*A lot of people look at ABC’s “Black-ish” as a vehicle to speak to the country’s ills, especially it’s racial problems. However, the groundbreaking show’s creator Kenya Barris may say his show isn’t an issues-driven sitcom, but he’s wrong, reports TV Guide.
“Black-ish” is at its best when its characters are sitting in a room arguing about a topic, like they did about police brutality and Black Lives Matter in last February’s “Hope,” still the high-water mark for the ABC sitcom.
Barris and his terrific cast delivered a potent, timely statement once again with Wednesday night’s episode “LEMONS,” a startlingly relevant take on the impending Trump presidency that may go down as the definitive pop cultural artifact from the surreal, uncertain time between Nov. 8, 2016 and Jan. 20, 2017, and the first one to come to terms with the fact that Barack Obama is about to not be the president anymore.
The episode takes place eight weeks after the election — as in right now — and is built around three speeches from Dre (Anthony Anderson), Barris’ surrogate. In the first, which opens the episode, he muses in a voiceover about how America loves upsets (shout out to Steph Curry and LeBron James) and the role of the winner and loser on either side of that upset. He concludes with the episode’s thesis statement:
“What happens when the winners and the losers are supposed to be on the same team?”
In other words, how is America going to survive a political divide that has split the country in two and seems hopelessly unbridgeable?
The next speech comes in the middle, after Dre’s co-workers have been arguing about who to blame for Donald Trump‘s election instead of working. To find out how that turns out, you’ll have to get the rest of this insightful TV Guide article at MSN.com.