Today, we look at how Black-ish kicked off its second season with a thoughtful exploration of “The Word.”
This is “All the Best Things,” a spotlight on the best TV episodes, movies, albums, etc.
This is a Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day this year, we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.
All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great Black-centric TV episodes.
I recently asked readers to pick which episode of Black-ish that I would write about this month, and the winner was Season 2’s premiere episode in 2015, “The Word,” which shows middle schooler Jack (Miles Brown) using the explicit version of Kanye West and Jamie Foxx’s “Gold Digger” in a talent show at school, complete with the N word, and getting expelled from his private school (which had instituted a zero tolerance policy on hate speech, which was a movement that had been pushed by Jack’s mother, Tracee Ellis Ross’ Rainbow “Bow” Johnson). When asked where Jack heard the word, we learn that Jack’s dad, Andre “Dre” Johnson (Anthony Anderson) had been playing the song (with the N word) every day when driving Jack to school.
So Dre and Bow spend the rest of the episode trying to prevent Jack from being expelled, while Dre explores the word itself in a series of discussions both at home and at his office (Dre is an advertising executive, and he’s high enough at the company that he spends a lot of time just talking about his life at the office, and as one of the few Black executives, Dre often finds himself schooling his White co-workers and his White boss).
At the end of the day, there really is no “right” answer, which the episode’s writer (and show creator) Kenya Barris knows, but the only thing that is clear is that expelling a little Black kid from school for using the N word in the performance of a hit song is not a just result, and by the end of the episode, Jack’s expulsion is reversed.
Beyond that, Barris explores the various positions on the N word (whether it is so offensive that it shouldn’t be used at all, or if it can be used, but just by Black people, or if even Black people shouldn’t use it if they’re using it in a certain way). The interesting thing for me is that Black-ish tackled these subjects in, like, EVERY episode, so while another show doing an episode about the N word might have felt a bit too much like a “very special episode” for me (as I’m not using very special episodes in this feature), and in fact, I actually used a different Bernie Mac Show episode this month because that show’s episode about the N word DID seem too much like a “Very special episode”), it wasn’t the case for Black-ish, as they really addressed this stuff CONSTANTLY, so it’s just how the show worked.
The thoughtfulness of the show was always very welcome.
The B plot of this episode saw Junior (Marcus Scribner) go overboard trying to make his house eco-friendly. It was a pretty silly plot, but with some good sight gags (Junior showing up in the shower when Dre takes a shower because he thinks they should try to save water by showering together was hilarious). The main plot was strong, though, and even had a nice touching moment where Dre’s father, Pops (Laurence Fishburne), who disagrees with Dre’s “reclaiming” of the N word, tells Dre that while he disagrees with his son on a lot of things, one thing he doesn’t disagree with him is about how he is raising his kids. Awwww.
Matt Sohn directed the episode.
Okay, if I’m going to have 312 more of these (and 4 more this month), I could use suggestions, so feel free to email me at brian@poprefs.com!
