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Why ‘Waiting to Exhale’ Has Staying Power Onscreen

From left, Loretta Devine, Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Lela Rochon in "Waiting to Exhale."IMDb

Today is the 25th anniversary of Waiting to Exhale‘s cinematic debut, a film that brought a never-before-seen look into the ’90s grown Black female experience. The timing coincides with author sisters Attica and Tembi Locke embarking on a project to bring Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel to TV. Currently in pre-production, the series is following in the footsteps of the 1995 film and adding the TV binge element to screen.

Mystery novelist and Empire screenwriter Attica Locke and her sister, memoirist and actress Tembi Locke, are under a script commitment with ABC and Empire creator Lee Daniels to bring the story to TV, according to Deadline. The entertainment website also noted in November that Terry McMillan will serve as a consulting producer. It’s been 25 years since Waiting to Exhale sparked a cultural phenomenon among Black female viewers who wanted to see their stories onscreen.

The film Waiting to Exhale starred the late singer Whitney Houston as Savannah, a TV producer who longs for a married man; Angela Bassett as Bernadine, a mother of two whose husband is leaving her for a White woman; Loretta Devine as Gloria, an overweight single mother who owns a hair salon; and Lela Rochon as Robin, an executive trying to elevate from mistress to wife. The story and film is set in Phoenix, Arizona, a city known for a low Black population but symbolically represents a phoenix rising from the ashes and starting over.

In Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s 2019 memoir Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America about being the first Black female reporter at The Washington Post, she discusses the cultural impact of the film that opened in theaters on Dec. 22, 1995. She recounts the moment with her friend and Post executive, Joyce Richardson, and quotes her saying:

“‘Just like the friendship of the characters Gloria, Robin, Savannah, and Bernadine, our get-togethers lifted us up when we were down, helped us network, gave us shoulders to lean on, advice when we needed it, and a safe place to share the good and bad times,” she said. “Each of us could connect with the issues that these women had in one way or another.'”

The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.

The book’s characters are trying to figure out their relationships with men, which impact family, faith, and career, but it brings them closer as a way to de-stress. Friendship between women over men troubles is a common theme in works, but Waiting to Exhale incorporates the Black female perspective, which in 1992 was rare in contemporary literature.

With the 2000s HBO series Sex and the City still in reruns based on a novel by Candace Bushnell, the stories don’t age with time. But with Black women as the stars during a time when 47% of Black adults are single in a dating-app world, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center, the new show could resonate on a higher level than it did 25 years ago.

How the new version of Waiting to Exhale will be perceived in the #MeToo era, where women are looking for female friendships but may not be bonding over men trouble, has yet to be seen.

Amid the #BlackStoriesMatter movement sparked by the George Floyd protests, Terry McMillan tweeted earlier this year that she wasn’t getting the same amount of interest for her 2020 novel, It’s Not All Downhill From Here.

Attica Locke released her latest book, Heaven, My Home, last year. She’s also worked on the Netflix miniseries When They See Us about the Black men formerly known as the Central Park Five. Her sister, Tembi Locke, is an actress and wrote a grief memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, about moving forward without her late husband. The memoir, a former Reese’s Book Club pick, is on track to become a film on Netflix with the aid of Hollywood bookwoman Reese Witherspoon.

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what's lit

Gabrielle Union Adds ‘Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls’ to #BookToTV Roster

Actress and producer Gabrielle Union will be giving Anissa Gray’s debut novel The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls the TV treatment.

Entertainment news outlet Deadline reported this week that the novel has a first-look production deal with Sony Pictures Television and Gabrielle’s production company I’ll Have Another, a play off her 2017 memoir title We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True.

A first-look deal is a contractual agreement between a well-known actor/director/producer/writer and their production company and another production company, network, or studio that will have first rights to consider the project by financially supporting the project during development.

“Thank you @gabunion for wanting to bring the women of Care and Feeding to the screen,” Anissa wrote on her Instagram. “They could not have a better champion.”

Erika L. Johnson will be the main writer on the series and serve as executive producer. Her résumé includes book-to-TV show Queen Sugar based on the novel by Natalie Baszile.

https://twitter.com/ErikasWrite/status/1316781637871398913

I’ll Have Another has also acquired other bookish projects including The Idea of You by Robinne Lee and The Perfect Find by Tia Williams, which Deadline reported in June will be a Netflix film.

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what's lit

How Sister Souljah’s ‘The Coldest Winter Ever’ Got Yandy Smith Her Break in Hip-Hop

Original Love & Hip Hop: New York cast member Yandy Smith-Harris says the Sister Souljah classic The Coldest Winter Ever contributed to her big break in the music business.

Yandy’s candid interview in the recent airing of TV One’s Uncensored revealed how she had worked since high school in The Gap’s retail management program, but once the program was eliminated, she found her way into the office of hip-hop management firm and record label Violator. She said she asked an assistant for an internship. After hearing no, she said she kept pushing for more information but noticed the assistant was absorbed in a book. And she knew taking note of the book could open doors.

“‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know I got that book, The Coldest Winter Ever,‘” Yandy said she recalled saying to the assistant the next day after borrowing money from her mother to buy the book. “‘I noticed you were reading it, and I’m like, ‘Girl, Midnight, he sound like he about to be a number.’ And she’s like, ‘Wait till you get to chapter six, girl. It gonna get crazy,’ or something like that. I don’t remember. You know I read chapter six in about a day or two.”

Once she finished that chapter, she called the assistant again and asked her to lunch, so they could discuss the book. The assistant instead invited her back to the office, where Yandy met veteran hip-hop manager and soon-to-be VH1’s Love & Hip Hop creator Mona Scott-Young. Mona interviewed then hired Yandy on the spot for an internship.

Yandy became “Mona’s assistant’s assistant’s intern” and eventually was elevated to junior manager touring the globe with famous artists like Missy Elliott. Years later, she’d be on Mona’s reality TV show about the women behind rising male rappers via the first version of Love & Hip Hop that’s now a highly rated franchise.

Sister Souljah

A hip-hop musician herself, Sister Souljah attracted attention when she spoke out on racism during the 1992 presidential election, the same year the Los Angeles uprising occurred putting a light on racial tensions. She took her words to books with 1999’s The Coldest Winter Ever, which became an instant best-seller, especially among the hip-hop industry and its fans. A movie based on the book has been up in the air since the early 2000s with actress/producer Jada Pinkett Smith being rumored to be involved.

Sister Souljah’s follow-ups include 2008’s Midnight: a Gangster, 2011’s Midnight and the Meaning, and 2013’s A Deeper Love Inside chronicling the lives of Winter Santiaga and her drug-dealing family and community. The long-awaited The Coldest Winter Ever sequel, Life After Death, is expected to drop in March 2021.

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what's lit

Saying Goodbye to Bookstore Entrepreneur Poppy of TV’s ‘Single Parents’

SINGLE PARENTS - ABC's "Single Parents" stars Kimrie Lewis as Poppy Banks. (ABC/Brian Bowen Smith)

One of TV’s dream literary businesswomen is Poppy on ABC’s Single Parents. Played by actress Kimrie Lewis, Poppy owns the ultimate dream venture: a bookstore/wine bar.

We won’t see any new updates with Poppy’s business because ABC cancelled the adult-centric family comedy series last week. Now with the series’ two seasons living on Hulu, The Winebrary in the background can still be appreciated as the ideal place to peruse books and drink wine.

The Winebrary showcased bookshelves in a swanky setting with the bar being the focal point. The business model is starting to pick up steam in the real-life literary world. One example includes The 1894, the wine bar at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, which opened in February but has been temporarily closed like most bookstores due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Bookstores find it hard to break even with the competition of Amazon.com, so adding another non-book part, especially surrounding refreshments has been explored more in the past few years.

SINGLE PARENTS –
KIMRIE LEWIS, JAKE CHOI
SINGLE PARENTS –
KIMRIE LEWIS, BRAD GARRETT

 

Single Parents revolved around a group of five single parents played by Kimrie, Brad Garrett of Everybody Loves Raymond, Taran Killam of Saturday Night Live, Leighton Meester of book-to-TV classic Gossip Girl, and Jake Choi separately raising their children but depending on each other to create a village. With the children spewing appropriate lines clearly written for an adult audience and hanging out at The Winebrary bar at times, it stood out as an edgy, refreshing comedy even if you’re an adult who’s outgrown the family comedy model.

Having Poppy as a black woman owning a bookstore was also a unique creative decision. Los Angeles itself doesn’t have a black woman-owned bookstore though black women do own stores that sell books on top of other merchandise. Black women are the top book consumers, but owning indie bookstores period is too risky of a business for anyone with Amazon taking over the market share. The bookish bizwoman character even inspired Kimrie to share her book picks as #PoppysPick on her Instagram account. Though she hadn’t shared a selection in a while, Kimrie would pose with books worth reading.

 

 

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what's lit

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: Find a Way

The Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere based on the best-selling novel by Celeste Ng came to end with its eighth episode that has the characters realizing and acting on their fates.

The premise revolves around two mothers fighting each other over who is a good mother in Ohioan suburbia. Elena Richardson, played by Reese Witherspoon, embodies the rich white mother stereotype with raising four children in a mansion with her successful lawyer husband. She rents her family cottage to Mia Warren, played by Kerry Washington, a single black mother who’s a traveling artist constantly moving around the country with her teen daughter.

As their children grow closer, the mothers find themselves in conflict when Elena’s best friend Linda McCullough, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, is in the process of adopting a Chinese baby who had been abandoned by Mia’s work friend Bebe Chow, played by Lu Huang, during a postpartum breakdown. The battle for the baby, whom Bebe named May Ling but Linda renamed Mirabelle, goes to court where Elena’s husband Bill, played by Joshua Jackson, defends Linda and Mia pays for Bebe’s legal defense with the sale of a pricey photo.

IZZY’S FIRE

Elena’s daughter Izzy, played by Megan Stott, is the fourth and youngest child that we learn Elena blames for stunting her journalism career. They come to a screaming match at the end when Izzy, upset when she sees Mia and Pearl driving away with their belongings strapped on the hood of their car, pours gasoline on a pile of clothes and her curtains. The other Richardson children—Trip, played by Jordan Elsass; Lexie, played by Jade Pettyjohn; and Moody, played by Gavin Lewis—try to stop Izzy from setting the fire. The commotion brings in a tipsy Elena. She yells at Izzy that she never wanted her. This makes Izzy run out the front door. We later see her riding the Greyhound out of town.

LEXIE’S FIRE

While snooping for more incriminating evidence against Mia, Elena heads to the clinic to ask her friend there for any files connected to Bebe. Of course, her friend denies her request over health privacy concerns, but once she steps out of the office, Elena looks on the computer then sees a paper file with Pearl’s name on it. Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood, is Mia’s daughter who accompanied Lexie during her abortion. But Elena thinks Pearl is the one who had the abortion. She thinks she’s surprising Mia with the news at her door, but Mia reveals that it is Lexie who had the abortion and shames Elena for not being the mother Lexie could run to in such a situation.

After Izzy leaves the house during the gasoline fight, Lexie tells her mother that she is the one who had the abortion. She screams she’s not perfect while Elena screams back that she is. Distraught, Lexie tells her brothers they would end up like their mother desperate to live a perfect life. Then she sets the first fire in her bedroom.

TRIP’S FIRE

When pouring the gasoline, Izzy tells her siblings that their mother drove Mia and Pearl away. Trip is in shock since he developed a romantic relationship with Pearl and hid it from Moody. Earlier in the day, they physically fight over Pearl in a junkyard that Moody had introduced to Pearl as a secret space. Pearl eventually starts meeting Trip there to create their secret relationship. Losing Pearl forces him to set his fire in his bedroom.

MOODY’S FIRE

Coming home after the fight with his brother, Moody is icing his bruised face with a bag of frozen peas in the kitchen. Elena comes in and blames him for Pearl’s alleged abortion. He tells her to look at Trip.

Later, he’s on the sofa still icing his face when he and Izzy are looking at the news when the verdict over who won custody over baby Mirabelle/May Ling appears. The McCulloughs win. Visibly upset, Izzy shakes tears away when Moody tells her she should’ve expected that outcome because the rich and beautiful people always win.

Izzy accuses him of being in that category and that’s why he expected Pearl to be with him instead of Trip. She tells him he didn’t own Pearl as the first Richardson kid to become friends with Pearl and falling for her. While his siblings are setting fires in their own bedrooms, he’s doing the same, watching the flames grow.

WHY EVERYONE IS SETTING FIRES

Mia plants the idea of the fires unintentionally when she tells Izzy a story about seeing a prairie wildfire in California while she was pregnant with Pearl. She says sometimes the land has to be scorched to start over.

Instead of starting an actual fire, Mia soon talks to Pearl about calling the Ryans, the family she originally had acted as a surrogate before losing her brother and being disowned by her family. Now with Pearl knowing who her biological father is, she confides in her mother that she knows their time in Shaker Heights, Ohio is finished. They go into Mia’s art studio as she starts completing a massive art project emphasizing the current and past racial landscape of the town. Then they pack and leave town.

Bebe chooses another route. In the McCullough residence, Mirabelle cries in her room over the baby monitor. But Linda wants to check on the baby when her husband stops her to train Mirabelle to cry it out; they won the baby and nobody is taking her away. Uneasy, Linda falls back in the bed until the early morning when she finds Mirabelle is gone. We see baby May Ling in Bebe’s arms at a rest stop in New York. She kidnaps her own baby.

Bill isn’t home when his children are having breakdowns that turn into acts of arson. He admits to Elena that he knows that she had dinner with her ex-boyfriend, a superstar The New York Times reporter, while she headed to New York to investigate Mia’s background. Though he wins the custody case, he’s sour to the point he leaves the house smoking a cigarette. On his drive back, he returns to his house completely engulfed in flames.

When asked by investigators who started the fires, Elena takes the blame for her children.

WHO REALLY STARTS THE FIRE

In the book, Izzy is the sole arsonist who starts the fires alone in each of her siblings’ bedrooms at the end of Chapter 19.

“On her shoulder she had her bookbag stuffed with a change of clothes, all the money she owned. They couldn’t be far ahead, she thought. There was still time to find them. The sandpaper grated under the match head like nails on a chalkboard and there was a whiff of sulfur and the tip flared bright, and Izzy dropped it onto her sister’s flowered comforter and ran out the door.”

Watching the fractured mother-daughter relationship between Izzy and Elena onscreen may have swayed the writers’ room to take the blame off of Izzy. The girl has been through a lot. The premiere episode shows the house on fire with the investigators asking about Izzy’s whereabouts, which follows the book, of letting us know Izzy commits the fire but the story will reveal the why.

But the TV series went the surprise route with forcing the other Richardson kids to start their own fires. It humanizes the siblings more because in the book Izzy remains the outcast until the end. At least, on TV the Richardsons, except Elena, seem tired of the perfectionism constantly bestowed upon them.

The next chapter reveals Pearl wanting to include Izzy on the car trip out of Shaker Heights. The TV series doesn’t show that aspect; Pearl and Mia just want to flee and avoid goodbyes.

“An idea began to form in Pearl’s mind in wild golden loops. “We could go back and get her. I could climb up the back porch and knock on her window and—”

 

“My darling,” Mia said, “Izzy is only fifteen. There are rules about that kind of thing.”

Izzy fantasizes about running off with Mia and Pearl after actually seeing them pull away from the curb, so that hope remains with Izzy that she can experience the freedom the Warren women have. The freedom theme continues when Elena sees the art project Mia leaves behind. It’s a wheat flour mold of Shaker Heights with a birdcage in the center of the town holding a cardinal feather. We see the feather in the beginning of the episode when a younger Izzy lets an injured bird into the house and Elena becomes upset by the disruption to her perfect home. Inside the cottage, Elena caresses the feather and hopes for her daughter’s return. In the book, the character has the same sentiment, knowing the authorities could find Izzy but if they can’t, she will look for Izzy herself.

The TV series did an excellent job with bringing the book to life even when artistic license created more depth to the characters and their behaviors. The largest difference is making Mia and Pearl black to reinforce the racial tensions in this real utopian community and pitting white mothers with means against nonwhite mothers without means. Since the final episode ends with the book, let’s hope there won’t be a meaningless continuation like HBO’s Big Little Lies based on Liane Moriarty’s book that Reese is also involved in.

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what's lit

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: Picture Perfect

The latest episode of Little Fires Everywhere continues to pit two mothers and their children against each other during a child custody trial that’s rocking their quaint Ohio suburb.

Elena Richardson, played by Reese Witherspoon, is a wealthy homemaker and journalist who rented a cottage to Mia Warren, played by Kerry Washington, without checking her background. But as they become more acquainted with each other and their teen kids become friends, they notice they have different perceptions of motherhood.

Elena’s best friend Linda McCullough, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, is about to adopt a Chinese baby who had been abandoned at a local fire station. It turns out Mia’s work friend Bebe, played by Lu Huang, left her baby at the fire station in the throes of a postpartum depression breakdown. Once Mia realizes that Bebe’s  daughter May Ling is really the baby Linda plans to adopt whom she named Mirabelle, she helps Bebe fight for the baby. But Elena gets behind her friend, too, and now she and Mia are fighting each other over a baby that belongs to neither of them.

LOVING WHO YOU LOVE

The episode starts with Elena’s youngest daughter Izzy, played by Megan Stott, going to a house party months before with her best friend. They run into a spin-the-bottle game which in turns leads to 7 Minutes In Heaven. Izzy spins the bottle and lands on her friend. They go into the closet after being forced by the other teens. Inside, they touch each other romantically; they already had done this before. They start kissing until a boy opens the door in shock of them kissing with the other kids staring. The friend shouts at Izzy and accuses her of molestation.

Throughout the miniseries so far, Izzy has had a difficult time fitting into high school because of her relationship with the friend, who is now popular, while Izzy has sunken into a depression for being misunderstood. Their fracture is finally explained. Until the friend makes it worse again.

Later, Izzy and her friend are going through boxes of old dolls. Izzy asks her friend why she put the blame on her, and her friend says the peer pressure made her freak out and she rolled with it. At school, the next day Izzy brings the Cabbage Patch dolls and places magazine cutouts of faces and places them on the dolls. She’s selling the dolls based on race—Asian for the $10,000 the Elena offered to Bebe on behalf of the McCulloughs, white for $100,000, and black for free—to make a statement about the May Ling/Mirabelle case that has gripped the community. When students come up her outraged about the stunt, her friend throws Izzy under the bus again. In disbelief, Izzy is staring at her ex-friend when the principal comes to shut the social experiment down.

RICH GIRL, POOR GIRL

Mia’s daughter Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood, has led a vagabond lifestyle since she could ever remember with her artist mom, but now after settling in Shaker Heights, Ohio, she’s done. In last week’s episode, we learn Elena has crossed state lines to do a deep-dive investigation into Mia’s past where she learns Mia was supposed to be a surrogate mother but instead skipped town with Pearl and raised Pearl as her own child. Two episodes ago, Mia sells an old photograph by her former lover for thousands of dollars to help Bebe with her legal defense.

Pearl doesn’t know any of this. When her pseudo-boyfriend and eldest Richardson son Trip, played by Jordan Elsass, tells her he overheard his mother saying that her mother is paying for Bebe’s lawyer and had a lot money, half a million stashed somewhere, Pearl grows suspicious.

At home, Mia comes into Pearl’s bedroom wanting to talk. Pearl asks laughingly if it’s about the half a million and if she’s paying Bebe’s legal bills. Mia admits she sold a piece of art reserved for a rainy day. Pearl becomes angry that her mother received a large sum of money and didn’t spend it on their family. Instead, Mia spent the money on Bebe, whom she only known for three months. Pearl screams for her mother to leave.

The next day, Pearl tells Trip that she never had what she wanted. She shares a story of living on the property of a family with a girl who had horses. Pearl wanted everything the girl had. It upset her that the girl can have anything, and Pearl rarely had a bed. This is a revelation that though the Warrens lived as if they were in poverty but also lived in ritzy areas where Pearl has grown accustomed to seeing what other kids like her have and feeling deprived of such luxuries.

TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH

The name of the episode comes from Elena’s obsession to get the Christmas family portrait just right. In the beginning, she rejects the photos they had already taken, rendering them useless. After her oldest daughter Lexie, played by Jade Pettyjohn, gets into Yale University, she throws a nice dinner and invites the photographer back to the house for a redo.

During the photo session, the Richardsons are patiently waiting for Izzy. When Izzy shows up without the plaid Keds her mother requested to match other family members’ accessories, Elena throws a fit. We see later Izzy had gone back and put on the Keds, but she is sticking her middle finger in the photo Elena is already stuffing into cards. The Richardson patriarch Bill, played by Joshua Jackson, notices the faux pas. Soon, Elena begins chopping Izzy out of the dozens of copies.

When Mia returns home, she finds a distraught Izzy in her family room. Izzy had ran out of her mother’s car after she had to get picked up over the doll-selling debacle. They talk about the dolls, but Mia eventually admits about loving her art professor—a woman—which surprises and soothes Izzy to let her know nothing was wrong with her trying to find romance with her best girl friend.

When Izzy returns home, she finds the cutup photos of her in the trash. She collects them and tries to piece them together on her bedroom carpet.

RACE EQUATION

As Izzy tries to figure out her slashed photos, Lexie comes in and tells her she broke up with boyfriend Brian, played by Stevonte Hart.

Earlier they had another race-based argument. Brian is still upset with Lexie when she used Pearl’s essay to get into a higher math class that she was first rejected for because she was black. Lexie reworks the essay and submits it with college applications, and now she’s headed to Yale. This doesn’t sit right again with Brian, who plans to attend Princeton University.

They’re in the fast food drive-thru when Lexie sends her hamburger back; she didn’t want the meat, just a grilled cheese sandwich. The attendant, who’s black, explains that wasn’t in the order but takes the burger back when Lexie insists it was. Brian in the driver seat tells Lexie he feels like she sent it back because the attendant is black. Lexie is upset that he thinks that’s the reason. When Lexie gets the burger sans the burger, Brian still seems unsure about Lexie’s unnecessary action.

Later on Lexie’s bed, Brian brings up the race issue again. He asks Lexie if she sees his blackness because everyone else does. He won’t be seen as a smart kid who got into Princeton because everyone will assume he’s an affirmative action case. Lexie tearfully explains herself, that’s she not racist, and though she turned Pearl’s story into hers, she didn’t mean for it to happen that way. Her whitesplaining doesn’t agree with Brian. When Lexie sees she’s not getting her way, she wants to tell him about the abortion but instead she tells him to leave.

Their heartbreaking breakup shows how deciding to ignore how race plays a major factor in society like Lexie can make a partner feel like they’re not being seen at all because their race is a part of their identity. Lexie uses the she-doesn’t-see-color excuse, and Brian asks what does she see. It’s hard for her to say to him as a person when he sees his blackness as a part of the equation.

SECRETS REVEALED

The entire episode Elena and Mia are taunting each other as the trial for custody of May Ling/Mirabelle starts. In the court bathroom, Elena tells Mia that she knows her secret that Pearl wasn’t meant to be her child but a child for the Ryans, a couple she was a surrogate for while in art school. Elena even admits she visited Mia’s parents. Mia is taken aback by the revelation.

Meanwhile, Elena is pushing Bill to use the evidence in court as her husband defends Linda’s family, the McCulloughs. He tells Elena she doesn’t need to worry about Linda losing Mirabelle because people like Bebe don’t win these cases. Linda has the financial means to give Mirabelle whatever she needs while Bebe doesn’t. But as the episode progresses, Bill is seeing Elena in a different lens, a vindictive lens. With Mia on the stand, he doesn’t bring up her questionable maternity issues. Elena catches his arm, and he shoos her down.

While Mia is comforting Izzy, Pearl ends up at the Richardson home with Trip. Pearl wants Trip to tell his brother Moody, played by Gavin Lewis, that they’re dating. She had met Moody first, and Moody is in love with her and trying to figure out why they’re spending less time together. As Trip searches for Moody, Pearl sits down with Elena. We see them talking through the Christmas lights in the living room, but we don’t hear the conversation. It’s not until Elena drives Pearl home is where we get the gist of the conversation: Elena told Pearl about her paternity. Pearl in tears rushes past her mother, who’s in the driveway in shock that Elena came near her child.

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: The Uncanny

This week’s episode of Little Fires Everywhere explores how two mothers in picturesque Shaker Heights, Ohio who are at odds deal with the early trials and tribulations of motherhood.

Reese Witherspoon is Elena Richardson, a wealthy white housewife with four teens, and Kerry Washington is Mia Warren, a single black artist mother with one teen. They have clashed since the beginning of their relationship until an incident put them against each in a battle over motherhood.

We travel back in time to the early 1980s where both Mia and Elena are becoming young mothers before they are ready.

BEADED BRAIDS

The episode starts with young Mia, played by Tiffany Boone who has an uncanny cadence like her adult counterpart Kerry Washington, in box braids decorated with jumbo beads at the dining room table with her parents, played by the unappreciated Obba Babatundé and Melanie Nicholls-King, and brother Warren, played by Aubrey Joseph, praying over her success in New York as an art student. At school, Mia finds her classroom and becomes enamored with her new professor, Pauline, played by Anika Noni Rose, who wears sleek microbraids with Cleopatra-rivaling beaded necklaces. How young Mia and Pauline are styled is the best fashion of the series that it deserved a shout-out.

Pauline pushes all her students to tap into the “terrifying, repulsive and uncanny” to produce their art. She also takes a liking to naive Mia, whom she invites to a gallery opening after learning Mia had singed parts of a photograph for effect. Mia knows how to play with fire. At the opening, Mia meets Anita, played by Sarita Choudhury, the gallery owner who constantly works with Mia. And Pauline snorts cocaine and offers it to Mia. They eventually end up at Pauline’s place, with Mia sleeping on the sofa.

HOW ELENA BECOMES A MOTHER

We also see a young Elena again like in the previous episode, who’s played by AnnaSophia Robb, preparing to head back to The Shaker Times newsroom after maternity leave with baby Moody. Yet once she starts, she knows she has to keep a hold on her job, especially after her friend gets a promotion to editor. But at the doctor’s office, she finds out she’s pregnant again. She doesn’t tell Bill right away, but young Linda, played by Alona Tal, and young Mark McCullough, played by Andy Favreau, detect it while they’re all having dinner. The McCulloughs had suffered a miscarriage but hadn’t told their friends yet. While Elena is becoming a mother of four, Linda is struggling to even have one child.

This worries her since the family is expanding in the cottage that’s now rented to the Warrens and her budding journalism career is taking a fourth hit. After having baby Izzy, she’s falling apart. Three kids is different than four kids, as Izzy keeps crying and crying. One day, the water is turned off, and Elena begins breaking plates. Bill, the younger version played by Matthew Barnes, arrives home from work where Elena leaves Izzy in his arms and heads to the pharmacy for the pacifiers.

Staring at the pacifiers she’s taken back to the disco night in Paris with her former boyfriend Jamie, played by Luke Bracey. Outside the pharmacy, she calls Jamie. A scene later, she’s in Rochester, New York meeting with Jamie for a beer. Jamie just received his job at The New York Times as an editorial assistant with goals to become a foreign correspondent.

Elena is devastated by the news because her life has hit another roadblock. Jamie wonders aloud what it would’ve been like if Elena stayed in Paris. They eventually move to a hotel, where Elena has to stop the action to pump breast milk into the bathroom sink. She doesn’t recognize herself anymore. Jamie becomes a casualty in Elena’s confusion, and Elena runs out the door and drives back home.

HOW MIA BECOMES A MOTHER

Mia rides the subway to school. That’s where we meet Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams, the man who keeps coming up in Mia’s subway nightmares. He is Joe Ryan and stares at Mia several times on the subway until he follows her out of the station. Equipped with mace, Mia threatens to use it against him. He explains she looks like his wife, Madeleine, played by Nicole Beharie. They’ve been trying to have a baby, so they could pay Mia to carry their child as a surrogate. Mia takes the number.

Soon, she receives a letter from her school that tuition has been suspended for the next year. She desperately needs $12,000. On the Ryans’ sofa, she negotiates that amount to carry their baby. With contracts signed, Mia is given a turkey baster by Madeleine. She admits she’s a virgin, and the innocence washes over her face. Madeleine mirrors Linda with trying to conceive during a time before in vitro fertilization was an inaccessible process.

Mia and Pauline kiss in the dark room while developing photographs and become an item. When Warren comes to visit Mia, he is surprised by her apparent pregnancy. Warren warns Mia that their religious parents wouldn’t approve of the decision, but he gives her music to share with the baby since he won’t be the baby’s uncle technically.

Weeks later, Warren is killed in a car accident. Nine months pregnant, Mia shows up at her family home in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, but her mother refuses to embrace her. The day of Warren’s funeral her mother tells Mia she can’t go to the funeral because it would take away attention from Warren.

Alone in the house, Mia writes a letter to the Ryans about having a miscarriage and calls Pauline to tell her she plans to stay home for awhile. But instead she prepares her car and drives across the country to California. She gives birth to Pearl there.

After getting adjusted in Southern California, she calls Pauline from a payphone. Anita picks up. Mia is confused why Anita would pick up. Anita breaks the news that Pauline died suddenly from ovarian cancer. That’s when Anita promises to help Mia with her art career. Anita also adds she packed up Mia’s belongings in Pauline’s apartment, including the photograph of a naked Mia in the bathtub that was dubbed “Duo” that inspired Elena in the last episode to start doing serious research on Mia.

Pearl grows up in the backseat of the car always driving to a new destination until she’s old enough to be in the front seat when they arrive in Shaker Heights.

Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will arrive on Wednesdays.

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‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: Duo

Kerry Washington as Mia Warren and Jesse Williams.

The fifth episode of Little Fires Everywhere ventured into the backgrounds of two mothers in suburban Ohio at odds about who is considered a mother.

Reese Witherspoon is Elena Richardson, a white housewife/journalist raising four teens in a mansion with her husband, who finds herself investigating the woman she rented her family cottage property to. Kerry Washington is Mia Warren, a single black mother who recently moved to Shaker Heights with her teen daughter, has become an enigma for Elena. Mia is fighting for her friend, Bebe Chow played by Lu Huang, to regain custody of the baby girl she had left at a fire station due to the hardships of having no support as recent Chinese immigrant. But Elena’s friend, Linda McCullough played by Rosemarie DeWitt, is planning to adopt the baby. This causes a rift between Elena and Mia who were developing a relationship as so was their combined five kids.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

The episode opens in 1976 in Paris with Elena, the younger version played by AnnaSophia Robb, dancing in a disco with her boyfriend at the time, Jamie, played by Luke Bracey. They’re studying abroad as Denison University students until Elena starts packing her suitcase to head back to Shaker Heights. Jamie is hesitant to join in the packing and admits he doesn’t want to go back home. He wants a global life and tries to convince Elena she wants to do the same. They break up.

Fast forward to 1997 where Elena is using her journalistic skills to research Mia. Her leads end up in New York City where Mia had attended art school. After Linda comes to the newspaper office blaming Elena for the fiasco of her possibly losing baby Mirabelle aka May Ling for Bebe and her supporters, Elena heads off to NYC in a frenzy.

In NYC, Elena bribes the art school’s receptionist with cupcakes to get Mia’s files. On her way back to the hotel, she decides to take a detour to The New York Times, where Jamie works. She asks Jamie to hunt down additional information since the newspaper recently printed a story on Mia selling a photograph of herself pregnant and naked in a bathtub called “Duo.” Jamie says he’ll help and asks Elena to dinner afterward.

Their fancy dinner is going well with Jamie discussing his life as a foreign correspondent and living all over the world compared to Elena raising her four kids and only talking about those kids. When they depart, Elena confesses, when pressed, she wanted to see what Jamie’s life was like after pursuing the dream she thought she would pursue herself. She then asks Jamie to run off with her. In disbelief, Jamie calls Elena selfish and leaves.

THE ROAD TAKEN

Lexie, played by Jade Pettyjohn, is the eldest Richardson daughter who’s also a popular cheerleader dating the popular football player Brian, played by Stevonte Hart. In the last episode, Lexie brags about having sex with Brian. Now, she’s pregnant.

She only confides in Pearl, Mia’s daughter played by Lexi Underwood, who has become more of a pet than a friend. But Pearl is desperate to fit in.

In her car, Lexie wants to tell Brian she’s pregnant until she asks about  the Mirabelle/May Ling situation. Who should have the baby has become a dividing topic in the picture-perfect Ohio suburb. Trying to find an ounce about his interest in children, Brian mentions he’s leaning to Bebe’s side since she’s the biological mother. He also adds he’s not ready for kids at all and doesn’t even want to hear about it. They’re only seniors in high school. With a pained look, Lexie stares straight ahead.

Later, Lexie is at the abortion clinic. When asking for an appointment, she notices one of her mother’s doctor friends in the background. It spooks her. For support, she calls Pearl, who is the shiny example of sincere support. Lexie tells Pearl she’s the only one she’s confided in about the pregnancy, with Pearl earlier holding the pregnancy test and breaking the news to Lexie. Pearl smiles a bit. Until the nurse calls her name. Lexie gets up and quickly apologizes for registering under her friend’s name.

Pearl waits for Lexie, who refuses to go home. She asks why her name was used. Lexie explains it matters if people knew she had an abortion. So Pearl drives Lexie to her home where Mia senses what happened and comforts Lexie. After Lexie relaxes into a nap, Pearl shows her mother Lexie’s discharge papers with her name on them. Mia tells Pearl she doesn’t like how Lexie treats her. Pearl admits she had sex with the eldest Richardson son Trip, played by Jordan Elsass, and it wasn’t what she hoped for. Then Trip calls Pearl.

When Lexie wakes up, she asks Mia what decision she would have made. Perturbed by the question, Mia tells Lexie she needs to trust her decision and adds how she didn’t like the way Lexie used Pearl’s name at the clinic. Lexie complains that she had no one else to turn to. Mia counteracts that Lexie had a million places to turn to.

I think my daughter skipped school to help you and you thanked her by using her name and then demanding she take care of you. I spent two months cooking your diners, working in your house and you never so much as uttered a thank you and now you want more. Pearl may have love to give and give to you, but I do not.

Meanwhile, Pearl meets Trip at a swing set. Trip apologizes to her for being mean during her first time after his youngest sister Izzy, played by Megan Stott, pointed out his tendency to sleep with girls and not care about their feelings. Trip tells Pearl she’s different. “You read The Bell Jar for fun. I don’t even know what the fuck The Bell Jar is still,” he says. “And you’re really really pretty.”

Pearl accepts his apology, and they hold hands.

TOO MANY ROADS

After Elena can’t sleep with Jamie’s words and Joshua Jackson as her husband Bill’s voice messages in her head, she drives into Pennsylvania to meet with Mia’s parents.

They hadn’t seen Mia in fifteen years. Shocked, Elena asks if they ever met their grandchild, Pearl. They say no. They also add Pearl is not their granddaughter.

This confuses Elena. Then it’s hinted Mia was a surrogate who kidnapped the child, which is the reason why she jumps from town to town.

Additional secrets that come up around Mia includes:

  • Mia Warren is Mia Wright. She changed her last name to Warren, the name of her younger brother she lost in a car accident when he was 17.
  • When Pearl asked for the umpteenth time about her father, Mia returns to the nightmare on the subway she’s had in previous episodes where Jesse Williams is coming toward her. Who is he?
  • Mia digs into a memory box after the paternity question. She finds a roll of photos to develop. Once developed, we see Anika Noni Rose appear in the photo. Who is she?

Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will arrive on Wednesdays.

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When Maya Angelou Shared Her Wisdom on ‘Moesha’

In honor of Dr. Maya Angelou’s 92nd birthday, she lit will analyze the master storyteller’s unforgettable appearance on the 1990s Black girl TV sitcom Moesha.

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. Despite losing her voice after she was raped as a child, she eventually found her voice which led to an incredible career on the literary stage as she used her words to create brilliant memoir and poetry collections. While mute until she was twelve, she read voraciously and developed her talent from there. By the time she died in 2014 at the age of 86, she had received over 50 honorary degrees, the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

The film version of Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came out ten years later and was on repeat in my house along with 1984’s The Color Purple based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. When I became a teenager and realized I only knew Maya Angelou’s story via video, I started reading her memoirs including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas; The Heart of a Woman; and Gather Together in My Name.

Twenty years ago, Maya Angelou played herself in a pivotal episode on Moesha, my favorite sitcom from childhood, and changed the course of the namesake character’s life. In the fifth season’s second episode, “Fired Up,” which aired Aug, 30, 1999 according to IMDb, Moesha—played by 90s braid queen multi-hyphenate Brandy—is looking for ways to redeem herself after accusing her boss at Vibe magazine of sexual harassment.

If you’re familiar with the sitcom that ran from 1996 to 2001 on UPN, then you know Moesha, a bright Black girl coming of age in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles, would tend to get in trouble often by thinking she was grown and later learning she was not.

Moesha’s professional misstep has not been forgiven completely as her colleagues still treat her as the lowly editorial assistant. Then a message without a name comes to her desk, so she calls the number. It turns out to be Maya Angelou’s publicist! But everyone else in the office had already gone home. Moesha, with her best friend Niecy—played by Shar Jackson—there to head out for a movie, decides to pose as a reporter and says she can interview Maya Angelou at the Vibe office. Here’s a transcript of their interview:

Maya Angelou: “I suppose Socrates said it the best, most succinctly. He said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.'”

Moesha: “Oh, that is deep.” [audience laughter]

Maya Angelou: “Deep enough to write down?” [audience laughter]

Moesha: “Next question: What is Oprah really like?”

Maya Angelou: “I think that question is best asked of Oprah herself.”

Moesha: “Of course, I’m so sorry. OK now when you first started writing how did you get people to recognize your talent so you can be published?” 

Maya Angelou: “Other people’s recognition wasn’t my first focus. My focus was on the work. Recognition comes after that.” 

Moesha: “But wouldn’t it be frustrating if you knew you had the talent and drive, but no matter how hard you try, nobody gave you the chance?” 

Maya Angelou: “Well, you certainly are not talking about yourself. I mean, obviously you’re much appreciated here at Vibe. You have this important job and you just got out of college last night.” [audience laughter] 

Moesha: “Well, actually I bypassed college, so I could plunge straight into the world of journalism.” 

Maya Angelou: “You bypassed college?” [audience laughter] And let me ask you a question. Is this your office?” [She eyes her majestically crafted cane preparing to expose Moesha]. 

Moesha: “Unh, hunh. Why do you ask?” [A look of goofy bewilderment marks her face as if she couldn’t believe she got caught]. Maya Angelou then turns around a nameplate that reads Moesha’s male boss’ name toward the alleged reporter. 

Moesha: [She accepts she just got caught] “You’re not gonna tell me to go to college? Are you? Because I’ve had this discussion with my parents.” 

Maya Angelou: “My dear, elders all over the world do their best to gain some wisdom, so they can tell you young people something wise and wonderful to do which we know you’re not going to take to.” [audience laughter] 

Moesha: “So you are gonna tell me to go to college?” 

Maya Angelou: “I’m not going to tell you, but rather I’m going to pull something for your consideration. I’m suggesting more than any other place college can offer you a chance to know human thought over human centuries by then garner some preparation for your own life.” 

Moesha: “Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Angelou. You have given me so much to think about.” 

Maya Angelou: “I’m delighted.”

They embrace. Of course, Moesha gets fired.

After showing her boss her article on Maya Angelou, he tells Moesha she should’ve called him in order to ask the right questions. Now Vibe has to use its budget to send an experienced reporter to North Carolina to interview Maya Angelou in person. Moesha tries to explain how she seized an opportunity, but her boss tells her that’s 10% of the job and the other 90% is preparation. And from that question about Oprah and the other questions about her own situation, it was obvious Moesha hadn’t even done the research to interview Maya Angelou. 

When Moesha gets home, she surprises her family by announcing she’s going to college. Little do they know, the one and only Maya Angelou was the catalyst for the decision with sharing the knowledge about the importance of college and becoming the subject of Moesha’s poorly executed article that led to her firing.

The episode ends perfectly with Maya Angelou and Moesha reciting “Still I Rise,” alternating lines in the darkened den within Moesha’s house. Then they recite together:

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise.

Maya Angelou

After they speak the last line, they rise slightly off the sofa as if to show the power they received from their ancestors. “Still I Rise” is one of Maya Angelou’s most recognizable poems published in 1978’s And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems.

The Moesha guest appearance was a multi-generational milestone for Black women on TV by having intellectual icon Maya Angelou reciting her poetry about rising above racial barriers with top Black girl singer of the time Brandy. It showed Maya Angelou’s influence spanning over time, which she lit also reflected on in the 1993 film Poetic Justice starring pop legend Janet Jackson.

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‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: The Spider Web

Gavin Lewis as Moody Richardson and Lexie Underwood as Pearl Warren in Hulu's Little Fires Everywhere.

The fourth episode of Little Fires Everywhere details the aftermath of a birthday party and the rupture of a budding relationship between two mothers and their children.

Mystery novelist Attica Locke, a producer on the Hulu series, wrote the episode based on the novel by Celeste Ng. Attica was also a TV writer on Fox’s Empire and Netflix’s When They See Us and a part of a growing cohort of women authors bringing their bookish career to the small screen.

This episode highlights the intersection between two mothers with another mother being added into the mix of drama in the real rule-abiding community of Shaker Heights. Ohio, Elena Richardson, played by Reese Witherspoon, a well-to-do white woman who’s helping her friend keep the baby she’s trying to adopt; Mia Warren, played by Kerry Washington, a single black mother with an artist daughter who spends time with Elena’s kids; and Bebe Chow, played by Lu Huang, is a Chinese immigrant who works with Mia at a Chinese restaurant and recently learned that the baby she’s been looking for is the same baby being adopting by Elena’s friend.

The motherhood angle is emphasized in a turning point scene in Bebe’s apartment where Elena, who used her investigative journalism skills from her part-time job to find the address, shows up to offer Bebe money. Not knowing Elena’s intentions, Bebe invites Elena inside and gives her a hot cup of tea. Elena explains that she represents the McCulloughs, the family who will adopt a baby they named Mirabelle. But with Mia’s assistance, Bebe discovers Mirabelle is May Ling, the baby she abandoned at a Cleveland fire station due to financial hardship.

With the check in her face, Bebe asks Elena how much she would sell her kids. Upset that her offer wasn’t taken even with the threat of turning Bebe into the authorities for illegal immigration, Elena leaves the apartment with the check on the table.

THE DINNER TABLE

At the end of the episode, after Elena and Mia blow up in the Richardson kitchen over Mia lying about her role in Bebe finding out about Mirabelle/May Ling’s whereabouts, both mothers told their children at their separate dinner tables that they cannot speak to each other anymore.

Pearl is upset at her mother, whom she believes never trusted the Richardsons or took the chance to get to know them. She heads to her bedroom but doesn’t stay there. Within minutes, she’s being welcomed by Elena at the door as Elena finds Pearl clothes to sleep in.

Meanwhile, Mia is gloomily peering at a photo of herself very pregnant in a bathtub. She puts the photo back and goes to check in on Pearl. Finding an empty room, she drives to the Richardson home. The headlights in the window wake up Pearl.

SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO

The strong connection between Izzy, played by Megan Stott, and Mia brightened in this episode with them collaborating on Mia’s art project at her home. Izzy confides in Mia that her mother Elena believes she’s at a boy’s house for a study session. Because Elena is worried about Izzy’s sexuality with lesbian rumors flying around school, Izzy knows it’s a secret that she would rather do art at Mia’s house. They’re interrupted by a frantic phone call from Bebe. Mia cuts the session short to meet with Bebe and convince her to fight for her daughter.

Izzy later finds an article on Lilith Fair on her pillow. She asks Bill, her father played by Joshua Jackson, about it. He tries to explain how her mother meant well when thinking Izzy would be interested in Lilith Fair, the all-female concert tour that started in 1997 by Sarah Maclachlan. Teary-eyed, Izzy tells her father she didn’t like the gesture.

The connection is undeniable between Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood, and Elena. Pearl sees Elena and her eldest children, Lexie, played by Jade Pettyjohn, and Trip, played by Jordan Elsass., as the model of perfection she wants to be. Elena symbolizes stability, and since Pearl has been begging her mother for that lifestyle, she feels she can absorb it at the Richardson home.

When Mia and Elena have their spat about what it takes to be a good mother and taking the sides of their friends in the fight for Mirabelle/May Ling, Elena brings up how well-behaved Pearl is even though Mia is not a good mother because she keeps moving Pearl around from town to town, school to school.

VIRGINAL

Pearl is officially a part of the popular girl gang when she’s sitting upon Lexie’s bed with Serena Wong, played by Lisa Yamada. Plus, Lexie is bragging about her lack of breakouts due to her having sex with her boyfriend, Brian, played by Stevonte Hart.

Later, in the algebra two class Pearl fought so hard to get into, the teacher is passing out tests. Pearl did well while Trip got a D. This presents the opportunity for Trip to come over to the Warren home and study with Pearl.

On the floor. With music playing. Of course, this leads to a make-out session that Pearl suggests should move to the bedroom. Now, her virginity may be the talk of the town.

But it doesn’t happen. Even Trip has the nerve to blame Pearl for seducing him into her bed while playing with Moody’s feelings! Pearl did neglect the other Richardson brother Moody, played by Gavin Lewis, but she’s taken by surprise hearing this from Trip as he jumps into his pants.

Pearl has an awkward run-in with Moody at a Halloween party. Dressed as Scary Spice from the Spice Girls with Lexie and Serena dressed as Posh Spice, Moody comes up to Pearl and asks about the racism aspect of Pearl being the black Spice Girl. He assumes the other girls are using her as a pet project due to her race. She clarifies that she chose to dress as Scary Spice. When the other girls call her name, she excuses herself, but it shows how her friendship with Moody depreciated amid Pearl’s ascent to popularity.

LAWYER UP

As the kids are trying to figure out their social circles, the adults are trying to figure out the custody arrangements for Mirabelle/May Ling.

With Mia’s persuasion and monetary contribution, Bebe hires a lawyer to fight for May Ling. The fight quickly moves to the TV news as reporters run up to Linda McCullough, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, with Mirabelle in the baby carriage. Linda running into her home along with interviews with Bebe and the lawyer swearing they will fight for custody lights up the TVs in all of the families’ living rooms.

When Bebe says in the report she was offered $10,000, Izzy asks in shock why the McCulloughs would offer that sum. But Bill looks at Elena, sensing she is responsible for the offer.

BURN HER UP

At the very end, Mia is cutting up strips of a photo she blew up. She hangs up the shreds on a rope. Mia puts a lighter to each shred and watches them burn. As she stands back, it turns out to be an image of Elena.

Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will arrive on Wednesdays.

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‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: Seventy Cents

Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson

Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu has already set the groundwork for showing the relationships between three mothers—all of different races—and how their circumstances in 1990s suburbia will impact their lives forever.

The show stars Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson, a white housewife/journalist raising four teen kids—Lexie, Tripp, Moody and Izzy; and Kerry Washington, a black single mother raising her teen daughter Pearl. The third mother who was just brought into the mix is Bebe Chow, played by Lu Huang, a recent Chinese immigrant who works with Mia as a waitress and is looking for the daughter she gave up. They all live in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a real community outside Cleveland that historically created its own rules for a utopian suburbia vibe.

While the kids are preparing for the homecoming dance, the same night the adults are preparing for a one-year-old birthday party hosted by Elena. These two events will define the storyline with both ending in disaster.

The Mixed Question

After the kids decide to go to homecoming, Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood, jumps at a chance to go shopping with Lexie, the eldest Richardson daughter played by Jade Pettyjohn. Lexie just plagiarized Pearl’s essay to get placement in a math class for her Yale college application. Pearl comes out of a dressing room in a dress she loves. That’s when Lexie tells her about seeing the essay, but she conveniently leaves out the plagiarism part and calls the essay more of an inspiration when for her essay.

Lexie further distracts Pearl from the truth after asking about her lineage: “Are you mixed?” Going on about how pretty Pearl is, Lexie continues with asking who Pearl’s father is because he must have some non-black blood. This loaded question can be seen as offensive with emphasizing Pearl’s racial identity and asking her paternity, but mostly it’s about race and what society calls beauty. Lexie purports herself as an expert in race with having a black boyfriend, Brian, played by Stevonte Hart. How black her boyfriend is already came up in the first episode.

The biggest distraction of all: Lexie buys Pearl her homecoming dress.

“You’re letting some rich spoiled white girl turn you into her dress-up doll!” Mia screams at Pearl after discovering the new dress. “She doesn’t own you. You don’t belong to Lexie Richardson.”

Pearl then verbally hits her mother back by asking about her father and his whereabouts. Mia can’t give a clear answer. Again, Pearl is frustrated by her vagabond life, now realizing other kids didn’t live like her.

In the book, Lexie is talking to her best friend Serena Wong, who hasn’t been introduced formally on the show yet, and calling the new friend of her brother Moody, played by Gavin Lewis, “Little Orphan Pearl.”

You’re letting some rich spoiled white girl turn you into her dress-up doll! She doesn’t own you. You don’t belong to Lexie Richardson.

“She’s so quiet,” Lexie tells Serena at the top of chapter five. “Like she’s afraid to speak. And when you look at her, she turns bright red—red-red, like a tomato. A literal tomato.”

The book goes on about Lexie’s new fascination on Pearl, who is showing her desire to hang out with the older Richardson siblings, Lexie and Tripp, played by Jordan Elsass, who have ascended into high school popularity. The quote also emphasizes how Mia and Pearl are not black in the book with Lexie’s reddening description of Pearl.

The Black Boyfriend

Brian, Lexie’s boyfriend, comes to dinner at the Richardson house where he’s pushed to meet Pearl. Elena bluntly talks about what Pearl and Brian have in common, which is code for both being black. Pearl doesn’t seem interested in getting to know Brian due to that remark, but Brian tries to be friendly.

When Brian discovers Lexie adapted most of Pearl’s essay to her own for college, he doesn’t know how to feel about his longtime girlfriend even when they’re crowned homecoming king and queen. Brian dislikes how Lexie took a story from a black girl’s perspective and badly adapted it to her own perspective, which raises ethical questions for him.

At the dance, Brian tells Pearl about the essay. In the distance, Lexie knows they’re talking about her.

COMMON GROUND

After much despise that Izzy, played by Megan Stott, is not her clone, Elena softens in episode two. The turning point is finding out from Tripp that kids at school have been calling Izzy “Ellen” as in Ellen DeGeneres assuming she’s gay.

The next morning Elena tells Izzy of an embarrassing high school moment. This inspires Izzy to ask her siblings and friends to go to homecoming. Scenes later, while modeling in her emerald dress in the driveway, Mia exclaims that Izzy’s leg is bleeding. A shaving mishap. Elena takes Izzy and shaves Izzy’s legs with care over the bathtub.

The pendulum swings back to normal when Elena discovers from the mother of Izzy’s ex-friend that Izzy allegedly violated the friend. Though Elena runs to her husband Bill, played by Joshua Jackson, the truth will come out in the next episode as the party rapidly goes downward.

whose baby is it?

The episode opens with Bebe months before when she had a hard time taking care of her newborn, May Ling. With the hardship of no power in her bare-bones apartment, Bebe tries to buy formula for May Ling, but she’s seventy cents short, hence the episode’s title. The cashier screams at her to get out of the store. It’s the last straw as Bebe soon leaves May Ling outside a fire station for a safe surrender.

The story obviously touches Mia. With Bebe broken over the baby and also unable to speak fluent English, Mia vows to find out what happened to May Ling.

Elena’s friend, Linda McCullough played by Rosemarie DeWitt, has been introduced in the previous two episodes for a short period of time. It turns out Linda adopted a baby, Mirabelle, and Elena is throwing a birthday party for the one-year-old.

Earlier, Elena tells Mia, the home manager, about the baby shower and Linda’s adoption journey—how Linda and her husband adopted Mirabelle, who is Chinese, after she was abandoned at a fire station.

With this new information, Mia tells Bebe she may have found May Ling,  newly named Mirabelle McCullough. Bebe wants to go to the McCullough house immediately, but Mia calms her and says it’s easier if she goes to see if it’s May Ling first. The identifying factor: a red spot on May Ling’s scalp.

Strapped with more information, Mia offers her photography services for the birthday party at the Richardson home. At the party, Mia is choosy about taking photos until she sneaks upstairs to the sleeping baby. She wakes up Mirabelle and tries to find the red spot. She finds it, but Elena comes in. The baby is handed over as Mia slips away.

The episode, and the party, ends with the earsplitting scream of Bebe, who appears at the party and sees her daughter cradled in the arms of a white family.

Bebe’s baby, May Ling by her supporters and Mirabelle by the McCullough supporters, will be a central point in the story, dividing not only the Richardsons and Warrens in the process but the idyllic community of Shaker Heights.

The first three episodes of Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will arrive on Wednesdays.

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‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: Seeds and All

Kerry Washington as Mia Warren and Lu Huang as Bebe Chow in Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu.

The second episode of Little Fires Everywhere deepens the shaky acquaintanceship of two matriarchs trying to accept their newfound ties.

Kerry Washington is Mia Warren, a single black mother who moves to rule-abiding Shaker Heights, Ohio with her daughter Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood. Reese Witherspoon is Elena Richardson, a rich white mother with four teenage children distraught over how her youngest daughter, Izzy, played by Megan Stott, is not aspiring to be the American dream she set up for her family.

As Pearl hangs out more with the Richardson children—Izzy; Lexie, played by Jade Pettyjohn; Tripp, played by Jordan Elsass; and Moody, played by Gavin Lewis—Mia and Elena are seeing their lives collide more, whether they like it or not.

DOING THE MATH

Pearl wants to take algebra two, but the white male school counselor placed her back in geometry. The counselor claims Pearl attended too many schools and assumes she’s being bused in from Cleveland. Knowing her race is really the decision, she later tells Mia about the situation at the Chinese restaurant where her mother works. But Mia is watching her coworker, Bebe, deal with the diners, especially a baby.

Pearl picks up on the disinterest and asks Elena the next morning if she could proofread her essay to get into algebra two. Elena gladly accepts and mentions the school doesn’t like to put the students of color in the higher-level classes. In the kitchen, Elena puts the essay down on the counter to fetch Izzy for school. Lexie sees the abandoned papers and takes a peek.

BOOK CLUB

Elena’s book club is reading The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, which of course riles her conservatism as she complains she had voted for Arthur Golden’s classic Memoirs of a Geisha instead. At the book club inside her spacious living room, Elena touches on motherhood not being mentioned as much in the famous feminist play.

The moderator shoots back about the last chapter revolving around childbirth and asks if she’s less of a woman for not having children. Pouring liqueur in the background, Mia wanders into the conversation to defend Elena, who barely read the play distraught over the mention of “vaginas,” and discusses the buried motherhood theme. Elena approves Mia’s defense and introduces Mia to the book club.

After the book club, Mia and Elena are bonding on the sofa with wine. The invisible competition comes up again when Elena absentmindedly tells Mia that she helped Pearl with her letter to advocate for her upgraded math class. Mia abruptly ends the bonding session. At home, she asks Pearl about how she got into the class. Pearl said she stood up for herself without mentioning any help from Elena.

WHO IS BEBE?

Back at the restaurant where Pearl is talking to Mia about her math dilemma, Mia zeros in on Bebe Chow, the quiet Chinese immigrant working at the restaurant played by Lu Huang. Mia senses Bebe needs help after Bebe shows happiness then sadness when handling a baby for a family, so Mia gets up from the dining table on her night off and tells Bebe she will take over her shift.

Later, Bebe makes homemade noodles for Mia that she brings to Mia at home. Mia gives Bebe her tips from the night before. Her kindness touches Bebe, who admits she lost her baby daughter.

Mia tells Bebe she doesn’t have to share her story to explain her behavior; she understands as a mother. This signals another mother being brought into the equation and how her race will play a role in discovering what happened to her daughter.

still, Who is Mia?

The episode opens in a years-old flashback of Mia having sex in a cramped car. She’s only distracted by baby Pearl waking up. She kicks out her sex partner and comforts Pearl.

This accompanies the New York City subway flashbacks that Mia has been having since the first episode. She’s scared sitting on the subway and the main person she’s staring at across from her in the car is Grey’s Anatomy actor/activist Jesse Williams. At one point, his unidentified character flickers into Elena. Mia’s traumas may take a backseat to Bebe’s traumas we have yet to see.

The first three episodes of Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will arrive on Wednesdays.

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‘Little Fires Everywhere’ TV Review: The Spark

Kerry Washington as Mia Warren in Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, which started streaming this week on Hulu with its first three episodes, is already establishing the racial thread between two families in an upscale Ohio suburb in 1997.

The series introduces us to two different neighbors in Shaker Heights, Ohio: Elena Richardson, played by Reese Witherspoon, the well-to-do white housewife/part-time reporter with a lawyer husband and four teenage children; and Mia Warren, played by Kerry Washington, a black single mother/mixed media artist who moved to the restrictive suburb with her teen daughter Pearl.

Below are the top threads laying out the complexities of the characters and opening the pathway to the plot.

Mia and Pearl are black

In the book, Mia and Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood, aren’t described as black. In fact, their race isn’t really identified with the socioeconomic barrier standing between them and the Richardsons.

Adding their blackness to the storyline, the show emphasized the racial tension between mothers Mia and Elena.

Mia is the black single mother barely making ends meet while Elena is the financially comfortable white homemaker who only offers Mia her rental home after seeing Mia’s car and realizing she had reported it to the police for suspicious activity. Elena eventually offers Mia a “house manager” job, which Mia interprets as a maid job and the racial connotations of domestic service.

Elena will be the white woman character not understanding her racism, like when she calls the police about Mia’s car, while convincing herself she’s not racist, like offering Mia the home to rent after seeing the car. She’s the modern-day Barbecue Becky or Permit Patty but trying to right her wrongs while still making offense, like with the job offer.

Pearl gets in trouble

Once Mia’s daughter Pearl and Elena’s son Moody, played by Gavin Lewis, get acquainted, they’re two peas in a pod. Moody introduces Pearl to a junkyard where he’s decorated a small shed he turned into an artistic sanctuary. Pearl is impressed when she sees words from a poem she had quoted to Moody earlier. But then the two get busted for trespassing.

When neighborhood watch brings the kids back to the Richardson home, Mia goes ballistic. Her black daughter is being brought home by a police officer! In a new (mostly white) neighborhood! Of course, she can’t control her emotions, telling Pearl she’s not like the Richardsons aka not white. Elena is soft on Moody for the offense and tells Mia that it was neighborhood watch, with the man’s uniform appearing like that of a police officer. Mia is visibly upset by Elena’s response and leaves with Pearl.

the mothers

How the series is juxtaposing Mia with Izzy, played by Megan Stott, and Elena with Pearl shows how the grass is greener on the other side, but in this case the teen girls see themselves in these adult women who are the opposite of their mothers.

Pearl admires Elena because she represents stability. Being a daughter of an artist, she’s been forced to believe she has to move constantly. She begs her mother that they make Shaker Heights home, at least stay a year.

After Pearl gets in trouble with the neighborhood watch, Mia feels profound guilt and lets Pearl paint the rest of her walls in her bedroom a cerulean hue, buys Pearl a bicycle, and even paints her fingernails. There’s a desperate guilt that she can’t offer her daughter stability, especially the kind the Richardsons have. With Mia’s recurring New York City subway terrors, we see this mother struggling with her past circumstances and how she’s escaping them to focus on her daughter.

In the Richardson home, Elena chastises Izzy for not playing her violin at a school concert and writing in black marker across her forehead: NOT YOUR PUPPET. A chilly distance still remains between them because Izzy is the unique child. She burns her hair, wears black clothing, and refuses to conform to the suburban life her parents had set up for her and her siblings. But this ruffles perfectionist Elena to the point they can’t connect.

When Izzy is spraying black paint on a trunk in the front yard, Mia takes notice of the art in motion. Izzy smiles at the compliment. The connection is snapped between their artistic hearts. Seeing how Izzy may be misunderstood in her ambitious household compels Mia to take on the house manager role Elena had offered previously. Though she first took offense, her motherly tendencies overruled her.

The episode ends with Elena receiving a call from one of the references Mia put down for her tenant application. It turns out the alleged former landlord never met Mia, raising suspicions about who Mia is, where she came from, and how her secrets could threaten the Richardsons and the greater Shaker Heights community.

The first three episodes of Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will arrive on Wednesdays.

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How Lisa Turtle Was ‘Slighted’ As a Black Teen Girl TV Character

Seven years after People reported she had bipolar disorder, Saved by the Bell star Lark Voorhies revealed this week on The Dr. Oz Show that indeed the diagnosis is somewhat true—and that she felt “slighted and hurt” over being left out of reunions and the upcoming reboot. As a 90s kid who paid attention to any Black girl who came across the TV screen, I noticed how Lark’s character Lisa Turtle as the lone Black girl character in the high school sitcom ensemble was also slighted on screen.

In the Dr. Oz interview, Lark clarified she has schizoaffective disorder, which the National Institutes of Health defines as “a mental health condition that includes features of both schizophrenia and a mood disorder such as bipolar disorder or depression.” She noted it may be the reason why she’s not included in the Saved by the Bell casual and formal reunions and the reboot expected on the NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock launching in April. The original show ran on NBC as a part of its TNBC teen-friendly Saturday morning programming from 1989 to 1993.

When Dr. Oz asked Lark about her feelings on the offscreen and onscreen cast reunions, Lark said, “They have the right to do that, and they’re happy in their element. They can have it.”

Treating her with kid gloves, Dr. Oz then asked if Lark would like to be a part of those reunions. She answered, “Oh yes, what family isn’t kept complete without its lead.”

Lark was the only girl brought onto the new reincarnation of Good Morning, Miss Bliss, a 1987-1989 sitcom also starring her Saved by the Bell castmates Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zack Morris and Dustin Diamond as Samuel “Screech” Powers about middle schoolers in Indianapolis. The show reformatted with moving the setting to the fictional Bayside High School in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades and adding three new kids: Tiffani-Amber Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski, Mario Lopez as AC Slater and Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano. This rounded out the most well-known Saved by the Bell cast.

But Lisa became overshadowed by Kelly and Jessie, who were presented to the audience as the hotties. Lisa became the fashionista, though the other female characters had more crises, e.g. Jessie’s drug addiction and Kelly’s college boy tryst, on top of steady boyfriends. The lack of love interests for Lisa solidified she wasn’t considered a hottie and that as a Black girl she didn’t deserve love, which mirrors the alleged reactions from her former castmates now.

While the two white girls had boyfriends, Lisa never had one—and only nerdy Screech was interested in her.

Lisa and Screech

Why did Kelly have popular blond guy Zack as her boyfriend? Why did Jessie get muscly football player AC? Because they’re white. Lisa Turtle weirdly could only attract Screech, the annoying nerd who eventually attracted a girlfriend, Violet, played by pre-Beverly Hills 90210 Tori Spelling.

Lisa received a bit of attention, most memorably a Black guy who magically turned up at their high school (Pacific Palisades’ Black population is 0.4%) who turned out to be a freshman. She was a senior. Or the other Black guy who was very studious that Lisa tried to impress him, but he didn’t like her brainless friends, so he was dropped.

Lisa kissed Zack in “The Bayside Triangle” episode before her fashion show in season five, but only because Tiffani-Amber and Elizabeth had left the show. Kelly was out of the picture. The episode poised to make Lisa the star girl where she had the star guy, but that turned to mud soon when producers introduced us to biker chick Tori, played by Leanna Creel. More on that in the next point, but the show couldn’t let Lisa get any love as if because she’s a Black girl at a white school she getting it wouldn’t be believable.

Zack and Lisa

Seeing how Lisa wasn’t able to get a guy with her beauty and fashion didn’t add up correctly for a Black girl viewer. It was offensive, knowing in real life she could have any boy she wanted at the average Los Angeles area high school.

This contrast was to let viewers know Lisa is not ideal girl-next-door material because she’s Black. Comparing Lisa to another iconic Black girl TV character of the era, Laura Winslow of Family Matters. Played by Kellie Shanygne Williams, Laura had the undying devotion of another infamous nerd, Steve Urkel, but she still had her share of romantic interests. It was a Black show with a more interracial production team that understood the popular girl regardless of race can get a boyfriend if she wants.

The only original girl from the show’s previous incarnation, Lisa was pushed to the side to make room for Kelly then Tori.

Back to forgettable Tori. Again, a stereotypical biker chick that Zack suddenly falls for, obviously due to her whiteness. Knowing the character arc of Zack and the type of females he prefers, Tori was not it.

The show evolved into another incarnation with Saved By the Bell: The College Years. Lisa went to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, so Lark wasn’t a series regular. The show moved to prime time, but when Tiffani-Amber returned, the producers kept the two new white girls and kicked off the Black girl named Danielle Marks, played by Essence Atkins, to make room for Kelly. The removal of the Black girl probably led to the show’s demise after one season since they not only killed the successful recipe but told us a Black girl can’t be a part of the ensemble.

Lisa was an independent single girl but was that due to the strong Black woman stereotype?

The superwoman complex many Black women in the U.S. experience is associated with the shield we wear to present ourselves as strong and stoic. From Lisa’s demeanor, she is the fun-loving girl who also seems boy crazy yet can’t have a boyfriend while her white friends can.

Lark and Mark-Paul dated in real life for three years, but the romance was only placed in the storyline after the other actresses left the show. At the time, interracial teen relationships weren’t there yet. For example, heartthrob white actor Jonathan Brandis and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Black actress Tatyana Ali dated for three years, but we didn’t hear much about that relationship until years later.

And producers allegedly created Lisa as a rich Jewish girl from New York before Lark aced her audition. Slater was supposed to be Italian until Mario, who’s Latino, stepped into the role (Pacific Palisades’ Latinx population is 3.2%). These characters, originally white, had to be altered to fit their race and culture, but it seems this led to watered-down storylines for Lisa.

In real life, Lark was a part of a TV family, but as a Black woman with a mental illness, she’s out.

Kelly, Lisa, and Jessie

Would the white actresses be treated the same if they had a health condition? Along with Lark, Dustin Diamond has been missing from reunions, possibly due to his sex tape in 2006, subsequent legal trouble, and unauthorized tell-all about the years on the sitcom.

Most of the YouTube commenters on the Dr. Oz videos of Lark’s interview support Lark but also question why her cast family hadn’t reached out to her. One commenter mentioned how the cast supported Elizabeth after her adult role attempt in the 1994 cult classic Showgirls.

In the interview, Dr. Oz mentioned how Lark had been MIA in Hollywood almost immediately after Saved By the Bell. She interrupted him and said she went to college. She also had two soap opera roles in The Bold and the Beautiful and Days of Our Lives. After growing up on a white teen sitcom, she actually transitioned into Black Hollywood.

In the mid-90s, she was engaged to Martin Lawrence at the height of Martin fame and even appeared on an episode. She starred on movies that went into rotation on BET such as Civil Brand and straight-to-DVD films such as Fire and Ice. She had roles in How To Be A Player and How High. She also appeared in several music videos, such as Kenny Lattimore’s “Never Too Busy,” Dru Hill’s “These are The Times,” and Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee.”

Lark has said no to reunions in the past like in 2015 when her rep told The Hollywood Reporter her work schedule didn’t permit her to participate in a Jimmy Fallon sketch tribute to the sitcom. She told Dr. Oz this week that it was a triumph for her to leave the house.

The alleged estrangement Lark feels from her ex-castmates shows mental illness can mean unintentional isolation. Friends, even longtime ones, may not know how to cope with the effects and don’t want to add the burden of knowing how to cope, especially when juggling their own families and other friendships. To witness Lark speaking her truth on being left out of the Saved By the Bell‘s ongoing get-togethers, it strikes a chord on how she feels left out and how in reality her character should’ve felt the same way, too.

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Reese Witherspoon Set to Bring Memoir ‘From Scratch’ to Netflix

Reese Witherspoon with "From Scratch" by Tembi Locke. Her production company, Hello Sunshine, will make the memoir into a Netflix limited series / Instagram

Actress Tembi Locke shared via Instagram that her best-selling memoir, From Scratch, will come to Netflix as a limited series with help from the queen of bringing books to the screen, Reese Witherspoon, and her production company Hello Sunshine.

In an Instagram post in which she shared the Variety article as the exclusive, Tembi also noted that she will be working with her sister, award-winning mystery novelist Attica Locke, who has earned TV producing credits in Netflix’s When They See Us and Fox’s Empire as well as the other major bookish Hello Sunshine project in the works, Little Fires Everywhere based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel. Tembi added she and Attica will be working alongside the series’ star, Zoe Saldana, and Zoe’s sisters.

Hello Sunshine’s Instagram post said the project will be done in partnership with Cinestar and 3 Arts.

Zoe will play Tembi’s role in the book that follows Tembi from her college semester abroad in Italy where she meets her future Sicilian husband Saro, their lives as a married couple in Los Angeles building their careers, and then Saro’s cancer diagnosis which leads to his untimely death and a reawakening for Tembi and her daughter trying to find purpose amid the loss. Read the she lit book review.

From Scratch was Hello Sunshine book club’s May selection.

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Bookish TV Throwback: Maya Wilkes’ Book Launch on ‘Girlfriends’

Girlfriends fans rejoiced last month when star Tracee Ellis Ross shared on Instagram a video of her former co-stars Golden Brooks, Jill Marie Jones, and Persia White. As they all prepare for a long-awaited reunion appearance tonight on Tracee’s current TV gig, ABC’s Black-ish, fans may wonder if the book that defined Girlfriends will come up in conversation.

The reunion even produced an Entertainment Weekly first-look profile of the Black-ish episode that will revolve around Tracee’s character’s Rainbow and her feminist friends from college. But Girlfriends, a UPN sitcom that celebrated four single Black women living in 2000s Los Angeles, produced its own best-selling Oh Hell Yes! by Maya Wilkes, played by Golden.

Oh Hell Yes! is the fictional self-help book told in a “homegirl” tone. It obviously paved the way for today’s hits from mostly white women authors like Jen Sincero’s You Are a Total Badass to Rachel Hollis’ Girl, Wash Your Face.

“The Way We Were” is Maya’s book launch episode, running on Feb. 21, 2005, over a decade before TV shows that brought a book into the storyline actually worked with a real-life publisher to get the book on shelves, a newer tactic made popular by bookish shows like Younger and Jane the Virgin have done.

Maya (Golden Brooks)

To give some background, Maya is a single mom and recent divorcee who works as a paralegal for lawyer Joan Clayton, played by Tracee. Joan’s friends from UCLA includes Toni Childs, played by Jill Marie, and Lynn Searcy, played by Persia. So they’re all friends navigating the highs and lows of being professional Black women in the big city. At the time, the show was coined as a comedic Black version of Sex and the City or an updated Living Single.

Maya is nervous at the book launch inside the fictional Crenshaw Bookstore. They huddle behind a bookshelf to calm Maya before her “authoress” debut. (Maya dramatically called herself an “authoress” throughout the series).

“Don’t let fear make you its bitch,” Toni soothes Maya.

“Wow, that’s good. Who wrote that?” Maya asks.

“You.”

Maya freaks out about forgetting her own advice and heads to the podium. Joan is avoiding William, played by Reggie Hayes who’s also a lawyer and the fifth unofficial “girlfriend.” William shows up at the book-signing, after their awkward short-lived relationship.

As the event starts, each of the friends read an excerpt. “Don’t be hatin’ what your mama spent nine months creatin'” is one of Maya’s proverbs read aloud.

Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross)

Lynn (Persia White)

Toni (Jill Marie Jones)

After the readings, Maya thanks her cousin/publicist, her current boss William, and her friends.

“I also have to thank my girls,” she says. “Joan, Toni, and Lynn. You three have been my rock for these past few years, and the inspiration for my book. Because if y’all haven’t been manless, crazy heifers, there wouldn’t have been anything to write about.”

During the book-signing, Maya’s ex-husband Darnell, played by Khalil Kain, makes a surprise appearance to get his book signed. Of course, Maya takes this the wrong way, which leads to a fake cookout at Joan’s house the next day so she could wear her booty shorts for Darnell. But when Darnell, the sole attendee, shows up trying to figure out the situation, he breaks the news he’s engaged to his girlfriend.

Oh Hell Yes! played a pivotal role across seasons as Maya began writing the manuscript in her community college class as an essay. While dropping gems of wisdom at her cousin’s hair salon, customers became hooked to Maya’s no-nonsense advice to living your best life. This leads to a self-publishing adventure, where she’s even selling copies on the freeway ramp to drivers. She does finally get a big-time publishing deal, but she loses that deal once she can’t concoct a follow-up.

The show was ahead of the self-publishing wave and the self-help book wave. Books like Oh Hell Yes! are everywhere in bookstores, especially from women who have built a career through the internet and social media. As a Black female author, Maya also went the self-publishing route since it’s still hard for women of color to get book deals from top publishers.

If you’re looking for a binge, Girlfriends has eight seasons currently airing in reruns on BET and TV One and is available on streaming via CW Seed.

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Anika Noni Rose Joins ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Cast

Anika Noni Rose at an event for The 69th Primetime Emmy Awards (2017) / IMDb

Tony Award-winning actress Anika Noni Rose is joining the cast of Little Fires Everywhere.

Variety broke the news Friday that Anika will be guest-starring on the Hulu miniseries expected to debut next year and based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling 2017 novel. Anika, well known for her roles in playing one-third of the Dreamgirls and voicing the first Disney African-American animated heroine in The Frog Princess, will play Paula Hawthorne, an art professor mentor to the younger version of Mia, played by Tiffany Boone. This week, AnnaSophia Robb of The Carrie Diaries TV series based on Candace Bushnell’s young adult novel; Alona Tal, Matthew Barnes, Andy Favreau and Luke Bracey were also named in Deadline as playing some of the characters in flashbacks.

The novel follows struggling artist Mia, played by Kerry Washington, who moves to Shaker Heights, Ohio with her teen daughter, and her neighbor Elena, played by Reese Witherspoon, the traditional suburban mother of four, as their lives intertwine through their children and friends.

Reese with her media brand Hello Sunshine and Kerry with her production company Simpson Street are also executive producing the miniseries. Author Celeste will also serve as an executive producer.

This isn’t Anika’s first time acting in a project based on a book. She also had roles in Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything motion picture; Terry McMillan’s A Day Late and a Dollar Short TV movie; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun movie; Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls motion picture; Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency TV series; Christopher Paul Curtis‘ The Watsons Go to Birmingham TV movie; Gigi Levangie Grazer’s The Starter Wife miniseries; and Alex Haley’s Roots in the 2016 miniseries remake.

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ rounds out casting for Hulu adaptation

Book Launch: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng

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‘Younger’ Season Finale TV Review: Forever

"Younger" Ep. 612 (Airs 9/04/19)

The sixth season finale starts with Kelsey (Hilary Duff) cementing her resignation at Millennial with first telling Liza (Sutton Foster), who tries to intercept the letter to Charles, then taking the letter back to hand to Charles (Peter Hermann). After being the publisher’s CEO, Kelsey admits she couldn’t return to being an editor at a place where she was a boss.

Kelsey meets Zane (Charles Michael Davis) at a park and reveals to him she’s in the market to start her own publishing company. Since Zane had started Mercury with Charles, she wants his advice. But Mercury has been absorbed by Millennial, so Zane says it’s not a good idea for Kelsey to get into the book startup business. Zane actually tells Kelsey that she shouldn’t given up her job after the cleavage social media mishap.

While Kelsey’s resignation drama is going on, the crew is preparing for Diana (Miriam Shor)’s upcoming nuptial. And Diana and Liza are unsure about their first book pitch at Millennial without Kelsey.

Kelsey pitches her business, KLP Print, to Quinn (Laura Benanti), the horrid ex-investor for Millennial. Later, Quinn drops the bomb of she and Kelsey collaborating to Charles and Liza at a restaurant. Liza meets Kelsey at another restaurant that night, and Kelsey says she trusts Quinn enough since she made Kelsey CEO.

At Diana’s wedding, the sentiment sets in. Charles begs Kelsey to come back to her job since she’s “family.” Kelsey lets her walls down with Zane, and they hold hands in the pew. Then at the reception, Charles proposes to Liza! But, of course, a ringaround dance with too many guests to count separates them. No answer until next season.

The entire season showed an evolution with the company not only falling into Kelsey’s hands but also it falling out. Once she had the power, it was always threatened by investors and authors alike skeptical about her leadership skills because she was “younger.” And she’s a woman. Though the show revolves around Liza lying about her age, it flipped to focus on Kelsey and how being a millennial can be a handicap, too. Showing how women have to be careful about every step and constantly prove themselves in the boardroom was brillinatly executed at this fictional publisher trying to stay afloat amid financial hardship.

The season finale hit a high with 1.2 million viewers on TV Land, making the series the top original ad-supported cable sitcom for women in the age demographics between 18-49 and 25-54, according to the network. The seventh season premiere date has yet to be announced. The first five seasons can be found on Hulu with subscription.

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‘Younger’ TV Review: Holding Out for a SHero

"Younger" Ep. 611 (Airs 8/28/19)

Throughout the current sixth season, the age-centric Younger has emphasized the ups and downs of a millennial publisher CEO, but now that role has disappeared amid scandal, leaving characters in limbo.

Walking into the Millennial publisher’s office after losing her CEO title, Kelsey (Hilary Duff) announces to the company that she’ll become an editor with Liza (Sutton Foster) again after securing an angel investor to replace a controlling investor who dropped off over Liza’s lying-about-her-age scandal.

In the conference room, one of the publisher’s authors is presenting her book on manners for millennials. She brings up how millennials share too much of their private lives online, which Kelsey is dealing with her social media faux pas from last week, and how millennials ghost others, which Liza is dealing with by cutting her ex Josh out of her life after an unexpected promotion ad went awry.

After the author’s presentation, editor Diana (Miriam Shor) receives a bouquet of flowers from a prospective author who said she picked another publisher. Diana says she appreciates the flowers à la rejection, with the manners book in mind. At home, Liza writes a Dear John letter, an old-school alternative to ghosting, to her ex Josh (Nico Tortorella) as she focuses on her romantic relationship with Charles (Peter Hermann).

Lauren (Molly Bernard), their social media maven/publicist friend, notifies Kelsey she’s been uninvited to several literary events because of her accidental nip slip. But Lauren says a girls’ high school wants Kelsey to speak to the student body about the dangers of making mistakes in a digital world. Kelsey is not crazy about the idea since she doesn’t want to talk about the downfall.

At a meeting, current (and former) CEO Charles lets the editors know he is reviving titles that Kelsey and Liza had passed on. The books that “fell through the cracks” upsets Kelsey as she worries her decisions as the boss will be reversed under new management.

Later that night, Diana’s bachelorette party goes from the strip club to Josh’s tattoo parlor. Still biting her nails over the letter she sent to Josh, Liza worries about what will happen next. As the group wanders, Josh asks Liza why she wrote the letter. He argues with Liza about her loving Charles doesn’t mean distance for them. He accuses Liza of picking the safe choice and demands she profess more love for Charles. She does. But Josh doesn’t believe her.

Kelsey decides to speak to the high school girls about how her one mistake has endangered her career longevity. The Dear John letter bug then bites Kelsey. She starts her letter by quitting her job.

How the season started with Kelsey struggling to get her foothold as the CEO and now losing the gig shows the hardships of being a girlboss. After one scandal after another, the scandal that affects Kelsey the most is the sexist one that throws her from the helm. Now with her resgination, next week’s season finale will foreshadow what’s next for Kelsey.

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‘Younger’ TV Review: It’s All About The Money, Honey

"Younger" Ep. 609 (Airs 8/14/19)

The publishing imprint Millennial is on its last legs, and Liza (Sutton Foster), the newly revealed 40-something who had been lying about being millennial in the industry, and her boss Kelsey (Hilary Duff), the millennial boss, are trying to find ways to keep the imprint alive.

Liza is glamorously walking in New York City when she notices the Infinitely 21 ad campaign she modeled for in last week’s episode on behalf of Millennial. But the rooftop photoshoot had been altered. The campaign is everywhere of Liza getting a smooch on the cheek by her ex Josh (Nico Tortorella), a natural scene from the bar they met at with company staff.

While Liza freaks out about the ad, Kelsey and Charles (Peter Hermann) head to Chicago to meet with investors. They nail the pitch session and celebrate later that night where Liza surprises them at the hotel lounge. During the meeting, Kelsey had told the investors how essential social media is to the new Millennial. And this foreshadows what comes next when Kelsey drunkenly flashes way too much cleavage for a photo, yelling “It’s All About The Money, Honey,” meant for her on-and-off boo/colleague Zane (Charles Michael Davis) but instead becomes an Instagram story that unfortunately trends all night.

The social media slip-up is brought up at the morning meeting with the investors. Kelsey argues it was bad judgment, but Charles presents Kelsey’s social media presence as helpful to the publisher’s brand. But the investors are not convinced and want Kelsey out as CEO. Kelsey agrees to step aside to let Charles be in charge again.

In stereotypical millennial fashion, Kelsey is ousted from her CEO post because she over-shared on social media after a night of over-drinking. She spent the entire season trying to prove herself as a CEO of the troubled Millennial imprint that was a part of the failing Empirical publishing house owned by Charles’ family, and now she forfeits her hard work to save it.

And Charles has been sneaky all season, though he’s portrayed as that older man heartthrob innocently in love with Liza. But he may have been worming his way back to the publisher’s reins with saying he doesn’t want to take charge. He started the rival Mercury publisher secretly with Zane, then he went along with a merger. His actions seem more sinister now that he’s back in charge, especially when he set up the investor meeting.

Kelsey’s selfie debacle can also show Zane’s intentions since he could be upset about the turn of events or happy that his Mercury partner Charles is in charge. The last few episodes of the season look like they will show everyone’s true colors when it comes to keeping Millennial alive.