The crafty, comic genius of HBO’s Insecure

There is only one more episode left of HBO’s popular comedy drama Insecure. When the fifth and final season began in late October, many faithful viewers took to social media to express their collective sorrow that the show was ending.

Ever since it started back in 2016, Insecure has been hailed as a cultural balm, a comic and crafty reflection on what it’s like to live life as a middle-class black millennial American woman. The show follows the life, friendships, relationships and sexuality of Issa Dee, an awkward, searching twentysomething living in south Los Angeles, trying to figure out her life like everyone else.

In the very first scene of the first season, Dee is talking to a classroom of black and brown middle-school students about her work at the non-profit “We Got Y’All”. Dee, played by the show’s creator and writer Issa Rae, is the only black employee at the organisation, which is focused on helping black youth. When she finishes her presentation, the first question a student has for her is: “Why you talk white?”

One of the next questions, from a cocky little teenager, is: “Why aren’t you married?” Quickly followed by: “My dad said no one’s checking for [interested in] bitter black women no more.” With a blank look on her face, Dee replies in a patient and explanatory tone: “We’re not bitter. We’re just tired of being expected to settle for less.”

The show explores culture and race without any running thread of black trauma and without stereotyped expectations

One of the reasons the show has resonated so much with its audience is because Rae did not want to make a show that was — as she put it in an interview — “exclusively about the struggle of being black . . . It’s just regular black people living life”.

The character she plays is funny, quirky, both good and bad at being a friend and a lover, and learning, like most people of her age, how to navigate life with grace and self-forgiveness. And she introduced viewers to a community of other characters too: Lawrence, her underachieving boyfriend; Molly, her driven and controlling best friend; Tiffany and Derek, a married couple dealing with their own set of issues; and Kelli, the always-up-for-anything wild card.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, stories are a significant way by which we understand and make sense of the world. Growing up, I remember watching reruns of the popular 1970s sitcom Good Times. The first show of its kind to portray a two-parent African American family, it was set in the poor, inner-city Chicago Public Housing Projects. The Cosby Show offered a completely opposite reality, that of an upper-middle-class black family with five near-perfect children living in Brooklyn, New York. There simply was not a lot of variety between the extreme ends of the spectrum.

Growing up, I didn’t see any representations in western media that gave black people room to be more than struggling or less than perfect. But I was also raised partly in non-western countries, within families and communities that showed a wider, more realistic range of human experience for people who looked like me — in stark contrast with most of what I saw emerge from the imagination of western storytellers and culture shapers.

It’s telling that a show about black people living ordinary lives felt like a watershed on mainstream TV. Insecure explores culture, race and relationships without any running thread of black trauma, without fetishising black women or men, and without stereotyped expectations of the issues faced in black communities.

But throughout the seasons, Rae also gives consistent and subtle commentary about common experiences that many black people have in the US. There are examples of the racially stereotyped assumptions with which the characters are forced to contend: in her work at the youth organisation, Dee is expected to understand everything the black students are experiencing, while Molly, a lawyer at a predominately white law firm, is asked to confront another black employee about her behaviour.

Rae also shows us the daily reality of code-switching — knowing how to move effortlessly between dominant (white) and non-dominant (everything else) cultural markers in language and customs — something that many people of colour simply learn to do automatically. In one episode, Dee describes how everyone, white and black, likes her friend Molly. She compliments her as the “Will Smith of corporate” and the camera pans from one scene of Molly as the sole black person in a boardroom, laughing and talking with a certain tone of voice and presence — and then to also feeling completely at ease in a card game with the building’s security personnel. Who all happen to be black.

By the beginning of Insecure’s third season in 2018, Rae was surprised to discover that almost two-thirds of her viewers were white. It may seem like just another TV show, but in claiming the value and significance of ordinary black life, Insecure has helped to shift the public imagination, to broaden the idea of what is considered relevant for the collective culture. That to go out for a jog, to walk around with some candy and your headphones on, to sit at home watching TV at night, to have a busted tail light or your car break down, aren’t (or shouldn’t be) experiences that get to be ordinary for some, and life-threatening for others.

Sometimes the most powerful act is daring to stand in the particularities of your own life, without explaining it, excusing it, or seeking validation for it. Simply saying: “This is normal and this is good.”

Enuma Okoro is a New York-based columnist for FT Life & Arts

Email Enuma at [email protected]

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