“The Wonderful Years” and the Void of Black Hollywood Redesign

With many TV and movie studios stuck in a rona rut over the past two years, the green light for new intellectual property appears to have slowed at a breakneck pace as the cycle of reboot, remake and rebirth has passed. at top speed. The last relic to receive a 2021 dusting is that of ABC The good years, which remodels the 1988 sitcom of the same name. At the time, the show wooing the baby boomers found a middle-class white nuclear family, the Arnold (and most notably their son, Kevin, played by Fred Savage, who also serves as executive producer for the reboot). at the moral center of frivolous suburban shenanigans with the surreality of the Vietnam War as a backdrop.

In the 21st century redux, lead character Dean Williams (Elisha “EJ” Williams) grows up in the eye of a civil rights storm as a middle-class black child living in Montgomery, Alabama, in. in the midst of social upheaval. With the ever-lovable Don Cheadle playing his adult version, the new Years of wonder adds a nostalgic black luster to a particularly fervent period of black life. But a show like this on a network like ABC, which has a penchant for making black shows for white audiences, begs the question whether a mainstream studio’s version of the Civil Rights Era is a vision that blacks want to come back to. Central to this question is also whether rebooting or redesigning white shows or movies with black actors pushes the progressive buttons that network executives would have audiences believe.

No one should expect any political or social education of blacks from blacks. The good years But the meta-narrative around the update involves a level of progressive politics that the series seeks to exploit. As we learn in politics, liberal politics almost never equates to more power for black people. In fact, the black creators of the two mediums would likely consider that the practice of donning blacks in white uniforms is actually doing depictions of darkness a disservice. Black Recast could therefore be much more regressive than you think.

And, of course, that doesn’t just happen on TV. Black Recast has its tendrils all over Hollywood. Earlier this year, Warner Bros. announced the development of two separate Superman projects, with Michael B. Jordan’s production company creating a series based on an alternate version of Man of Steel, while Ta-Nehisi Coates was hired to write a film version of Clark Kent . Anthony Mackie has just slipped into the role of Captain America without any mention of the ways the military police have led to the destruction and corruption of African nations. We have yet to see Daniel Craig pass his Walther PPK to new Bond Lashana Lynch, who has the (unfortunate) privilege of being both the first Black and the first 007 woman. No breath should be held back for that. this vehicle of action says anything. It’s worth noting how spies destabilize economies or trigger coups, but it’s very easy to imagine how the depiction’s industrial complex will present Lynch’s casting as a kind of step forward for black people. at Hollywood.

The portrayal, in itself, appears to be a distraction not only from the racist underpinnings of the industry, but also from how Hollywood really exists within an imperial project that seeks to propagate false notions of reality. During reboots and Black Recast’s wedding, it can mask a practical problem at the heart of the remake’s industrial complex: it steals precious time and resources that could be distributed to the original IP address to non-white creators, and non-heterosexual. Kathleen Newman-Bremang, editor-in-chief at Refinery29’s Unbothered, spoke about the inherent regression of the reboot-redesign node. “These reboots absolutely take something away from the original content,” she told CBC News in July, “and they get a time slot that could go to another black, native or colored creator.” More interestingly, black designers are hardly ever given the reins of a predominantly white cast. There is a quiet belief that black people can only write black type. This segregation creates opportunities for symbolism that end up glorifying a small number of non-white artists who get similar roles over and over again.

In its remarkable Atlantic Coverage on Black Television’s unwritten rules, Hannah Giorgis recounts television’s changing similarity from Sanford and sons Until now. The 20th century represented a time when more and more black experiences were portrayed onscreen, but from the perspective of white writers who would force their black colleagues to “bargain for authenticity.” They were to represent Blackness in a manner “acceptable to white showrunners, studio executives, and viewers.” But this process is made even more depraved now. A black overhaul is, to some extent, one of the most ubiquitous examples of Blackface, in which white executives mask their interests and demands behind a black mask and see it as “black art.”

Our current version of nostalgia is a multidimensional mirror. The white version of The good years was a 1980s look at a 1960s America that, after losing the Vietnam War, was ripe for revisionism. Now, as the present generation reckons with our losses in terms of racial and class freedom, another overhaul is at hand. This time in Blackface – and perhaps even more regressive than ever.