media essay 5-6 pages due 12 hours

28 | Sight&Sound | January 2017

A LESSON IN AWKWARD Following the toe-curlingly acute comedy of ‘The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl’, Issa Rae is back with ‘Insecure’, but has her zany, idiosyncratic brilliance been diluted during the transition from web series to mainstream TV? By Gaylene Gould

Internet star Issa Rae’s popular web series The Misadven- tures of Awkward Black Girl (2011-13) begins with an epi- sode called ‘Stop Sign’. In it we meet plain-faced J (played by Rae) in a beat-up car navigating traffic etiquette. When repeatedly stopping next to someone you know at red signals and stop signs, how long do you keep up the half- hearted smile and wave? Do you pretend to hear when they shout at you? Do you mime being on the phone? As in real life, the scene goes on long enough to make your toes curl. This opening instalment is low-budget practi- cal and comedically on point. “For any ordinary person,” J explains in voiceover, “the stop sign is a simple sign of direction, but for me it’s the epitome of social misdirec- tion.” She bears two crosses: she’s awkward AND black

– “the two worst things anyone could be”. Over 24 epi- sodes she guides us through life as a twentysomething wrestling with social mores on the fringes of adult life.

Comedy, of all genres, has been particularly successful at finding a wider audience for the black experience – through broad-appeal family sitcoms, from The Jeffersons (1975-85) to Black-ish (2014-), and more recent, edgier of- ferings such as Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-), an ellipti- cal look at life on the lower rungs of hip-hop’s celebrity ladder, and, in Britain, Michaela Coel’s dirty-mouthed Chewing Gum (2015-). Misadventures encroaches on terri- tory usually occupied by older Jewish men – existential comedy. Rae has said she was inspired to write the series after studying Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David – come-

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January 2017 | Sight&Sound | 29

RAE’S A LAUGH Issa Rae as Issa in Insecure (above), this year’s big- budget HBO follow-up to her hit web series Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (right)

dians who amble through the musing mind, revealing frailties most of us are too cool to admit to. The milieu ex- plored is often recognisable yet hilariously heightened: Misadventures reveals the murky, multicultural, zero- hours-contract world that America refuses to advertise.

J works in a call-centre for a dodgy diet pill company, Gutbusters. She’s surrounded by a cast of madcap col- leagues, including a delightful Rachel Dolezal-style race- switching boss, all skull-exposed cornrows and daishikis. J herself is no poster-child for normal. After her boyfriend dumped her, J shaved her head and has taken to compos- ing violent raps in her bedroom.

Essentially, Misadventures is a black The Office (2001- 03). But where David Brent suffers a self-awareness deficiency, J has been dished an excruciating double dose. We watch with shame-riddled compulsion as she writhes around in a perpetual state of embarrassment.

In an Escher-like episode called ‘The Long Corridor’ Rae brings to life the horror of walking past the same person over and over in a passageway until the standard string of polite greetings is exhausted. You wish the other person would die rather than face another awkward meeting. “Does this girl live in the hallway?” J screams internally.

At some time or other, we’ve all walked down that metaphoric corridor, haven’t we? Those places where social constructs threaten to crash down and expose our inept, bewildered selves. Misadventures lives within those terrible moments.

Race and gender are two of those constructs that both protect and stifle us. At least since The Birth of a Nation (the D.W. Griffith 1915 version, not Nate Parker’s recent film), images of black people and women have been a public not a private matter. Young black women are par- ticularly schooled in how not to present themselves for fear of negative labelling and the message often received is to tone down natural instincts in order to fit into a Eu- rocentric norm. Dress, style and behaviour become im- portant signifiers. If you need evidence, follow the nev- er-ending debates around the politics of black women’s hair. Letting one’s hair grow natural and unkempt could, according to some, in a single style bring down the entire race – but that’s what J does. She’s tomboy plain too, the kind of woman used to going unnoticed. Most of the storylines show her struggling with ideas of femininity. She’s an uncool, terrible flirt. The only romantic activity that makes any sense is with White Jay – an awkward pairing, because this is socially segregated America and White Jay is, well, white.

This unstyled character gained a fervent following among African American women, rather in the way Lena Dunham warmed the hearts of white women by waddling down a posh New England sidewalk in a bikini in her hit show Girls (2012-). As it did with Dunham, HBO took Rae into its stable. With its reputation for en- couraging quality writing and complex representations, HBO looked like the perfect partner. If anyone was going to understand Rae’s vision, it would.

The part of the TV watching world that I belong to waited impatiently. What impact would the move from a self-produced, crowdfunded internet platform to a major industry player have on Rae’s writing? Misadven- tures was principally made for and funded by a niche au- dience. Would the move from the margins to the centre prompt Rae to tone down the honest comic instincts that made her breakthrough such a refreshing joy? The show was finally aired this year under the name Insecure. Maybe the clue was in the title change. Men are rarely

labelled ‘insecure’. It is one of those nebulous feminised terms, like ‘hysterical’.

Rae explained her intention for the show in an inter- view with Fast Company magazine. “It seems to me [on television], we’re either extremely magical, or we’re ex- tremely flawless. But we don’t get to just be boring. Like, it’s a privilege to be able to be boring and not answer questions like, ‘What do you think about this shooting?’ and ‘How are you overcoming all of these obstacles?’… What about the times that I’m just kicking it with friends at brunch?”

The ‘we’ referred to here is black women. When it comes to black characterisations, boring is a radical concept. Black people are often placed at the edges of the frame (the sidekick) or presented negatively (the vil- lain). As a defining character trait, though, ‘boring’ needs some qualifying. Whose version of boring do we mean, and does boring make for good television?

Insecure focuses on two women, one of them played by (and named) Issa. Both women are trying to find se- curity – which in this context means finding the perfect man. Issa has a man, Lawrence, but he lacks drive. She is tempted, then, when a hot ex arrives back on the scene. Meanwhile, her friend Molly has worked her way up from a working-class background to become a lawyer and is now trying, with little success, to snare a man who embodies the New Her.

Issa’s life in Insecure is like a gentrified version of J’s in Misadventures. Her tomboyish looks now have a stylist’s touch. Her hair is natural but now neatly coiffed. She

still vents by rapping, but now she’s pretty good at it. Her job has been ramped up a notch, too. The call-centre has been replaced by a charity for inner-city black kids, and she is the only black worker. The multicultural world of Misadventures is now predominantly white. This gives rise to some interesting and potentially funny moments of dissonance, as when Molly is instructed to ask the new black intern to “tone it down” simply because they share ethnicity. Also Issa’s colleagues rely on her to give them the ghetto low-down whereas the black children she works with read her as white. These moments may be socially poignant, but they aren’t always funny. They sometimes have the instructive tone of a ‘white privilege’ Buzzfeed video. Most comedy-crushing

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30 | Sight&Sound | January 2017

INSECUREISSA RAE

of all, the levels of awkwardness have been dialled way down. Awkward White Jay has been replaced

by two gorgeous, nice black men. Easy on the eye they may be, but nice does not make funny.

Clearly, Rae’s intention has shifted with this show and that’s OK: artists are allowed to do that. But if her intention was to create a show that depicted black life as boring, she has, unfortunately, achieved it. Watch- ing Insecure after Misadventures is like playing a game of Spot the Difference. Some of the same actors appear in both shows and in similar roles, but they now sport less colour. In both shows Catherine Curtin plays her boss, but in Insecure the cornrows have been unpicked. In Misadventures Sujata Day plays kooky ‘bff’ CeCe, J’s true soulmate; in Insecure she features as a silent background colleague. Insecure bff’s have been upgraded to a group of sophisticated sisters with ‘good hair’.

It makes sense that Rae would not want to peddle cer- tain well-worn, problematic black tropes. The danger of desiring to appear normal through the lens of TV, howev- er, is that you might exchange one trope for a – perhaps – less interesting one.

Twenty years ago, Sex and the City made the spectacle of women sitting around in chi-chi bars talking sex and men popular. The show forced a revolution in the way women represented themselves. Here was an unfiltered look into what women really thought about their own sexualities in their own words. But it’s a format that’s been replicated many times since and is limited in its scope. For the most part, female characters are still re- alised only in terms of their relationship with the oppo- site sex. Insecure climbs into the Sex and the City hot tub – but now the genre is tepid. Yes, Molly and Issa meet over

brunch to talk sex and men, and, yes, these characters are now black, but the narrative feels done to death. I miss the zaniness of Misadventures. It’s like J moved to Stepford and was replaced by a TV stereotype.

The boredom of the everyday has great comedy po- tential, as Atlanta demonstrates. Donald Glover’s series debuted on Fox in September, around the same time as Insecure. Set in the eponymous city, it follows Earn, a young father and college drop-out, as he tries to jump on the coat-tails of his cousin’s burgeoning rap career. That’s the hook. However, Atlanta is really an opportunity to share the surreal existence of young black men trapped on the fringes of America. The hilarious and disturbing second episode, ‘Streets on Lock’, takes place entirely in a police station where first-time felon Earn is enduring a tedious overnight wait, straining to keep eyes front as a hoodlum on his left unwittingly chats up a transvestite on his right. Glover observes eccentricities as well as Rae did in Misadventures.

Atlanta is full of the problematic tropes that Rae con- sciously wants to move away from – drugs and guns and a fair few magical negroes. But unlike Rae, Glover amps up the strange and unusual: “I just always wanted to make Twin Peaks with rappers,” he said in one interview. Atlanta is many things, but it is never boring or derivative. Inter- estingly, in Misadventures J desperately hopes that her first date with White Jay will turn out to be a Glover gig. (It’s not.) J would love Glover. Glover came to TV prominence as the goof Troy Barnes in the sitcom Community, a mul- ticulti portrayal of the lovable losers who end up at com- munity college. By this point in his career, Glover was already a seasoned stand-up, as well as a rapper under the name Childish Gambino, and had sharpened his sitcom skills in the writing room of NBC’s Tina Fey vehicle 30 Rock. With Atlanta, Glover was intent on keeping his own show intimate, bringing friends and family on to his team and writing from his own home-based workspace. The result is a mescaline trip of a show, which has been described as a post-sitcom sitcom. Atlanta is now Fox’s highest-rated comedy.

Both Rae and Glover grew up between white and black worlds and their liminality granted them original per- spectives. In their new shows, though, Rae has seemed to drift to a more centrist view, while Glover has contin- ued to travel way past leftfield. As a result, he has created something much more memorable.

Misadventures and Insecure are very different shows, and perhaps comparison is unfair: but the difference shows the perils of mimicking someone else’s version of normality – and serves as a reminder of the, possibly self- imposed, pressures on the black writer. The desire to fit into a ‘normal’ TV frame is a limiting one especially for black female writers. First, that frame was not originally designed with them in mind and second, that frame con- stricts the comedic scope. Rae remains an extremely tal- ented comic performer and writer. Her presence draws me back each week, in the hope of glimpsing some awk- ward flashes of brilliance. I hope she eventually sidesteps the stifling romance of TV, lets her hair grow free, and continues to mine the deep seam of our innate rubbish- ness. The image of J shimmying clumsily along a corri- dor will stay in my mind for a long time yet.

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It makes sense that Rae would not want to peddle problematic black tropes, but the danger of desiring to appear normal through the lens of TV is that you might exchange one trope for a less interesting one

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