Kenya Barris on ‘Black-ish’ Police Brutality Episode

Wednesday’s remarkable episode, “Hope“, pulled off both about as well as you could imagine: It was amusing but heartbreaking, nuanced but not mealy-mouthed, blunt but not despairing.

Nor does this Black-ish episode (or any other) highlight that black people commit a catastrophically high amount of crime, disproportionately, while representing a small share of the overall population. They grapple with how to talk to the family’s youngest members – twins Jack and Diane – about the community reaction to the case and others like it.

Very special episodes, as TV used to call them, are always tricky for comedy, and Black-ish, which manages to bring in a range of perspectives on the conduct of police without ever leaving the living room, actually has some amusing moments Wednesday.

“I would not say that the episode at its inception was about police brutality”, Barris said. There’s not really a lot of qualified competition, seeing as network comedy is pretty far down in the dumps at the moment, its glory days having faded away like the ratings for Sean Saves the World. We chose to use police brutality because we felt like it was the best subject matter for the times. Anthony Anderson, who plays outspoken patriarch Andre “Dre” Johnson, compares the episode’s claustrophobic setting to that of 12 Angry Men, as Dre and his wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), argue over how much to tell their two youngest children. While they agreed that reality would eventually set in, Bo anxious that the children would lose their hope and innocence if they’re exposed too early to racial injustice. The show tries not to let the system or the viewer totally off the hook-the family soon comes to the consensus that things have to change-but it does get a bit hamstrung in its desperate attempt to maintain some measure of optimism. “It firmly established ‘black-ish, ‘ if there was any doubt, as a sitcom that’s not just timely but up to the challenge of its times…”

The courage of embracing optimism when there’s no real reason to.

“At some point, whether we like it or not, our kids are going to ask [hard] questions that we have to answer”, says her husband, Dre (Anthony Anderson). John Legend’s “If You’re Out There” closes out the episode as images of protests for gay rights, women’s rights, and Black Lives Matter flash across the scene.

But pop culture inconsistencies and that sentimental ending don’t negate the show’s ambition and success in addressing such an important topic. One thing black-ish does superbly is remind its mass audience of the wide range of opinions there are-that being black does not mean hewing to a party-line.