. In voice-over, Dre says, “I’m a lot. And if they could get past me, they could get past anything.”

  Barris himself is old-school in certain ways. He opened every door as we passed through the set. He insisted that I text him after I drove back to my hotel, to confirm that I had arrived safely. He wants to make more money than his wife; it was important to him that she take his name. He’s prone to theories about how men and women are “wired.” The biggest fight the writers’ room ever had was about Barris’s desire to own a gun, which led to an episode in which Dre wants to buy one to protect his family. At one point, during the debate over the black-nanny character, he told his staff, “Honestly, I regret not having spanked my kids.” (He won’t change his policy for the new baby, though: “He’s not going to be the Spanked One!”)

  Groff said that he’s asked Barris if Dre wants to be a modern man but falls short. No, Barris said: Dre is who he says he is. “I still believe a little bit that changing gender roles have hurt relationships,” Barris said. Many of his mentors have been women; he regularly hires women as collaborators—and half the black-ish writers are female, a rarity for a sitcom. But Tyra Banks told me that she spent years talking to Barris about the tensions between men and women, in a rolling debate about gender and power. It’s possible, Barris said, that his nostalgia for old-fashioned breadwinner masculinity stems from the fact that his mother was “so far away” from identifying with the feminist movement. “My mom was a man and a woman—she had to be,” Barris said. “And I so wanted to have my mom have someone open a door for her, pull a chair out, take the trash out for her.”

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  One night in March, Barris and Rainbow—he in a tuxedo, she with her hair in two slim braids—attended an awards ceremony for the American Black Film Festival, to be aired on BET. Black-ish won for best TV comedy, Straight Outta Compton for best film. The presentation was dominated by proud speeches about the power of black Hollywood. But our table erupted in laughter at the evening’s rudest joke—one that was cut from the telecast. Jamie Foxx claimed that he had no clue why people were protesting the lack of Oscar nominations for African Americans. Foxx, an Oscar winner, said, “I called Denzel and said, ‘What’s this all about? I mean, hashtag What’s the Big Deal? I mean, hashtag Act Better!’ ”

  On the drive home, Barris and Rainbow kept giggling about “hashtag Act Better!” Barris told me, “I’ve got to be honest—I don’t know if this was the right year for a protest of the Oscars.” He argued that it was counterproductive to have a “black slot”: “It just dilutes it.” Like any film-studies major, he had finicky opinions about the year’s movies. He enjoyed Straight Outta Compton. But was it Best Picture material? He noted, “The Ryan Coogler movie that truly deserved a nomination wasn’t Creed. It was Fruitvale Station.” On the flip side, Idris Elba, the star of Beasts of No Nation, had been robbed. The problem was far bigger than the Oscars: When African Americans were starved of opportunity, they were forced to celebrate art merely because it existed, to be cheerleaders instead of individuals with distinct, even iconoclastic, tastes.

  Barris was particularly frustrated with prominent black figures who, to his mind, support
ed schlock. “I believed in Oprah for so long!” he moaned, as Rainbow smiled in recognition of the rant to come. “You know, Oprah is probably three weeks away from having a British accent. She was the purveyor of style and class.” But when Winfrey’s cable channel, OWN, began failing in the ratings, she’d partnered with Tyler Perry—the purveyor of gooey church-lady theatricals. “I know that Oprah has taste! She cannot think that those shows are good.”

  Barris clearly wants commercial success himself: He’d love to oversee a slate of TV shows, as Norman Lear did, and he has been working on multiple film projects. He co-wrote the script for the new movie Barbershop: The Next Cut. He’s developing a Good Times film and a comic version of Shaft. He’s got a deal to make a new ABC pilot—a sort of buddy-comedy version of one of his favorite shows, Veep, with characters based on Donald Trump and Al Sharpton. The next three years, he said, were crucial—his shot to establish a legacy that couldn’t be wiped out if the industry mood shifted.

  Unlike the movies, television now featured enough shows by and for and about people of color that it had become possible to draw comparisons. Barris is both excited by and competitive with NBC’s The Carmichael Show, another Lear-inflected black-family sitcom, which was co-created by his friend Jerrod Carmichael. He admits that he’s biased against Fox’s Empire—a camp rap melodrama that’s been creaming black-ish in the ratings—but he also doesn’t think it’s good. “Just because someone’s handicapped, doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole,” he said. “I can’t call this dude a dick because he’s in a wheelchair? Same thing—just because someone is black and they do something, doesn’t mean it’s dope.”

  At the ABFF awards, a presenter joked that ABC stood for Another Black Channel—a hoary joke that left Barris stone-faced. But he does express pride in the network’s deep bench of creators of color. According to Barris, John Ridley, the creator of the drama American Crime, encouraged him to secure a long-term deal with ABC, and Shonda Rhimes advised him on social-media strategies, including getting his cast on Twitter. Television is the vanguard medium now, Barris believes—he’s a binge viewer who is offended “on a primal level” by TV writers who don’t watch TV. But, regardless of the medium, he is most attracted to art that is “proprietary,” a word that Barris uses to describe not only early Spike Lee but also ambitious TV, from Jill Soloway’s Transparent to Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers, from Broad City to Mr. Robot. What rankles him is talent wasted: The funniest, meanest joke in “Hope” is Ruby’s claim that the guy Tasered by the cops deserved it, because he’d been selling copies of Lee’s Chi-Raq.