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For five solid years, Living Single was part of a solid Thursday night block on Fox that caters specifically to the African-American demographic. The show would be centered around four twenty-something black women in Brooklyn and their (mis)adventures in the workplace and the dating game. On to the tale of the tape… Relevance: Oh […]
The Wire aired for five seasons on HBO. The main character of the show was the city of Baltimore, with each season looking at the city through a different infrastructure (the streets, the docks, politics, the school system and the media). I’ve done nothing to disguise the large amount of admiration for the show […]
Openly taking its cues from Scarface, New Jack City was an ‘anti-drug’ movie about a group of young brothers in New York rising to the type of the drug game in the early years of hip hop. I openly admit this was a personal favorite of mine growing up as a teenager in the early […]
Still one of the most beloved of all shows about black families, Good Times still stands for good and bad reasons as a benchmark for black television. On to the tale of the tape… Relevance: The story of the Evans family, struggling to make ends meet in the projects of Chicago. Nuff said. Legacy: The […]
Based on the critically acclaimed novel, The Color Purple was an equally popular film that received its fair share of critical acclaim. On to the tale of the tape… Relevance: The storyline of black life in the South in the early 20th century would be enough for this category. The inclusion of the film’s author and the film’s […]
One of the most emotionally powerful movies of its era, What’s Love Got to Do With It? follows the true life rise of superstar Tina Turner and her notoriously explosive marriage to Ike. A black biopic made at least ten years before the musical biopic became one of the genre’s du jour in Hollywood. On to […]
One of the most popular shows of the late 70s and early 80s, The Jeffersons revolved around the day to day life of dry cleaner George Jefferson and his wife Louise (Weezy). The show left a lasting impression on not just black culture, but the mainstream as well. Let’s examine the ways, shall we? […]
This one makes me reminisce how good we had it in the 90s. I can pick up the phone right now and start quoting from this show to put my people into a laughing fit. For the uninitiated, Martin told the story of a Detroit DJ (Martin Payne) and his comical relationships with his […]
More than once, I’ve been asked by people ‘outside the target audience’ to explain the phenomenon of Madea and the Tyler Perry brand. My standard answer usually revolves around the fact that, while I don’t consider myself part of the target audience personally, Tyler Perry movies are the only films that come out that my […]
Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorsese all get their well-deserved credit, but doesn’t Mel Brooks deserve a little more love for pumping out his own classic films in the 70s/early 80s? Chief among them is his parody of the Western genre, Blazing Saddles. The story revolves around a black sheriff put in charge of a racist town […]
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