The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lee tells why film led to new series
‘She’s Gotta Have It’ was ahead of its time when it was released in 1986.
Spike Lee never envisioned revisiting his 1986 indie film “She’s Gotta Have it,” which was groundbreaking by focusing on a single black woman who was unapologetically dating three dudes at once.
But his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, had other ideas. She convinced him to give the film a modernized spin via longer-form television, enabling him to delve deeper into the characters while maintaining its distinctive vibrant style. Netflix released the 10 episodes to subscribers on Thanksgiving. His wife was also an executive producer, and several female writers contributed to the expanded storylines.
“She had the vision I didn’t have,” said Lee, a 1979 Morehouse College graduate who recently visited Spelman College to give advice to undergraduates
and talk about the new Netflix series. “I did it already. She said, ‘You should think about bring-
ing this back and make it contemporary.’ We ran with it. I’m very grateful Netflix stepped up.”
Lee said he had barely looked at the film over the years but had no choice once he was ready to bring it back. He cringed a few times. “I saw all the mistakes a very young filmmaker made,” he said. “It was my first feature film. I did it in two six-day weeks: July 1 to July 13, 1985!”
He said this is, in a way, a five-hour movie, and given how people view shows on Netflix, that’s not a far-off statement. And to ensure continuity, he directed all 10 episodes. “That was not a discussion,” said the famously hands-on Lee.
And as a filmmaker, he didn’t change his approach even if this is loosely defined as “TV” on Netflix. “We’re making cinema,” he said, “not a TV show.”
For viewers familiar with the film, the jazzy piano music is the same during the credits. Nola Darling, played with radiant confidence by DeWanda Wise, still loves candles. She still paints. She is still juggling three guys: mature and caring Jamie, narcissistic Greer and fun-loving wackadoodle Mars Blackmon.
“I consider myself abnormal,” Nola proclaims in her bed in the opening seconds. “But who wants to be like everybody else? Not I!”
But Fort Greene is now part of a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. The once allblack neighborhood has become far more diverse. Now rents are so sky-high, for her to afford her cool loft ($3,000 a month!), she has to hold multiple jobs.
In the first episode, one of Nola’s good friends mocks a bearded white waiter, calling the changes in Fort Greene “hipster imperialism.” Nola namedrops OWN TV personality and life coach Iyanla Vanzant and the Urban Dictionary. Jamie reads his corny birthday poem off his smartphone, not a piece of paper, while Greer accuses of her being a sex addict. And each scene is introduced in hashtag.
Lee isn’t above making references to himself. “Hamilton” vet Anthony Ramos, now playing Spike Lee’s Mars, coos over Nola’s painting of Malcolm X, and Nola complains how Denzel Washington on Lee’s film “Malcolm X” was robbed of an Academy Award in 1993.
One of the toughest to cast on the show was Mars, Lee said. But when he saw Ramos in “Hamilton” (“Eight times!” Lee said), he decided the actor had to play the Michael Jordanloving, gold teeth-wearing character. To accommodate Ramos, he made Mars half black, half Puerto Rican.
The early reviews for the show are promising. The average Metacritic score is 79 out of 100 with 10 positive reviews and one mixed.
Collider’s Chris Cabin loved it: “It melds Lee’s studied vision of Brooklyn in the age of sexting with the intimate yet ubiquitous inner thoughts and feelings of a generation of young, black artists and professionals without overtly praising or diminishing either.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Dan Fienberg said it gets stronger the further it moves away from the original film: ” ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ is already a very good show and maybe a second season could rewrite some rules the way the movie did.”