In its first season, ABC’s popular comedy series, “black-ish” delivered on a mission to raise awareness around various topics on race and family, and that objective hasn’t changed as the show gears up for a fall premiere.
The show’s sophomore season will address topics including health care and other issues affecting the black community, as well as dialogue surrounding the use of “the n-word.”
Starting these types of conversations on primetime network television, says show creator Kenya Barris, can come with high risks and high rewards.
“There’s a lot of stuff that we’re going to cover, and I’m scared because you always want to tell good stories and you want to do it in a way to get people talking,” he told The Huffington Post. “But at the same time, some of those same stories are the ones that you sort of put into a corner and I hope that people are understanding and like the way that we’re doing it.”
The second season premiere features scenes of the Johnson family attempting to dissect the usage of “the n-word,” which characters say and is bleeped in the scene above. Barris said he was previously apprehensive about highlighting the word on the show, but has since changed his mind and feels the premiere episode will be a good entry point to dissecting the term on television.
“One of the things that we hoped would take off [in season one] was topic-driven humor. So we are going to definitely try to talk about some topics that people talk about. In our premiere episode we talk about the N-word and we thought it would be a entry point into that subject in an interesting way to handle it and show different sides of the conversation.”
In fact, Barris likens his attempt to expanding dialogue around the word on network television similar to how legendary TV producer, Norman Lear once discussed race on black sitcoms. The Los Angeles native feels Lear’s approach to tackling race relations directly — with characters using the n-word — on shows like “Sanford and Son” and “The Jeffersons” during the 1970s is a void that’s missing from today’s lineup of shows.
Source: Black Voices | Brennan Williams
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