Lena Waithe and When Black Artists Make Mediocre Art

Their intergenerational exchange is smugly combative and made all the more fascinating by the obvious allusions to the real-life showrunner Mara Brock Akil, the Girlfriends and The Game creator for whom Waithe once worked. The scene is also one of the more self-aware moments on Twenties, an uneven satire that nonetheless conveys some of Waithe’s most nuanced thoughts on the impossible standards that black creators are often held to. Toward the end of her ill-fated interview, for example, Hattie challenges Ida B.’s dated approach to portraying romantic relationships among black people: “You could use your platform to do a lot more than showing a dope black woman falling in love with a fake-ass Billy Dee Williams.”

Twenties isn’t one-directional in its judgments, though. Hattie’s friends attempt to keep her in check too. The three women spar over whether they each feel the need to watch—or at least refrain from publicly criticizing—certain bad works from black artists for the sake of supporting black art as a whole. Hattie, Nia, and Marie differ in their political and aesthetic priorities, but they all feel some level of protectiveness over shows and movies focused on black characters. In their discussions of the work produced by industry veterans such as Ida B., and black viewers’ mixed responses to it, the women of Twenties also explore, by extension, the strange place that Waithe herself now occupies.

The show is debuting at a particularly fraught time in Waithe’s career, one in which she’s much closer to Ida B.’s position than to Hattie’s. The series is airing less than four months after the release of Queen & Slim, the romantic crime drama Waithe wrote. That film, which stars Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith, follows two young black people who go on the lam together after their first date ends with the accidental killing of a police officer. The Melina Matsoukas–directed feature earned middling reviews from several black critics (myself included) for its clumsy, self-serious exploration of black suffering in America. (In one characteristic sequence, the titular couple’s first and only love scene is choppily interspersed with footage of a protest happening elsewhere, in which a black teenager they’d met earlier that day shoots a police officer in the face.) But some of these writers—such as Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, who argued that “the movie’s anger is never given the complexity it deserves”—were met with backlash from black fans who saw the criticism as some sort of racial betrayal.

Read: The best part of ‘Queen & Slim’ is the soundtrack

Waithe’s own writing was very recently the subject of the same kinds of unimpressed assessments that Hattie—the character based on her—levies in Twenties. Queen & Slim, like any project, was never going to satisfy all viewers or capture the full breadth of black experiences. But Waithe’s work has been especially susceptible to critiques of its messaging about blackness, or about what it means to be black. Queen & Slim, for example, relied on viewers’ presumed frustration with real-world police brutality to fill in the gaps in its script. The Chi, the hour-long drama that Waithe, a Chicago native, produced for Showtime, assumed a level of viewer exhaustion with the myth of “black-on-black crime.” Both works seem to anticipate an audience—in particular a black audience—that would necessarily be sympathetic to their weighty themes, banking on relatability rather than fleshing out developed narratives.

For those who have been watching the incremental rise in shows from black creators, the reliance on shorthand and assumed cultural hallmarks may be familiar. Shows such as Dear White People (from the frequent Waithe collaborator Justin Simien) and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It took similar shortcuts in their characterization of young black people as archetypes rather than as distinct characters. Twenties can be guilty of this tendency at times, even while making fun of it. But the show’s lighter tone makes that impulse far more forgivable on Twenties than in Waithe’s earlier works. Even when jokes on the BET series fall flat, they’re still jokes. Hattie might be opinionated and obnoxious, but she’s clearly young, despite her very Harlem Renaissance–era name. She’s idealistic, too. She believes her boss—and the industry they all work in—can and should be better. In the meantime, the fate of My Bae is not a matter of life and death. And thank goodness for that.

Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.