[This episode of Black-ish, which, if it had come out when it was
supposed to, would have been a time capsule of where we were as a
nation a year into Trump’s presidency.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

ABOUT THAT ‘CONTROVERSIAL’ BLACK-ISH EPISODE …  
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Jen Chaney
August 11, 2020
Vulture
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_ This episode of Black-ish, which, if it had come out when it was
supposed to, would have been a time capsule of where we were as a
nation a year into Trump’s presidency. _

“Please, Baby, Please” recounts President Trump’s rise to power
as a leader who, as Dre (Anthony Anderson) puts it to his baby son,
“scared the s— out of Daddy.” , Photo: ABC

 

The _Black-ish_ episode “Please, Baby, Please,” an airing of
Trump era grievances framed around Dre’s attempt to calm his infant
son, was supposed to air in February of 2018. That never happened due
to what was characterized at the time as “creative differences
[[link removed]]”
between ABC and _Black-ish_ creator Kenya Barris, who co-wrote the
season-four episode with Peter Saji. A few months after the dustup,
Barris signed a multimillion-dollar
[[link removed]] contract
to develop future new series for Netflix.

Yesterday, more than two years after all that ruckus, “Please, Baby,
Please” finally became available on Hulu
[[link removed]],
as confirmed by a social media announcement from Barris
[[link removed]]. “We
were one year post-election and coming to the end of a year that left
us, like many Americans, grappling with the state of our country and
anxious about its future,” Barris wrote in the post. “Those
feelings poured onto the page, becoming 22 minutes of television that
I was, and still am, incredibly proud of.”

“Please, Baby, Please” — which now appears on Hulu at the very
end of the lineup of season-four episodes — really does play like a
creative endeavor that emerged from a flood of strong feelings. While
it’s more scattershot and heavy-handed than _Black-ish_’s other
notable post-2016 political episodes, “Hope” and “Juneteenth,”
some of it resonates even more deeply than Barris could have
anticipated in early 2018. What’s most clear is that it seems even
more ridiculous now that ABC didn’t air it back then.

Set during a thunderstorm, when baby DeVante is wide awake and Dre
(Anthony Anderson) is tasked with trying to soothe his youngest son
back to sleep, the episode unfolds as a series of issue-focused,
cross-generational conversations between various members of the
Johnson family who also are having trouble sleeping. First, after
reading some of Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee’s children’s
book _Please, Baby, Please_, narrated via a guest voice-over by Spike
Lee, Dre tells DeVante his own story about “the Shady King,” an
American ruler who split his kingdom in two. Then Dre and his father,
Pops (Laurence Fishburne), discuss the evolution of American white
supremacy and Black pride. Junior (Marcus Scribner), concerned about
weighing in on a school debate about whether kids can kneel during the
national anthem, talks to Dre about Colin Kaepernick and the
importance of peaceful protest. And lastly, twins Jack (Miles Brown)
and Diane (Marsai Martin) confess to their dad that they’re scared
by the storm, but not because they fear thunder; the extreme weather
reminds them how concerned they are about climate change. The
structure of the episode, in which Dre gains perspective from his
elders and from younger generations, is set up to lead to an (overly)
optimistic conclusion.

Reports back in 2018 cited the dialogue about Kaepernick
[[link removed]] as
a primary reason why ABC pulled the episode, perhaps understandable
given the extra-charged conversation surrounding Kaepernick at the
time. The _Black-ish_ episode was due to air on the heels of an NFL
season in which President Trump indirectly referred to Kaepernick as a
“son of a bitch” for having kneeled during the national anthem to
protest racial injustice and police brutality, remarks that prompted
even more players to take a knee
[[link removed]].
During that 2017–2018 season, Vice-President Mike Pence also made a
show of walking out of a 49ers game
[[link removed]] when
players kneeled during the anthem.

ABC Entertainment Group president Channing Dungey later told
reporters
[[link removed]] that
the network’s issues weren’t focused on the conversation that Dre
and Junior have about Kaepernick, and having seen the episode, that
makes sense. There is nothing problematic in that dialogue. Dre
expresses a pro-kneeling stance, while Junior says he’s not sure he
agrees with refusing to stand during the anthem but ultimately
supports the rights of players, as well as the students at his school,
to protest in that way. If anything, the segment of the episode
related to Kaepernick goes too far to show both sides of the issue, a
fact that comes through louder and clearer in 2020, when, following
the public outrage over George Floyd’s death, professional athletes
in other sports are kneeling
[[link removed]] and playing
with Black Lives Matter messages
[[link removed]] splashed
across their fields, courts, and jerseys. Despite all the backward
steps this country seems to have taken in the past two years, watching
this episode serves as a reminder that we’ve also taken some steps
forward, at least symbolically, since then.

I suspect the story of the Shady King, a.k.a. Trump, caused more
consternation for ABC executives at the time, who were then excited
about their semi-Trump-focused reboot of _Roseanne_
[[link removed]].
(In case you’ve forgotten, that turned out not so great
[[link removed]].)
The tale, brought to life with a mix of animation and actual news
clips, recounts Trump’s rise to power as a leader who, as Dre puts
it, “scared the s— out of Daddy.” Footage of Trump, parroting
the words of Bane in _The Dark Knight Rises_, is featured. So is
cartoon imagery of hunched-over workers being forced to build a wall
and toilet paper being tossed out of a castle as Dre describes the
Shady King as someone who “appears to be out of touch” with what
his subjects need.

In his attempt to explain how we wound up with a Shady King, Dre
flashes back to 2008, when a figure he calls Prince Barry was elected,
which “was a pretty big deal for this kingdom because this was the
same kingdom that used to use people who look like Prince Barry as,
how do I put this? Really cheap gardeners.” Images of Barack Obama
appear on the screen during this segment, followed by pictures of
Black slaves.

Barris and Saji, via Dre, posit that things changed during Obama’s
presidency, but too much for the comfort of some Americans. “I mean,
do we really need remote-control fighter jets, or to give the medal of
freedom to a dancing daytime talk-show host?,” Dre asks, as an image
of Ellen DeGeneres receiving said medal from Obama flashes on the
screen. “Probably not.” In 2018, when broadcast networks were
still leery of offending conservative viewers and DeGeneres’s
reputation as the nicest gay icon was still fully intact
[[link removed]], this all probably made
some ABC executives break out in severe hives.

But nothing about this story was wrong then, and its accuracy is even
more apparent now. That makes this episode of _Black-ish_, which, if
it had come out when it was supposed to, would have been a time
capsule of where we were as a nation a year into Trump’s presidency,
more like a pair of bookends that speaks to then and also now.

There are moments in “Please, Baby, Please” that, obviously
inadvertently, strike sharp chords in the summer of 2020. The shade
thrown at Ellen, which might have been perceived as homophobic back
then, seems more justifiable given the recent reports about the toxic
culture on DeGeneres’s show
[[link removed]],
which, apparently, plenty of people in Hollywood already knew about.
Dre has to put his Shady King story on pause when his wife, Bow
(Tracee Ellis Ross), tells him that little DeVante is too young to
know how scary the world has become. “It’s like the only place you
can find a little peace is at home,” she says. This is in no way
meant to be a laugh line, but in the midst of a pandemic that seems
destined to keep us largely in our homes well into 2021, it now plays
as a brutal bit of dark comedy. While the Shady King story unfolds,
the Run DMC song, “Hard Times,” plays on the soundtrack. It was a
natural choice two years ago, but listening to the lyrics now —
“Hard times spreading just like the flu / Watch out homeboy, don’t
let it catch you” — makes one wonder if Barris is legitimately
psychic.

Then there’s the ending, which hits in all kinds of different ways
now. As Dre crawls into bed alongside his wife and his kids — well,
minus Zoey, who, like all children, has grown up and gotten her own
spinoff [[link removed]] — he finds comfort
in the tradition of American resilience. “That’s the thing with
our country,” he says, via voice-over. “We’ve gone through a lot
but when it’s darkest, we help each other out. No matter how bad the
storm is, we’ll be here for each other.” Hearing this in the
middle of a congressional debate over coronavirus relief, a battle
over whether to open schools, and continued irresponsible stubbornness
by those who still refuse to wear masks, that conclusion sounds
laughably naïve. It _was_ naïve, we know now.

But that’s also the heartbreak of watching “Please, Baby,
Please.” It captures a sense of anxiety that was profound and an
America that looked like a disaster to many in 2018. But it’s also a
snapshot of a comparatively “better” time when we could not
imagine how much worse things would get. That makes the conclusion of
this episode, which expresses the sort of optimism that we tend to
expect from family-oriented, broadcast-network sitcoms, register as
the sounding of an alarm. If, in 2020, we look back at a politically
panicked half-hour of television as a mark of lost innocence, imagine
how 2020 could seem in 2022.

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