#blackaf

I never got on the Black-ish bandwagon -- something about it struck me as self-serious and pedantic -- but creator Kenya Barris's Netflix series #blackaf is #funnyaf. It covers much of the same ground as Blackish and its offshoots but it feels smarter, less racially brittle, more combative and outrageously profane. (Well, it IS Netflix.)The parents (played by Barris and Rashida Jones) are a hot mess of questionable intentions and their half-dozen Gucci kids wear stylish insecurity, irony, introspection and resentment as if it were hair tint.

Episode 5 of #blackaf might be the "realest" 30 minutes of Black Television ever. In it, Barris tries to have a conversation about black cinema with his faux family, friends, co-workers and even some actual black filmmakers and cannot get anyone except his wokest daughter Drea (Iman Benson) and the white writers on his shows to agree a recently released motion picture, directed by and starring blacks, is actually crap, despite raves on Rotten Tomatoes. Even his wife, Jo (a terrific Jones), thinks its gold, but she's wrestling with her own identity issues.

The conversation between Barris and Tyler Perry, who is a pet target for many among the black and cinematic cognoscenti for making several fortunes shoveling formulaic dreck to, mostly, black audiences, is uncanny. Perry offers his defense, and its persuasiveness will probably depend on how much the viewer likes Madea.

This episode of #blackaf, as most of them in this series, is complex. That's not to say it's "complicated," as in "puzzling." It's complex, as in "that's deep, right there." Barris is inviting us to have an important conversation but I doubt it actually goes beyond this wonderful episode. I, for one, would love to be a part of it.

But, unfortunately, the wheels came completely off in epis 7 and 8. Borrowing from a host of other sitcoms that sent the family on an exotic vacation as a Sweeps Attraction, producers moved the action to Fiji, where all of the cantakerousness could get some sun and, maybe, work some TV magic. The bitter scornfulness among the Barrises (especially parents Kenya and Jo) had apparently grown to nuclear proportions even though it wasn't ever clear to me what was at the center of the animosity between any of the warring family members. Maybe having so much money made life worse for them because now they could retreat to their respective silos of privilege and tell everyone else to bugger off? The word "petty" is tossed around a lot and, perhaps, self-referentially, as the relational matters the narrative seemed most interested in probing just didn't feel that important. Maybe that's the real takeaway here. Dysfunction may just be something we create to kill time.

Tales from the Loop

Amazon's contemplative sci-fi series Tales from the Loop matches strangely forbidding exteriors with even stranger interior landscapes where characters -- often young people -- find disassociation from family paired with disconnection from their own spirits. It reminds me of the science fiction work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky -- deliberate, hypnotic and unsettling. The setting of Tales is a bleak little Ohio town that sits atop an experimental laboratory employing the town's best and brightest in activities that early on are not explained and likely little understood. The surrounding forests are littered with robotic detritus and the residue of bad ideas, waiting to cause mischief. Obsession seems to be the coin of the realm. The refreshingly diverse cast is led by Jonathan Pryce and will no doubt remind many of Syfy's Eureka and Netflix's Black Mirror anthology.