‘SOUL’ REBORN
‘Train’ arrives on BET, mixing drama & music
Kids today can pull out a phone and watch pop stars sing and dance any way, anyhow, anywhere they choose. But TV was small once, and such appearances were rare — and all the more psychically powerful for it.
Born in Chicago, transplanted to Hollywood and syndicated everywhere, “Soul Train,” from 1971 to 2003, was a seemingly simple jukebox dance show that became one of the most culturally significant TV shows of its time. A beacon of young black music, dance and fashion, it lit up the nation with “love, peace and soul,” in the words with which creator and velvetbaritone host Don Cornelius (inset) ended each weekly broadcast.
Now the “hippest trip in America” has become the basis of a different kind of television program — “American Soul,” which premiered Tuesday on BET. Joining “Empire,” “Star,” “Power” and “Pose” in a small congregation of black TV music and nightclub dramas, the series is a conceptual sequel to NBC’s 2002 pop-musical drama “American Dreams,” which was set in mid-1960s Philadelphia, against the backdrop of “American Bandstand.”
Jonathan Prince, who with Devon Greggory (“Harry’s Law,” “Being Mary Jane,” “Underground”) cocreated “American Soul,” also cocreated “American Dreams.” And like the earlier show, it follows the young amateur dancers out of the studio in their soap-opera-complicated lives and employs pop stars of more recent vintage as stand-ins for pop stars of less recent vintage. But where the private life of Dick Clark was not grist for “Dreams,” Cornelius is very much at the center of “Soul.”
After a title-card epigram quoting Nietzsche (“Without music, life would be a mistake”) — because, sure, why not — we join Cornelius (Sinqua Walls) on the last day of his life, Feb. 1, 2012, as he tearfully rewatches old footage from his show. From there we flash back to a happierday, Chicago, January 1971, where the local version of “Soul Train” is already in progress, with “Chicago’s very own ChiLites!”
But the Windy City cannot hold him. “Fourteen cities, all we need is a Top 10 act — they want us by the fourth quarter!” declares George Johnson of Johnson Products, makers of Afro-Sheen and the show’s cornerstone backer and sponsor.
In pursuit of that Top 10 act, Cornelius will head out to LA, where he has been promised a meeting with James Brown, though this jaunt is mostly just to introduce Gerald Aims (Jason Dirden), a philosophical club owner who provides a combination of comic relief and criminal-element tension.
He then rocks back to Gary, Ind., to pitch Gladys Knight (Kelly Rowland). Later there will be some nonsensical difficulties over what song Knight will sing on the show, to inject drama into a milieu that actually requires a lack of drama to function efficiently.
But there is a lot of other drama in “American Soul,” centered mainly on brother and sister Kendall (Jelani Winston) and Simone Clarke (Katlyn Nichol), who have a singing group with their friend JT (Christopher Jefferson) and think dancing on “Soul Train” might help them get noticed.