Kenya Barris, the creator of the ABC family sitcom “black-ish,” slumped on a sofa in his airy home, in Encino, California, his eyelids drooping with fatigue. In the nearby media room, his two young sons, Beau and Kass, played Minecraft on an Xbox. In the kitchen, his wife, Rainbow, who was pregnant with their sixth child, made popcorn. Out in the hall, their three daughters—aged ten, fourteen, and sixteen—yakked and giggled. The family was getting ready to watch the West Coast airing of “Hope,” an episode about police racism which, at varying times, Barris had described to me as both “the one that ruins me” and “maybe my most important episode.” Once, with a resigned shrug, he had said, “Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube.”
Like most breakthrough sitcoms, “black-ish” is built on autobiography. It’s narrated by Andre (Dre) Johnson, a black ad executive, played by Anthony Anderson, who has jumped, as Barris did, from inner-city poverty to bourgeois wealth, only to find himself flummoxed by his brood of privileged, Obama-era kids. Tracee Ellis Ross plays his wife, who, like the real Rainbow, is a biracial anesthesiologist nicknamed Bow. With a joke velocity approaching that of “30 Rock,” the show, brassy and shrewd, stands out for its rare directness about race and class. As Barris likes to put it, whereas “The Cosby Show” was about a family that happened to be black, “black-ish” is about a black family.
In its first two seasons, the show scored laughs from such subjects as whether black parents spank more and how different generations use the N-word; there was a plot about the knowing nod of recognition black men give one another. One hilariously nervy script satirized Martin Luther King Day. (Dre, Jr., admits that he’s never read King’s speech, explaining, “I always kind of zone out when people start to tell me about their dreams.”) Some viewers, especially black ones, have been put off by the show’s title, with its cheeky implication that some people are less black than others. But Barris told me that he was glad he’d resisted ABC’s suggestions to sanitize it, titling it “The Johnsons”—or, absurdly, “Urban Family.” Michelle Obama has called “black-ish” her favorite television show.
Until “Hope,” however, the show hadn’t tangled with real-world politics. During Season One, in 2014, Barris pitched a story based on the arrest of the African-American professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for breaking into his own home. At the time, the Ferguson riots were streaming live on the Internet; ABC asked him not to do any jokes about cops. By 2015, the national outcry about police brutality had become too loud to ignore—and “black-ish” was getting raves as part of a newly diverse TV landscape. Over the December holidays, Barris holed up in the studio attached to his home, bingeing on Red Bull and “probably some Adderall,” and hammered out “Hope.”
The episode opened with Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” and a scene borrowed from Barris’s life: Beau, watching the Ferguson riots on television, had asked his parents, “Why are these people so mad?” What followed was a classic TV “bottle episode,” set in one location: in their living room, the family debated the acquittal of a cop who’d repeatedly Tasered an unarmed black man. Their arguments were punctuated by jokes about Dre’s father having been a member of something called the Black Bobcats. (“We were Panther-adjacent.”) The episode felt haunted—and was made more vital and angrier—by the killing of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, in Cleveland. While Barris was struggling with the script, the Ohio prosecutor announced that a grand jury would not indict the cops who shot Rice. Barris still gets distressed talking about the case. “You know, twelve is young,” he said, his voice cracking. “That’s somebody’s baby still.”
Eight-year-old Beau, who was wearing pajamas printed with pine trees, hopped onto his father’s lap. While another ABC sitcom, “Modern Family,” played on the TV, interspersed with promos for “Hope,” Beau held his father’s iPhone, watching a nature video about predators.
“It escaped!” Beau called out, looking up at his dad excitedly. “Mouse can swim?”
“What?” Barris said, confused. Forty-one years old, he has amused, hooded eyes and pockmarked cheeks. Blue-green tattoos peek out from his collar.
“Mouse can swim?”
“No, mice can’t swim—they can, like, paddle,” Barris said, laughing.
In the video, a mouse was in a river, being tormented by a fish. “That’s mean, now,” Barris said. “That’s sadistic.”
“Why are they mean?” Beau asked.
“Guys do that sometimes. It’s a bad way to be.”
“It’s gonna escape. Look!” Beau said.
“It didn’t escape,” Barris said, gently. But Beau kept seeing something different.
“Yes,” he insisted. “It did.”
The exchange felt peculiarly congruent with the episode we were about to watch: a meditation on just how much black parents should protect their children’s innocence about the American justice system. Barris, who had been thrown against cars by cops and seen friends choked during arrests, had devoured Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” an anguished manifesto addressed to Coates’s son; the book was both quoted and displayed in the episode. (Barris asked Coates to do a cameo, but Coates declined.) The show’s climax came when Dre begged Bow to remember how thrilling it had felt to watch the Obamas walk into the White House for the first time—and how terrified they were that the First Couple would be assassinated. “Tell me you weren’t worried that someone was gonna snatch that hope away from us, like they always do,” Dre said. Silent footage was spliced into the scene: the Obamas, smiling, youthful, a model American family.
The table read for “Hope” had been cathartic; afterward, Laurence Fishburne and Jenifer Lewis, who played the Johnson grandparents, made speeches thanking Barris for writing it. But Barris knew that the episode was odd—not especially funny and possibly pedantic. “I played it for friends, and no one’s going to say they don’t like it to your face,” Barris told me. “But the reactions have been mixed.” He worried that it might be perceived as agitprop, a Black Lives Matter episode; although he supported the movement, he wasn’t a fan of the idiom. “It’s alienating,” he told me. “No civil-rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.”
These worries were intensified by some Westeros-style drama at Disney, which owns ABC. A week earlier, Barris’s strongest ally—the network’s president, Paul Lee, the British executive who had bought “black-ish”—had been ousted. Ben Sherwood, the president of Disney-ABC Television Group, replaced Lee, who is white, with Lee’s deputy, Channing Dungey. She became the first black network president in history, a benchmark that got gushing press. But Barris didn’t know Dungey; he had no idea what to expect. It wasn’t a great moment for an episode to misfire with the show’s audience, which is three-quarters nonblack. On Monday, Barris said, he had called ABC to make sure that its promos prepped viewers for, “as much as I don’t want to say this, a ‘very special episode.’ ” He added, “They did a good job.”
Now that the East Coast airing was over, it was clear that “Hope” was a phenomenon: it was trending on Twitter and being gif’d and quoted and hallelujah’d for its embrace of the Norman Lear tradition of political theatre. “So many people I went to school with, that I hadn’t talked to since elementary school,” Barris marvelled, reading his e-mail. He looked for negative responses, too: “On Facebook, I got scared, because I saw people saying, ‘I’ll never watch the show again.’ That’s the last thing I need right now.”
Barris’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Kaleigh, came in, holding her phone up, and said, “I read so many comments about people crying—people saying it was one of the most inspirational shows they ever watched.” Her younger sister Leyah furrowed her brow: “But they haven’t seen it yet!”
Barris cracked up. “On the East Coast!” he said. “Leave it to Leyah to shoot it down. This house is a hornets’ nest.”
As “Hope” began, Kass curled against his mom on a sofa, the girls reclined in black leather armchairs, and Beau sat cross-legged near his father, eating popcorn. The show opened with a newsreel-like montage—the Iran-hostage crisis, J.F.K.’s motorcade—which culminated with the sweet, smiling face of Trayvon Martin.
They watched the episode, which ended with Ruby, Dre’s mother, spray-painting “black owned” on the family’s garage. As the credits rolled, there was a silence. “Kaleigh, what’s the matter?” Barris asked. “I just feel sad,” she said, looking at her feet. “Did it bum you out?” “Yeah.” His daughters began unspooling their responses, with Kaleigh describing how self-conscious she felt when they were the only black family in nice restaurants—how people stared at them. She hated the fact that her younger brothers would need to learn defensive tactics to deal with cops. “I feel like I have to tell my brothers that, regardless of how they’re treating you, regardless if you’re doing anything wrong, with the police you comply, because he’s an authority—he has this gun on him, he could kill you.”
Turning to Beau, Barris said, “What jokes did you like?” His son picked a scene in which the Johnsons bickered about takeout menus: “I liked it when we”—for Beau, there was no distinction between the Johnsons and the Barrises—“were all talking over each other.” The family laughed at how well the show nailed their raucous style. Six-year-old Kass was fast asleep, and Barris carried him up to bed.
Barris and Rainbow first dated when he was sixteen and she was fourteen, a basketball player and a cheerleader attending sister-and-brother Catholic high schools in Los Angeles. Rainbow accidentally got pregnant by Barris when she was twenty-two and a medical-school student in Boston, after she flew out to visit him in Los Angeles. In between, they broke up, and dated mutual friends, while attending Clark Atlanta University. Both had been inspired to apply to the school by two intoxicating portrayals of historically black colleges: the 1987 “Cosby” spinoff “A Different World” and the 1988 Spike Lee movie, “School Daze.” Lee’s film jolted Barris: he’d never seen anything like its dance-off between “jigaboos” and “wannabes,” its brazen display of intra-black tension. Lee impressed him as a new kind of black artist, an impolite innovator with a voice supple enough to “talk about things that felt very personal to me but make everyone else interested in them.”
Barris studied film, dreaming of becoming “the new Spike Lee.” But he was also drawn to black sitcoms, which proliferated after the success of “Cosby.” For a while, the boom seemed like a lasting phenomenon: Will Smith beat-boxed as “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” on NBC; on “A Different World,” activists, premeds, and Jack-and-Jill princesses sparred and flirted. In 1990, the FOX network launched a slate of black-centered programming, including the celebrated sketch show “In Living Color.” In 1994, though, the show was cancelled, along with “The Sinbad Show,” “Roc,” and “South Central,” as FOX rebranded for mainstream—meaning white—audiences. In the late nineties, black comedies were repeatedly subjected to this form of TV gentrification: they were launched on upstart cable networks, like UPN and the WB, then cancelled, or shunted to BET, when the networks whitened up their programming. In 1999, the N.A.A.C.P. lamented a “virtual whiteout” on television. As Kristal Brent Zook writes in her 1999 book, “Color by Fox,” network executives were uneasy not just with black casts and writers but with “black complexity”: they bumped black creators for white producers, pushing for the most risk-free, formulaic comedy.
In 1998, Barris, working with several other aspiring TV writers, shot footage for a documentary about this problem, calling it “Film Noir.” Among the people Barris interviewed were Felicia D. Henderson, who wrote for the sitcom “Moesha,” and a co-creator of “Moesha,” Ralph Farquhar—Rainbow’s uncle. Barris and his partners ditched the project, fearful of alienating employers. “We didn’t want to fuck ourselves before we began,” he said. But Henderson became his mentor. She helped Barris get a slot in the Paramount Writers Program, a diversity initiative, and hired him to write for “Soul Food,” a series that she created for Showtime. During the years it aired, from 2000 to 2004, it was the only black-family drama on television.
To Barris’s mother, Tina, TV writing seemed like a crazy gamble for a college-educated black man. In fact, right after he graduated from Clark Atlanta, she’d hooked him up with a job as the press secretary for an L.A. councilman, Nate Holden. “I was wearing these Men’s Wearhouse suits, hating my life,” Barris told me, laughing. She was furious when he quit to try standup comedy and writing. Barris has always been devoted to Tina, who raised him and his three siblings, mostly on her own, in Inglewood, in poverty-ridden South Central L.A. Tina divorced Barris’s father, who was physically abusive, when Barris was five; six years later, his father won a settlement after losing a lung in an industrial accident. Half the money went toward supporting the children, enabling Tina and the kids to move to middle-class, integrated Hancock Park and allowing Barris to attend private school.
Though he hung out at the Comedy Store, Barris says that he wasn’t much of a standup performer: “There’s a certain don’t-give-a-fuckness that you have to have as a comic. I don’t have that. At my core, I’m shy.” But he was an empathetic observer, a strong joke writer, and, as Rainbow puts it, a natural “hustler,” able to sell ideas and to crack closed systems. After working on “Soul Food,” he helped broker a reality-TV deal for his best friend since childhood, the model Tyra Banks. The show, “America’s Next Top Model,” became a hit, with Barris as its co-creator and producer. (He still gets a cut of the profits.)
After a year, he returned to scripted TV. He initially wrote for shows aimed at an African-American audience, such as “The Game,” about the wives of football stars. But when he jumped to sitcoms on the WB and NBC, with predominantly white writing staffs, he hit a wall. Barris was often the “diversity hire,” and dryly describes himself as a “beneficiary-slash-victim” of such initiatives. In some writers’ rooms, such as the one for a short-lived WB sitcom called “Like Family,” he made lifelong friends. But wherever he worked he was a cultural outsider—the one writer who didn’t know who Neil Young was. “Any mistake that you make is amplified,” Barris recalls of the experience. Barris quotes W. E. B. Du Bois when talking about the “double-consciousness” that a black person develops in a white world, but he also describes acquiring chops specific to comedy writers: he learned how to use jokes to build bridges and defang put-downs. “I beat ’em with funny,” he says. When a colleague kept comparing the colleges they had attended, Barris recalls, “I was like, ‘It doesn’t really matter where you went to school, because right now I’m looking at you across the table. So kudos to Harvard! Because we make the same money.’ ”
His grimmest experience was on “Listen Up,” a 2004 CBS sitcom starring Jason Alexander as a sports journalist, with Malcolm-Jamal Warner in a supporting role. The showrunner was Jeff Martin, a former writer for David Letterman’s show and a Harvard Lampoon alum who wrote for “The Simpsons.” It was a slow poisoning; Barris knew that the room didn’t like him. When they wrote a story about the mother of Warner’s character—an educated football player from New York—the white writers pitched the mother’s lines as those of a fat black woman with a Southern accent. Barris recalls, “I was like, ‘Wait, where is she from? How much does she weigh?’ It wasn’t even done maliciously—it was just, ‘This is how a black woman sounds.’ It was such a wake-up call.”
One day, Barris argued with Martin over the seventies Norman Lear series “Good Times,” which is about the Evanses, a poor black family living in the Cabrini-Green housing project, in Chicago. Martin said that he wished he’d been born into the Evans family, because it was “rich in love.” Barris blew up: “Dude, you would not have liked to be in the fucking family on ‘Good Times.’ You’re saying that from such an entitled place! You missed the whole point of the show.” Barris’s contract wasn’t picked up—the Hollywood equivalent of being fired. (Martin said that his comments were likely ironic, adding that he’s happy for Barris’s success. “His sensibility didn’t fit my show,” he said. “But saying someone didn’t capture the voice of ‘Listen Up’ isn’t much of an insult.”)
Barris wrote pilot after pilot, trying to crack the formula that would put him in charge. “Black-ish” was his nineteenth attempt. Three got produced but didn’t make it to air. By this time, he and Rainbow had married. She’d moved back to L.A., re-started med school—she couldn’t transfer credits—and had two more daughters. The marriage was sometimes strained, and many of Barris’s pilots mined tensions at home. One was about a married man torn between his wife and his partying friends; another came out of a marriage-therapy session in which the counsellor told Barris and Rainbow that they needed to reboot their relationship, as if they’d never met, to suit their adult, not adolescent, selves.
Barris calls “black-ish” his best and most honest iteration of these pilots. Dre and Bow, former high-school sweethearts, have four kids: the Instagram-addled Zoey, the proud nerd Dre, Jr., and the mismatched twins Jack and Diane (who are named for the John Cougar Mellencamp song—one of Barris’s favorites). Dre’s parents are divorced; his mom, Ruby, is fiery and smothering, and his dad, Pops, judges him for not “whupping” his kids. Despite his success, Dre feels ill at ease living in an upper-middle-class, largely white suburb—and at sea as a father. Dre, Jr., is obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and wants a “bro mitzvah”; Zoey is a queen bee whose white friends use the N-word. Bow is an Ivy League graduate with a white hippie dad. If blackness is so easily detached from Dre’s prized codes of urban authenticity, what does that make him?
In the show’s original conception, Dre was the diversity hire on a network sitcom, which Barris based on “Listen Up.” ABC asked him to change the workplace to an advertising agency, in part, Barris acknowledges, to facilitate product integration. (He says of an episode in which Dre buys Zoey a Buick, “It was a commercial, dude.”) Tyra Banks calls Barris one of the most nostalgic people she knows, and, though “black-ish” isn’t set in the past, it’s studded with flashbacks to Dre’s Jheri-curled childhood—brief scenes with the stinging clarity of Chris Rock’s “Everybody Hates Chris.” The show’s psychic engine is Dre’s sense that the past isn’t past, for him and for all African-Americans. In an episode about Dre’s yen for high-end sneakers, he explains, “Think about it. If you didn’t get a paycheck for four hundred years, when you did finally get one, you might want to spend it.” At the same time, “black-ish” pokes fun at Dre’s tendency to see antiblackness everywhere. He fumes that it is racist to ask if he can swim—but he can’t swim.
Barris worked on the pilot with the African-American comic Larry Wilmore, whom ABC proposed as a co-showrunner. Wilmore, who wrote for “In Living Color” and created “The Bernie Mac Show,” knew plenty about what he calls the “ethnic cleansing” of nineties TV. But by 2014 TV executives were biting again. Shonda Rhimes’s ShondaLand empire was a ratings machine, led by “Scandal,” the first network drama since 1974 to star a black woman. Racial critiques of “Girls”—and the simultaneous rise of Black Twitter—had scared executives into at least paying lip service to diversity. On cable, shows like “Orange Is the New Black,” with an ensemble that was black and brown (and, just as shocking, butch, fat, and trans), were thriving; creators like Mindy Kaling were becoming popular brands. A Nielsen report found that black viewers watched thirty-seven per cent more TV than other demographics. It seemed like the right moment for an idea-driven sitcom about race that, as Wilmore saw it, felt daring and distinct, with “brilliant colors, flashy character choices, bold strokes.”
There was a bidding war for “black-ish.” Barris, who’d imagined placing the show in the cable-prestige jewel box of FX, went for the money and the mass audience—and the pressure to produce twenty-four episodes—of ABC. When Comedy Central offered Wilmore a talk show, Barris asked to partner with the white writer Jonathan Groff, an executive producer on “Happy Endings,” a cult sitcom that featured an interracial couple. For Barris, Wilmore’s departure was scary but also an opportunity. “People knew I was the voice behind this,” Barris said. “That’s how you make yourself invaluable.”
A writers’ room procrastinates as much as an actual writer. On a recent Monday afternoon, in Burbank, “black-ish” staffers stared at a monitor on the wall, giggling at a YouTube video of a cheetah eviscerating an ostrich. They spent ten minutes talking about the difference between Iceland and Greenland. But this aimlessness was a pose, as the table kept looping back, struggling to “punch up” bad dialogue in the season ender.
A high-concept finale was becoming a tradition for “black-ish”: Season One’s featured a flashback to the Cotton Club of the nineteen-twenties. This year’s installment, “Good-ish Times,” included a meticulous parody of the seventies sitcom that Barris had argued about with his old boss. When the show starts, Dre is anxious about corporate layoffs, especially because Bow is expecting their fifth child. He falls asleep watching a rerun of “Good Times” and dreams that he’s Keith, the football-playing boyfriend of Thelma, the show’s teen daughter, and that he is terrified to tell her parents (played by Pops and Ruby) that he’s got their daughter pregnant. Dre, Jr., plays J.J., the pencil-necked geek famous for shouting “Dy-no-mite!” “Black-ish” is filmed in the modern single-cam style, but the dream sequence would be multi-cam shot, before a live audience. The conceit played off Dre’s terror of falling back into poverty and his nostalgia for both his childhood and the sitcom that reflected it. Not coincidentally, the plot mirrored Barris’s adult life, which was bookended by two unplanned pregnancies—the one that led him to marry early, and the one that had come after nearly two decades of marriage.
The table read had been a dud, possibly because the writers felt uneasy constructing multi-cam jokes, with their hard, vaudeville beats. There were false starts; there were worries that some gags were mere “high-jinksing.” Someone pitched a diabetes joke: maybe Florida, the “Good Times” matriarch, could say, about a dog that bit her, “I would have lost my big toe, had the sugar not already taken it.” Another writer wondered if nonblack viewers would get it. “Is that too deep a cut?” Barris said, polling the room. It was fine, he decided: “30 Rock” made jokes about the same subject.
A writers’ room, in Barris’s experience, is the “cool kids’ table,” an aggressive display of social prowess, disguised in jokes. He and Groff were joined by such veterans as Gail Lerner, who worked on “Will & Grace,” and Yvette Lee Bowser, who created “Living Single.” It was far more diverse, in gender and in race, than most sitcom rooms; down the street, the “black-ish” set had a crew dominated by people of color.
Still, Barris had his own diversity hire, whose salary was drawn, in part, from a Disney corporate fund: Damilare Sonoiki, nicknamed Dam, a twenty-four-year-old African-American Harvard alumnus and former Lampoon editor. Like Barris, Sonoiki had grown up in a violent neighborhood, in Houston, and transferred to a private school. He had just submitted his first script, which showed promise, but he wasn’t entirely at home in the room. As the work dragged into the night, Sonoiki, who had a jacket on, tugged its hood over his head and pulled its collar up, until only his eyes peeked out. At one point, he suggested capping some banter with a sour punch line: “Unlike you, bitch.” When the other writers brushed it off, Barris turned his head to Sonoiki. “You just had a win,” he chided him, sotto voce, referring to the script. “Feel the room. Don’t say something like that.”
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 bellyflop—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.”
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 U.S.C.—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 that 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, barrelled 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 counselling, 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.’ ”
“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, 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-per-cent Kenya, a hundred-per-cent 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 goddam 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.”
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, supported 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 A.B.F.F. 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.”
Rhimes watches “black-ish” with her tween daughter. She ticked off her favorite bits: the N-word episode; the “white Greek chorus” of Dre’s office; the grandparents who are “not these saintly black parents—they’re divorced and hate each other’s guts.” She described Barris as “very kind,” “very quick-witted,” and “kind of shy.” When Rhimes, who can be shy herself, first met Barris and Larry Wilmore, they disarmed her with what Wilmore describes as an imitation of a racist Mickey Mouse, squeaking in horror at the idea of a Disney show called “black-ish.” She told them to keep in touch, and, unlike many creators she’d offered to help, they followed up.
Solidarity, she said, was the only way to cope with the fragility of being a Hollywood pioneer. “There’s no way to achieve any kind of voice if you’re the only,” Rhimes said. “That’s how women become the bitch and how people of color become ‘weird.’ Inclusion means more than ‘eight white guys and a person of color.’ ”
On my last night in L.A., I joined Barris at the Soho House in West Hollywood. He was having a dinner meeting with Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle, the comedy team that created “Slow Jam the News” for Jimmy Fallon. Like Barris’s diversity hire, Dam Sonoiki, whom they knew, they had gone to Harvard. African-American men on the verge of forty, they looked handsome in thick-cable sweaters. Barris slouched in ripped jeans and a sweatshirt—an outfit I’d seen him wear on the red carpet. His sneakers were always impeccable: growing up, he’d saved his money for fancy ones, which he cleaned with a toothbrush. He now had a closet devoted to his collection. Running down his forearms were two tattoos: the word “Choices” on the right, “Decisions” on the left. His mother had told him that black people made too many decisions—selecting from socially constrained options—and not enough choices.
Riddle told me that he and Salahuddin had met Barris once before: “He gave us some advice, but we didn’t take it.” He wouldn’t clarify, so Barris filled me in: he told them that they should seek out an amenable “white guy” to work with. It would build a bridge to top executives, who were almost universally white. “That guy can be an ally,” Barris explained. “A translator.”
Salahuddin and Riddle were feeling burned: they’d spent four years developing a show called “Brothers in Atlanta” for HBO, which ultimately rejected it. They were looking for a “rabbi,” they said, someone who knew about network TV. What you wanted, they all agreed, was a crew, a squad—like-minded friends who could jump in to “punch up the funny.” Barris spoke longingly about the comedic collective that Judd Apatow had built, and said that he want to create something like it—“a contemporary, racially eclectic, gender-eclectic, experience-eclectic salon.” He listed people with whom he’d like to collaborate, including Lena Waithe, who plays the laconic black lesbian on “Master of None.” Isolation, Barris suggested, might have been the problem for the comedian Dave Chappelle: when his Comedy Central show fell apart, he had no community to gather around him.
We ate pomegranate ice cream, and the conversation, as it often does in L.A., veered into black-ops financial territory, such as the advantages and disadvantages of a several-year network pickup. Salahuddin was newly engaged, and they talked about marriage. Barris told them about a turning point in his life, when he was in his late twenties, clubbing. One evening, he came home drunk from Xenii, a members-only club, and found Rainbow asleep at the kitchen table. She was pregnant with their second daughter, nursing their first baby, sleeping while sitting up, her medical textbook open in front of her. He realized that he couldn’t be “that guy” anymore. It wasn’t easy for him to have a family so young, he told Salahuddin and Riddle, but it saved him: it made him ambitious.
After dinner, Barris and I headed to the bar. Before ordering drinks, he said, he wanted to do a sweep of the room—if any black people were around, he half-joked, he’d know them. In fact, when we sat down Barris was approached by Jay Ellis, an actor on “Insecure,” an upcoming HBO comedy created by Issa Rae. Barris also greeted Steve Levitan, the white showrunner of “Modern Family,” who congratulated him on “Hope.” The bar had a spectacular view: the Pacific twinkled in the distance. Barris told me that he had spent a lot of time here during the first season of “black-ish.” Just as his show was becoming a hit, he and Rainbow separated for six months, living apart and dating others. Larry Wilmore and Anthony Anderson also broke up with their wives during the show’s first season; only Barris and Rainbow reunited. They both felt a strong need to live up to the radiant image of their best selves, as portrayed on the show. “I think it’s part of why we wanted to have another kid,” Barris told me. “To relaunch into what’s important.”
Rubbing his close-cropped hair, he said, “I’ve fucked up so much, gotten so many second chances.” As a teen-ager, he had a frightening flirtation with gang life. In his twenties, when his daughters were little, he said, he wasn’t around enough. “I sold weed,” he said. “I got caught cheating.” Earlier, he told me that he wanted the show to represent the life of an imperfect couple, not idealized figures. But there’s a built-in tension to “black-ish”: the burden placed on black stories, and on the artists who tell them, to be not merely good but inspirational. In one of this season’s best episodes, “The Johnsons,” other parents keep calling Dre and Bow and the kids “such a beautiful family”—praise that floods Dre with fear. He and Bow grew up trying to be the Cosbys; everyone knows what happened there. “It’s just one show,” Pops says of “Cosby.” “That’s just it, Pops—we get so few chances!” Dre says, in voice-over, as the screen cuts to the “Cosby” opening credits, except that it’s the Johnsons turning those iconic dance moves. “And when we do something and we do it well it’s special! And when we mess it up we mess it up for everyone coming behind us. It’s like we’re carrying everybody’s dreams on our back.”
The longing to see a positive portrayal of black life feels particularly fraught as Obama leaves office, and as Trump’s openly racist rhetoric attracts followers. Although Barris’s early life was punctuated by police violence, his ugliest memory, Barris said, was something a cop told him when he was sixteen: “You know, no one will care if you die.” A network sitcom could never address anything quite so raw, he knew. Even the most topical sitcom isn’t an op-ed; it’s more like Silly Putty that’s been pressed against Page 1. But, although “Good-ish Times” had many more jokes than “Hope,” it shared a stark central insight. It found dark laughs in the dialectic of striver psychology, as the Evans family flips between two equally extreme reactions to racism and poverty. One minute, they’re fatalistic to the point of self-sabotage; the next, they’re spouting affirmations of empty hope—“Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day!” They might in fact be “rich in love.” But their lives are all decisions, no choices.
In April, Barris’s family went on a vacation that could be taken only by people at the pinnacle of success. During a visit to New York, they saw “Hamilton” not once but twice. They also flew to Washington for the White House Easter Egg Roll, and were part of a V.I.P. group who met the President and the First Lady. “That’s our family,” President Obama told Barris, about “black-ish.”
Not everything went smoothly. After four hours at the White House, Barris, tired, insisted that they leave. Once they were outside, Kaleigh got a text from Anthony Anderson’s son: they’d just missed Beyoncé and Jay Z. Barris’s daughters were furious at their dad; tears formed in Leyah’s eyes. When he saw those tears, Barris lost it: “You just met the President!” They apologized. Barris stayed mad. But he was also inspired. “I texted Groff and said, ‘We have to use this next season.’ ” ♦
