SHE’S GOT CLASS
‘Black-ish’ daughter Zoey takes ‘U’ turn in thoughtful Freeform spinoff
Z OEY Jackson, the eldest daughter on ABC’s “Black-ish,” has enrolled in college — and gotten her own series. It’s called “Grown
ish” and her major is dating. While enrolled in a nighttime class at Cal U., called Digital Marketing Services, Zoey (Yara Shahidi) meets Aaron (Trevor Jackson, “American Crime”) — a handsome upperclassman who can text any girl on campus with a guaranteed instant reply — and Luca (Luka Sabbat), a self-styled enigma whom Zoey describes on the first day of class as “Baby B asquiat.”
The disaffected students also include twin girls, Jazz and Sky Henry (Chloe and Halle Bailey), Jewish lesbian Nomi Parker (Emily Arlook) and Vivek (Jordan Buhat), an Indian drug dealer.
The hooking up in evidence at Zoey’s college makes the infamous break-up Post-it left for Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) by Berger (Ron Livingston) on “Sex and the City” look like something out of the Victorian age. Rather than study, Zoey checks her phone every twelve seconds to see which boy is going to ask, “U up?” and then convenes an impromptu meeting with the girls on her dorm floor to analyze the intent of the three-letter text. Zoey’s roommate Ana (Francia Raisa) fires off one of the series’ best lines: “A ‘U up?’ ” text might as well be a Chris Brown song.”
Created by Kenya Barris, whose “Black-ish” is now a Disney mainstay, “Grown-ish” is a clever show that knows how clever it is. The Digital Marketing Services class is a modern-day version of the detention class in the 1985 John Hughes movie “The Breakfast Club.” The series aspires to entertain as well as affectionately satirize the behavior of its characters. While it’s believable for a girl Zoey’s age to wonder why one text from a cute boy may feel different from another, Barris also wants you to know that Zoey represents a certain generation of kids who know more about their iPhones than world history. When assigned a 25-page paper on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she confuses the Supreme Court Justice with TV’s “Judge Judy.” No matter, she can always drop an Adderall, described as “academic steroids,” supplied by Vivek (Jordan Buhat) to get the job done.
The ways in which Zoey’s advertising exec dad and doctor mother, Dre and Rainbow (Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross), react to Zoey’s inadvertent college education will hopefully play out in future episodes of “Grown-ish” (they’ll make the occasional appearance). At the outset, Dre is missing his baby girl; she won’t even come home on the weekend to watch “The Breakfast Club” with him. What he’s missing might make his head spin. The boys brag about getting some “top-shelf action” and the “side views” that make the pics in their “nudie bank” so hard to resist.
“Grown-ish” offers a funnybut-bittersweet look at a bunch of world-weary kids who’ve been there, done that — all at the tender age of 18.
On the first day of class, Zoey says, in one of the show’s many voiceovers, “The one thing I didn’t know about college was that I didn’t know anything.”
#She’snotkidding.