To evade capture, RayShawn takes shelter in his home, along with his wife and 5-year-old son, going live on Instagram as police bullets rifle through their kitchen window. “Don’t let my family turn out like Mike Brown or Tamir Rice,” he says, eyes pooling with water. Before long, he’s trending on social media.
With the dominance of streaming services and as cable networks have allowed for more nimble narrative structures, TV has shown itself to be one of the most expansive storytelling mediums. In the case of Dear White People, hashtagging it merely truncated its potential, stripped its power. A multiple-note story became one or two, a diminishing echo. Luckily, #FreeRayShawn doesn’t have that difficulty. The show specifically brings to mind the horrific death of Korryn Gaines, the 26-year-old mother who, along with her son, barricaded herself in her apartment as Maryland law enforcement demanded her arrest. The exchange ended in a bloody standoff, in which Gaines was shot and killed. In the event’s aftermath, she became a reluctant face of the movement for racial justice. Online, as is the case for so many other black people unfairly made into ghost stories, her memory is kept alive through a loose string of internet networks: Facebook posts, hashtags (#SayHerName; #BlackLivesMatter), stray news items.
A cheap criticism of the show is that it largely focuses on black pain, but it proves to have more resolve than that: To understand #FreeRayShwn as communally representative in the way society often expects black art to be is to misplace it. This is one man in one city. Ultimately it is about the beauty of gaining perspective, and what that beauty teaches—that your story is still your story, even as it sits alongside many others just like it, even as you are one hashtag in a growing sea. We get to see at RayShawn sees.
One new show that lacks perspective is #blackAF, the debut Netflix mockumentary by, about, and starring mega-showrunner Kenya Barris. If a sense of deja vu overtakes you while watching it, that’s par for the course—you’ve seen all of this before on Black-ish, Barris’ ABC comedy about the Johnson clan (they’re molded after his own family). Much like Black-ish, his new venture explores the nature of fatherhood and marriage, only this time we get a kookier look into the contours of celebrity. It’s meant to be a black Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO’s absurdist chronicle of Seinfeld creator Larry David, but it’s too rigid to match David’s brand of cranky eccentricity.
The thrust of the Netflix sitcom is about excavating the period after creative success. In Barris’ hands, these propositions flare in every direction, mostly out of control. After you’ve escaped the limits of your old neighborhood, what then? After you’ve established yourself as a bankable showbiz screenwriter, what next? After you’ve given your wife and six kids the life you dreamed of as a child, what more is there to do? This is the space Barris wants to mine with comic grace, but fails. (This largely has to do with him starring in this show; let’s just say he’s no Bernie Mac.) Even as mockumentary is meant to take risks and is permitted more liberties than typical sitcoms, hearing Rashida Jones (who plays his wife Joya) yell “Suck it, white gaze,” or Kenya deadpan “The freedom cake needs time to rise up” during a party for Juneteenth, doesn’t carry the slapstick sting it needs to work. And I want it to work.
