I have not seen this show yet, but I will be watching it tonight. If you already saw the first episode, please tell us what you thought.
In the meantime, LaShawn gives her 2 cents, and TruthDig gives the real scoop behind this show. Here is an excerpt of their article:
By Sheerly Avni
“Gangsta-rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube served as the show’s co-executive producer, in addition to writing its theme song, “Race Card.†R.J. Cutler, who made the groundbreaking 1993 documentary “The War Room,†a behind-the-scenes look at Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, is the one who developed the idea. Cutler hesitates to call the film a documentary, but he has also taken great pains to distance the series from the much maligned and wholly contrived world of reality TV, calling it instead a “reality experiment.†As you might imagine, the project has not been free of controversy. Nelson George, an eminent hip-hop journalist, activist and himself a producer of a documentary about race in America, went so far as to tell the Los Angeles Times that this kind of television is “phony and dangerous.â€Â
Not only do these situations feel forced, they often actually are forced: Even Rose’s class, for example, where she agonizes about whether to come clean with the young poets about her fake identity, is a setup. The kids there are all black, to push the whole racial divide thing, but in reality, spoken-word workshops are usually as diverse and multicultural as Los Angeles claims to be. Poetri and Juren Smith, the husband-and-wife team running the workshop, told the Los Angeles Times that he, Poetri, was asked to put together an all-black group to fit the needs of the show, and that he knew Rose’s secret the whole time.
It’s a bit self-defeating, especially since the whole point about racial (and ethnic) tensions is that daily life provides more than enough to work with. But the two families’ daily lives are what’s missing, since the whole situation is contrived from the start: You never see them argue (or agree) on what television show to watch, what food to cook, whose turn it is to take out the garbage, or who drives the car. We’re watching “reality,†sure, but it’s one in which all the conflict is orchestrated around artificial circumstances, far removed from the real-life interactions that both fuel racial tension and ultimately serve as our only means to combat it.”
Ice Cube should have known better than to get mixed up with this. I’ll add my two cents to this post after I have seen tonight’s episode.
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