Black-ish premiered tonight with a heavy set of expectations on it. In a nearly all-white television sitcom environment, the show, starring Anthony Anderson and Laurence Fishburne, was announced over a year ago but fell into a brief turnaround after its showrunner was replaced. Its creative team appeared to take their time and perfect the finished product. The unique concept showed the potential to capture lightning in a bottle the way past great sitcoms have.
But is the finished product any good? In my opinion, the initial results based on tonight’s pilot are good… ish.
Black-ish focuses on the Johnson family, a wealthy black family living in suburban Los Angeles. The basic overall premise revolves around father Andre (Anderson) having something of a cultural crisis over what he perceives his families’ loss of their cultural identity. He fears that his kids (and, to an extent, himself) are turning too white, particularly his son who has developed an affinity for field hockey at school. Sitting by the sidelines brilliantly occupying the archetypal role of all-knowing and wisecracking grandfather is Fishburne, who was a perfect addition to the show giving it heft and depth.
The pilot takes a long time to establish this idea, though, and the solid laughs don’t really kick off until Andre hits his office. The show cleverly brands management as “THEM” (all white) and worker bees as “US” (more diverse), masking a savage social-cultural statement in the guise of a throwaway visual gag. The cultural crisis continues when Andre, anticipating a promotion to a senior-level position, is branded the company’s SVP of the “Urban division.”
The show works best when it spends time with the family, echoing the great The Cosby Show in its bonding moments. It’s premature to draw a solid quality comparison to that show, but the parallels are there. My personal favorite moment of the show came when Andre, incensed at his son’s request for a Jewish bar mitzvah, conducts something of an African appreciation ceremony, complete with a subtle, yet hilarious, physical reference to Disney’s The Lion King.
Black-ish is an important sitcom because it promotes diversity in an environment where none exists. It asks questions that few shows ask, and it asks those questions in a non-preachy way, a difficult task indeed. I do only hope that the show evolves beyond its original premise and doesn’t spend its airtime rehashing the same arguments.
But, for now, Black-ish succeeds well enough on its comic merits. I enjoyed its political and topical humor (the expected OJ reference “Baby, the gloves didn’t fit!” or “Obama’s the first black president???”) as much as I enjoyed its cultural humor (Fishburne on baked fried chicken: “Fried fried chicken is too black for you?”).
The one odd thing about the show is that it’s paired with Modern Family, a show definitely not known for its diversity, so I question whether Black-ish will find its audience in that Emmy-darling’s shadow. I will keep watching, though, as it is the first show of the 2014 Fall TV season to entice me to come back for seconds.