“Black-Ish,” Kenya Barris Rethinks the Family Sitcom in the April 25, 2016

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For Immediate Release: April 18, 2016 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 THE ENTERTAINMENT ISSUE

With “black-ish,” Kenya Barris Rethinks the Family Sitcom

In the April 25, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, in “In Living Color” (p. 58), Emily Nussbaum profiles Kenya Barris, the creator of ABC’s “black- ish,” the hit TV series that is brazenly direct about race and class, and speaks extensively with Barris, his former collaborator Larry Wilmore, the producer Shonda Rhimes, Barris’s wife, and others, to explore the man who is remaking the family sitcom. “Black-ish,” which is built on autobi- ography, is narrated by a black ad executive who has jumped, as Barris did, “from inner-city poverty to bourgie wealth, only to ﬁnd himself ﬂummoxed by his brood of privileged, Obama-era kids,” Nussbaum writes. When the show, his nineteenth pilot, débuted in 2014, it seemed like the right moment for an idea-driven sitcom about race. Not until its second season did it tangle with real-world politics. As the national outcry about police brutality grew louder, Barris wrote “Hope,” an episode about police racism. He described the episode to Nussbaum, who watched it with the Barris family in their living room, as both “the one that ruins me” and “maybe my most important episode.”

Barris’s childhood and early years were not easy. When he was six, his abusive father attempted to enter his mother’s home and Barris witnessed her shoot him multiple times (he survived). Barris tells Nussbaum, “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.” Being honest about the unsanded edges of his life, Barris says, lets others be honest, too. It’s key to good comedy, and it’s influenced his show in innumerable ways.

“Black-ish” has been getting raves; its fans include Michelle Obama and Rhimes, one of TV’s most powerful producers. When Rhimes first met Barris and Wilmore, she offered her help. Solidarity, she tells Nussbaum, is 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,” she says. On the controversy surrounding this year’s Oscars, and the absence of any black actors among the acting nominees, Barris tells Nussbaum, “I’ve got to be honest—I don’t know if this was the right year for a protest of the Oscars.” He argues that it was counterproductive to have a “black slot”: “It just dilutes it.”

Barris attempts to tackle race and class in an honest, funny way. As he says, whereas “The Cosby Show” was about a family that happened to be black, “black-ish” is about a black family. He defends the family’s upper-middle-class portrayal, telling Nussbaum, “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 says, “I don’t even want to tell that story.”

Erykah Badu’s Expanding Musical Universe

In “Godmother of Soul” (p. 50), Kelefa Sanneh profiles the singer Erykah Badu, whose enduring appeal and influence were recently reinforced by an ambitious collection of eleven tracks, “But You Caint Use My Phone,” including a version of Drake’s viral hit “Hotline Bling.” In 1997, Badu’s début album, “Baduizm,” sold millions of copies, earned her a pair of Grammys, and instantly es- tablished her as one of the most celebrated soul singers of the modern era. “The word people used back then was ‘neo-soul,’ ” Sanneh writes, “but nowadays it seems appropriate to omit the ‘neo’— not because her music has grown more old-fashioned but because it has grown harder to catego- rize, and maybe even easier to enjoy.” Badu never doubted that she would find an audience for her music. “I thought I was ahead of my time,” she tells Sanneh. “There was nothing like what I was doing—and they agreed, the music business.” Badu has three children, including one with the per- former André Benjamin (known as André 3000). “Neither Badu’s blended family nor her string of relationships with prominent musicians has gone unnoticed,” Sanneh writes. From the beginning, fans have looked for connections between her lyrics and her family life. She denies that what might be her defining song, “Tyrone,” was about Benjamin, although Benjamin admits that his wildly popular OutKast track “Ms. Jackson” was inspired by Badu.

Based in Dallas, Badu spends a considerable part of every year on the road. “Her concerts and other appearances, combined with her garrulous presence on social media, have helped to solidify her position as one of the country’s most revered singers: a nineties star whose early hits have aged well R. KIKUO JOHNSON and whose later work is both warmer and bolder than the songs that made her famous,” Sanneh writes. “I’m the O.G,” Badu says. “Godmother. Auntie. They keep aging and getting old—and I just stay the same.” Before “But You Cain’t Use My Phone,” which she produced with the little- known East Dallas producer Zach Witness, Badu hadn’t released an album since 2010. “I’m a touring artist, not a recording artist,” she tells San- neh. In interviews, Badu sometimes refers to tantalizing projects that never materialize. She is in no rush to release another album, but she recently resumed her long-dormant acting career, and she has nurtured a side career in fashion. This spring, she has been working on the music for “Legends of Chamberlain Heights,” an animated series scheduled to début on Comedy Central this fall. “I have an interesting life,” Badu says. “I couldn’t have planned it this way—who would?”

Sharon Horgan’s Comedy “Catastrophe” Oﬀers an Unblinking Look at Coupledom

In “The Brutal Romantic” (p. 38), Willa Paskin profiles Sharon Horgan, the British actress and writer whose funny and grim television shows chronicle the life cycle of romance. “Horgan is prolific to an almost manic degree,” writes Paskin. She co-founded a production company and in the past decade has written or co-written four series for U.K. television, and acted in many more. Horgan created “Catastrophe,” whose second season just began streaming on Amazon, with the American comedian Robert Delaney, whom she met on Twitter. In the show, an Irishwoman, played by Horgan, and an American man, played by Delaney, have a torrid six-night stand in London, accidentally conceive a child, and then try to make a life together. If “Catastrophe” offers an unblinking look at a couple’s formation, “Divorce,” which will début this fall on HBO, offers a forensic account of a couple’s end. Horgan created the comically tragic series for Sarah Jessica Parker, in her first lead television role since “Sex and the City.” Parker tells Paskin that she was drawn to Horgan because of her “affection for the dark, sad, and ridiculous that reveals itself in painful circumstances.”

Most of Horgan’s writing stems from her own experience, but her autobiographical approach deepened when she and Delaney began writing “Catastrophe,” in 2013. They set a rule: make nothing up. “We didn’t want to get into a scenario where we were relying on sitcom tropes,” she tells Paskin. “We felt like if we could find a narrative for the bad stuff that had happened to us, that would be something you hadn’t seen before.” Yet Horgan doesn’t like to think that her work has made her personal life in any way transparent. She says that she puts just enough distance between herself and her fictions that she can “pretend it’s got nothing to do with me.” In her own marriage, Horgan is a “really bad talker. It just doesn’t come naturally.” Writing, she tells Paskin, is “a way of getting round the not-talking thing, and still spewing it all out of your psyche.”

The Pioneers Who Are Making the First Virtual-Reality Narratives

In “Studio 360” (p. 86), Andrew Marantz examines the evolving medium of virtual reality, and speaks with the executives, filmmakers, and investors who are pioneering the V.R. movement. V.R. devices, like the Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear, have been on sale since last year, and more sophisticated headsets, like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, are now reaching the market. When Facebook bought Oculus for two billion dollars, in 2014, “That was the moment when everyone, including us, went, ‘Holy shit, this V.R. thing is not a drill,’ ” Anthony Batt, a co-founder of the V.R. production company Wevr, tells Marantz. Wevr has a long-term goal to be the V.R. equivalent of Netflix or Hulu—both a producer of orig- inal V.R. experiences and a destination for watching V.R. content. It has about ﬁfty employees and in the past year has raised more than twenty- ﬁve million dollars from investors. “That’s what we’ve announced publicly, but we’re always raising more,” Batt says. The company has overseen more than twenty V.R. projects, and six more are in production. Last year, Wevr invited the filmmaker Janicza Bravo to write and direct a V.R. proj- ect. “Even while making the V.R. thing, I felt ambivalent about it as a medium,” Bravo tells Marantz. The result, a naturalistic drama called “Hard World for Small Things,” was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival’s showcase for new media. Like many V.R. experiences, it was filmed with GoPros, and the footage was stitched together in postproduction to make a single spherical image. “One of the main challenges for storytellers is learning to think in terms of spheres instead of rectangles,” Robert Stromberg, who won an Academy Award for his art direction on “Avatar,” tells Marantz. In V.R., cinematic grammar no longer applies: directors do not use zoom, montages, dissolves, or split screens. “Though these are all tech- nically feasible,” Marantz writes, “they might seem abrupt or confusing to the audience, which is learning to watch V.R. while its makers are learning to make it.” Could V.R. be as transformative as the Internet? “Let me put it this way,” Batt tells Marantz. “It’s not a new way to watch movies, or a new gaming platform. It’s a new medium. How often do new mediums come along?”

Adolescent Ingenuity Is Shaping the Future of Pop

In “Teenage Dream” (p. 70), with accompanying photographs by Elizabeth Renstrom, Matthew Trammell spotlights eight young musical acts—all under the age of twenty—who are all engaging pop in new ways: Novelist, age 19; Joey Alexander, age 12; Låpsley, age 19; the trio Babymetal, featuring Suzuka Nakamoto, age 18, Yui Mizuno, age 16, and Moa Kikuchi, age 16; Alessia Cara, age 19; Sammy Brue, age 15; the duo Let’s Eat Grandma, featuring Rosa Walton, age 16, and Jenny Hollingworth, age 17; and Kodak Black, age 18. Spanning jazz piano, grime, rap, electronic, J-pop metal, and beyond, these acts “strike a balance between technical achievement and wily innova- tion,” Trammell writes. “There’s something special about capturing them in this moment of early maturation, because nature will surely reshape them as quickly as they have reshaped their respective musical realms. They won’t look this way forever, and they certainly won’t sound this way forever.”

Plus: In Comment, Jelani Cobb looks at the emerging dialogue on class, and considers how the rhetoric is informed by the ways in which we typically talk about race (p. 33); in the Financial Page, James Surowiecki examines the growing willingness of America’s corporations to take a public position on social issues like L.G.B.T. rights, moving to the left of many state legislatures (p. 37); in Shouts & Murmurs, Paul Rudnick imagines President Lincoln’s visit to the home of his Jewish chiropractor for a Passover Seder (p. 44); Adam Gopnik reads two new books about the Beatles, Philip Norman’s “Paul McCartney: The Life” and Fred Goodman’s “Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles” (p. 46); James Wood reads Edna O’Brien’s seventeenth novel, “The Little Red Chairs” (p. 96); Alex Ross describes the Big Ears Festival, which unfolds every spring in Knoxville, Tennessee, and unites elements of classical composition, jazz, rock, folk, and electronica (p. 100); Anthony Lane watches Disney’s new version of “The Jungle Book,” directed by Jon Favreau, and “Tale of Tales,” directed by Matteo Garrone (p. 102); and new fiction by Lara Vapnyar (p. 80).

Podcasts: Dorothy Wickenden speaks with Benjamin Wallace-Wells about Hillary Clinton and progressive voters; Ben Taub speaks with members of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), who are gathering evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government, and a witness who describes being tortured by the Syrian regime; Lara Vapnyar reads her short story, “Wait- ing for the Miracle”; and Monica Youn reads poetry by Afaa Michael Weaver, and discusses it with Paul Muldoon.

Digital Extras: Analicia Sotelo and Andrea Cohen read their poems; in a video, students from the Roy Clark Academy, U.C.L.A. gym- nasts, and others perform viral dance moves from the last decade; an interactive portfolio featuring animated photography of the featured artists in Matthew Trammell’s “Teenage Dream,” and audio of their music.

The April 25, 2016, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, April 18.