A Season of Change

I am the one I've been waiting for? Shit!

Mar 20, 2024

On Stage at Berkeley Rep (Photo: Benjamin Fanjoy/The Chronicle)

I’ve been on a bit of a press tour recently to promote my work. I’ve been talking about my role as a guest correspondent on ABC’s What Would You Do? and my stand-up residency at Berkeley Rep. People also seem to want to hear my thoughts in these hectic times. The San Francisco Chronicle did a fairly substantial piece on me last week. Alta Journal did another one. I’ve been doing these press tours pretty regularly since the days of my first TV show, Totally Biased, back in 2012. I’ve learned a lot since then.

Your job in these pieces is to tell the media the story that you want them to tell — a story of why this thing is the new greatest thing. And you also have to explain in a fun way why the thing that you’ve always done is different now, and it is better this way. Sometimes, if the media outlet is a podcast or a comedy show, you have to do whatever their thing is. Here I am doing After Midnight’s thing:

I’m not complaining. It’s just how this press thing works. I’m lucky because the publicist who helps me do all this is the greatest publicist in the world, Heather Brown. I met Heather at CNN. We both worked there. She was my publicist for the first several seasons of United Shades of America. And now that neither one of us is at CNN anymore, she helps me out. She focuses on amplifying diverse voices and content. You have no idea how helpful it has been to have a Black woman publicist who really understands my particular strain of Blerd-dom. She is a lifesaver. Her only shortcoming is that, because she is from Cleveland, she likes LeBron James more than Michael Jordan. But it is not her fault. It is how she was raised.

Heather has done a great job lining up press appearances. I’ve been talking about What Would You Do?, the state of the world, and how to fix things that I’m not qualified to fix! Like when an entertainment reporter asked me how to solve houselesness in Los Angeles. I like my answer though. I’ve been having a pretty good time out here, and people have even been sending congratulations my way. It’s nice to know that people are excited to hear about my return to the stand-up stage, my new-ish production company, and my work with a bunch of badass East Bay creatives and organizers to make Oakland a more accessible place for the film industry. (We are calling it the East Bay Film Collective. You may recognize many of the faces as some of my regular collaborators.) After seeing those congrats and reading some of the coverage myself, I realized I’ve been telling only a part of my story. Don’t get me wrong. All the journalists are doing their jobs well. It is just that in an effort to get to the core of the story, I’m leaving a lot out. If you will indulge this longish (and late-ish) post, I have more to say.

In many ways, this moment in my career feels like the beginning of a new beginning. Some of that is because of the end of United Shades of America and some of that is because of the year 2020. When lockdown hit and I was downloading Zoom for the first time, I had no idea how much it would end up changing the world, our country, and me. Instead of using the time as much-needed break from the rat race and/or a time for reflection and connecting with family, I basically doubled- and tripled-down on projects. I used my sourdough time to co-write an anti-racist activity book. I used my Peloton time to direct a four-part series on Bill Cosby. I used my frustration about racism time to start making a documentary about mixed-race kids called 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. That wasn’t good for my cardiovascular system or my back.

The Showtime series We Need to Talk About Cosby was set to premiere at Sundance in January of 2022, but instead of finally being able to meet so many of the people I had worked with over Zoom, I found out that the festival (responsibly) decided to forgo its hybrid plans and make Sundance fully remote. (Covid was like, “Oh, y’all still don’t take me seriously? YOU GET A VARIANT! YOU GET A VARIANT!”) So when my series debuted at Sundance, I watched it in my garage office, by myself. My wife was attending to the kids. I did some press during the premiere, but I mostly sat and waited patiently for it to end.

Slowly and steadily, as the series was airing, reviews began to come in. While there were certainly a variety of opinions, it quickly proved to be the most critically acclaimed project I’ve ever made. By far. BY FAR. At the same time, it proved to be the most divisive. BY FAR. I spent 2022 not knowing what the reaction would be when I walked into a room. “Do they know who I am?” “Do they care?” “Did they see the Cosby series?” “Did they see it and love it?” “Did they see it and hate it?” “Did they see it and appreciate it but still have well-founded criticism that makes me wish I could re-edit it?” Or — the weirdest one to deal with — “Did they hate it but never even see it?”

After a radically up and down 2022, I was looking forward to having earned a smoother 2023. But that was a foolish thought. I should know by now that life doesn’t “life” like that. 2023 was an incredible year in many ways. Unions stood up for themselves all around the United States of America. Two of the unions I’m in, the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, were no different. They demanded changes, and many good changes were made. But things have not returned to “business as usual.” And we’re far away from “business as better.” From what I’m hearing and experiencing, it seems like there is not as much work now as there was before the strikes. This doesn't just affect scripted projects that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA were striking. I have felt the slowdown in the work I do — unscripted, documentary, and reality. None of those genres were covered under the strikes, which is a whole conversation for another day.

All that is to say, I picked a weird year to officially launch my production company. The launch was initiated by the start of a two-year deal with Boardwalk Pictures, which shifted to a one year deal due to reasons out of my control. While I will continue to have a production company and will continue to work with Boardwalk on a project-by-project basis, I am back to being as independent as I was when I was a comedian waiting for a spot at the Punchline Comedy Club in San Francisco in the 90’s. Just with more children and an office space that’s nicer than a local coffee shop.

So here, in 2024, my wife and I have a production company that specializes in socially-relevant, progressive, inclusive content at a time when those subjects have fallen out of fashion. We are now fully in the backlash to the 2020 “racial reckoning” spurred on by the murder of George Floyd. The backlash began in higher education as an attack on “Critical Race Theory,” made its way through school districts, local and state governments, and eventually found corporate America. Never forget that Hollywood is part of corporate America. From 2020 - 2023 I had so many meetings in rooms and Zooms filled with Black and Brown people talking about all the post-2020 plans. But often when I return to those rooms and Zooms to attempt to get those plans started, I discover that those people didn’t work there no mo’.

For a much better treatise on how this happened, check out Nikole Hannah Jones’ new piece in the New York Times, The Colorblindness Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked

As much as showbiz likes to pretend it is different from the rest of America, it is not. The myth that you hear from showbiz and from outside of showbiz is that it is some sort of liberal paradise. It may move in a more progressive direction faster than “most of the country,” but it often has to be pushed by people who put their mission ahead of their bank accounts. Or it can be pushed by someone like Shonda Rimes who has proven time and time again that you can make gobs of money for showbiz with diversity across race, gender, and sexuality. I believe that part of why people accepted marriage equality is that no one exploded when there were gay couples on Shonda’s Grey’s Anatomy and Ellen Degeneres showed up openly gay on people’s TVs during the daytime.

While it is true that showbiz has the power of narrative, and narratives can be powerful for good (and for bad), showbiz is still a business that runs more on the bottomline than on the ideals of America. It is not immune to the same attacks that are waged against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives all over this country. When I see stories about Ava DuVernay having to raise independent financing for her film Origin and I see Issa Rae talk about her struggles to get Hollywood studios to support her ideas, I ask myself, “Then who the hell am I to complain?” If these two Black women who have moved American culture forward multiple times ANNNNNNND who have filled corporate coffers can’t just green-light whatever they want, then Imma just put my head down and get back to work. It continues to be true that when America decides you are an oppressed person, it works even harder to make sure you can't just achieve your way out of it.

When I was young, I often came across stories of Black filmmakers raising money for their projects. Legendary writer, director, and producer Robert Townsend famously signed up for every credit card he could to pay for his — sadly still hilariously relevant — 1987 film, Hollywood Shuffle.

And I was going through the mail, and it was applications for credit cards — Visa, Preferred Visa, MasterCard, Chevron, Shell. And that's when I said, “I'll finish it with credit cards.” - Robert Townsend

While Spike Lee was in production for his 1992 epic film, Malcolm X, Warner Brothers refused to give him more money to finish it, so he raised the rest from Black celebrities (including Bill Cosby). The hope for Black Hollywood and Black people as a whole was that, after everything those filmmakers accomplished, we would be in a better place. The hope was that the next group of Black filmmakers wouldn’t have to work so hard to be included in Hollywood’s vision. And then the thought was that after 2020’s “racial reckoning” Hollywood (and even America) finally understood and was ready to take responsibility for systemic and institutional racism, from top to bottom. Welp, here we are again. America — its systems, institutions, and ruling class — have decided that us Negroes got too uppity. And they are taking back the 40 acres and a mule that we never got in the first place.

A recent study from the University of Southern California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative speaks volumes on this. It makes it clear that after a lot of noise about diversity in Hollywood the only group that has made any significant strides are Asian-Americans. Great for them. And I mean that. My Asian and Black solidarity goes back a long way. But it’s sadly predictable to learn that the rest of us BIPOCs didn’t make as much progress as the federal holiday of Juneteenth would like us to believe.

And here I am. I have a production company in my favorite place in America, Oakland, California. And I have a mandate from myself to keep going, provide for my family, and support my city. Whether or not the work I do is trendy or “popular,” I’m going to figure out a way to keep doing it. I’m going to figure out a way to help other people like me do this work and/or learn how to do this work. While I am still always looking for ways to work inside my industry, I was also raised to figure out how to do it, to paraphrase Malcolm X, by many means necessary. Even this Substack is a part of that.

All of this is to say that if you are a fan of someone who is creative and making media, see if there is a way for you to support them directly. And if they are on TikTok, do it quickly in case our government makes the xenophobic decision to ban it completely. The less we have to depend on the halls of power to decide what we get to enjoy, the better off we will all be. And the more we can understand that we are all in this together the higher chance we will make it through 2024 and beyond.

Here are some people who are making media their own way, by their own rules:

F.D Signifier “Martin Luther King Was Not a Conservative”
Pat Finnerty “What Makes This Song Stink Ep. 3 - Weezer Beverly Hills: A Retrospective”
Kimberly Renee “Tharpe: The Blueprint for Rock ‘n’ Roll”
K.J. Kearney “Who Made the Potato Salad”
Imani Barbarin “Wendy Williams and Conservatorships”

Give us your recommendations in the comment section.

A Season of Change

I am the one I've been waiting for? Shit!

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