OPEN UP ‘WHITE’!
Netflix’s ‘People’ like getting kids to eat: star
“Dear White People” star John Patrick Amedori compared the show’s final season to zooming a spoon into a child’s mouth like an airplane. The trick for talking about topics as sensitive as those covered in Netflix’s Ivy League dramedy is to make it entertaining.
The final season of the series presents itself as a ’90s-themed musical that takes over almost all of the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, a flashback from a future with constant biological threats and masked lockdowns.
But hidden behind that, like all four seasons of “Dear White People,” is the everyday trauma of being Black in America.
“It feels a lot like life,” Harlem native Antoinette Robertson, the 28-year-old actress who plays Coco Conners, told the Daily News.
“It’s honest. It’s authentic. It ebbs and it flows. Things are not going to be peaches and roses all the time, and people are going to have difficulties in life. I appreciate the depiction of both sides of the coin as opposed to selling some weird idea that life is going to be some straight-and-narrow road.”
The fourth season, premiering Wednesday, balances interlocking subplots for almost all of its characters, but all come down to a crisis of faith: Joelle (Ashley Blaine Featherson) in her science, Reggie (Marque Richardson) in his technology, Lionel (DeRon Horton) in his relationship, Troy (Brandon P. Bell) in his parents, Gabe (Amedori) in his art.
And then there’s Sam (Logan Browning), who for so long has existed as a force outside the system, a constant reminder of everything they’re doing wrong, until one day the system welcomes her in. Freshman Iesha Vital (Joi Liaye) does her very best, loudly and incessantly, to remind Sam she’s not angry enough, not woke enough, simply not enough.
“When you work very hard to fight the status quo but then you become it,” Browning, 32, told The News, “what do you do?”
For Sam, the answer doesn’t come easily. For very few of “Dear White People’s” characters, in fact, does the answer to any of life’s questions come easy. And as the season progresses, the questions become more difficult and the answers harder to come by.
Then they break into song. “You keep it light, you keep it light, you lull people into having a good time and then this terrible thing happens, and that’s what real life is like,” showrunner Jaclyn Moore told The News.
Eventually, it all culminates in chaos, not in the normal college-graduation way but in a scary, life-altering way. Through the singing and the joy peeks the darkest reality.
“The conundrum that every Black story faces ... is that we’ve gotta tell the truth about what this experience is like,” creator Justin Simien told The News.
“The question for the season, and I did not have the answer, is how do I find joy in all of that? If I’m going to work my butt off to bring about political change and a future for myself, I’m going to do all this stuff and at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is I’m still miserable because we have so much further to go. That can’t be the answer.
“So we have this strange challenge of how do we both tell the truth but also do that thing that art is supposed to do, which is to heal. It’s not healing for Black folks to just relive our trauma over and over again. So how do you tell the truth about our trauma and also make it healing?”