#cindyphan

Although the appeal behind web series can be attributed to a wide variety of reasons, one of the most prominent is the representation it offers—something that has historically been, and still continues to be, scarce within the landscape of mainstream programming.  

Major driving factors behind web series’ value as a media and entertainment form are the marginalized identities they render visible and the authenticity behind the narratives they portray.  At the forefront of the story, and not on the sidelines, are black and brown women.  Audiences can see positive and uncompetitive relationships between women of color; they see queer men of color in all shapes and sizes—queer men of color with ambitions, queer men of color who are doctoral candidates and who are not merely reduced to tropes.

The title card of Issa Rae’s hit web series

When Issa Rae’s web series, the aforementioned Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, was picked up by a major television network, fans were no doubt ecstatic.  Rae’s countless hours of hard work had been noticed, and with the now elevated platform that HBO could provide, her story could reach a wider audience.

And yet Insecure, despite how groundbreaking it is in its own right, came out different from its predecessor.

“[M]ost of the problems Issa has…prove to be universal,” Warner’s article points out, before going on to explain that the depiction of “‘human’ and ‘relatable’” experiences have become a “key tactic for HBO.”

When it comes to portraying Blackness on-screen, the intention of HBO and other major programming networks is never to provide authenticity or to genuinely make underrepresented audiences feel visible.  Racial diversity is not a display of human decency or a liberal political stance, but rather a symptom of the greed that underlays all moves (or “risks,” as racial diversity is apparently classified under) taken on those networks’ part.  Discussions of monetary payoff precede showing any POC face on-screen (Warner).  

In this way, one could argue that, even in the mediated world, Black bodies (and, by extension, bodies of color) are used as capital in a white-dominated system, as they have been since the inception of the thirteen original colonies.  Keeping this in mind, one also considers how bifurcation is all but necessary in series centered around marginalized identities (be they Black or queer or both or something else entirely), and how writers like Issa Rae have to play a delicate balancing act between moments of cultural specificity and a broader narrative that reassures mainstream white audience of its relatability (Warner).  Rae speaks of being approached by networks and production companies and having to turn their offers down because their demands and ideas dilute the stories that she, as an awkward Black girl, is attempting to tell (Wortham).

A delicate reminder of the diversity we can expect in a typical writer’s room 

In an environment where “authenticity” is manufactured and minorities are treated as an investment, the next time a web series is picked up by a larger network, we as the audience must question whether to consider that a success—or a defeat in of itself.