The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Prentice Penny’s Black Twitter Docuseries Was Inspired by Star Wars
His coming-of-age story is debuting at SXSWBy
His coming-of-age story is debuting at SXSW.
“I always want to chase this feeling of being scared again.”
rentice Penny had just wrapped the fifth and final season of Issa Rae’s
Insecure and was awaiting its release on HBO when Wired senior writer Jason Parham
published his definitive “A People’s History of Black Twitter” in July 2021. The three-part, 9,821-word series chronicles the evolution of the nebulous and influential collective of Black users on the platform now known as X, from its inciting event (the hashtag #UKnowUrBlackWhen) in the late ’00s to its growing influence and respective backlash through 2020.
For Penny, a multihyphenate talent whose work on such series as Insecure and
Girlfriends had been elevated and celebrated by Black Twitter, adapting Parham’s articles into a colorful visual history through the documentary medium seemed like an exciting new challenge after years in the narrative TV comedy space.
“I’ve been working on shows since 2004, and I felt like I had done scripted comedy for a long time,” the Insecure showrunner and veteran TV writer, whose credits also include Scrubs, Happy Endings and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, tells THR.
“I felt that, creatively, this is important, and I felt challenged again. I always want to chase this feeling of being scared again and not just feel like, ‘Oh, I can do this in my sleep,’ because that’s when your work gets lazy.”
The result is Hulu’s Black Twitter: A People’s History, Penny’s three-part docuseries based on Parham’s work. “After reading Jason’s article, one of the things that I found as a fun challenge was: How do you tell a story about this really amorphous thing?” he explains. “It was a coming-of-age story, similar to movies like Star Wars. Here’s this doe-eyed farm boy who doesn’t really know what’s going on and is faced with the Empire.”
Set for a world premiere March 8 on SXSW’s opening night, the series pays homage to the diversity, spirit and impact of Black Twitter across subjects both comedic and serious, rejecting a chronological, anthropological approach for a more visually dynamic, emotionally engaging style organized by topic.
“With Black Twitter, there was the beginning phase of, ‘What is this place?’ in terms of how we gather. It’s a place of fun, and we’re starting to find ourselves, finding a collective around Ashley [Weatherspoon’s] tweet of #UKnowUrBlackWhen,” Penny says. “Then we end with Trayvon [Martin’s killing in 2012] as the first awakening that there’s something more impactful out there that we need to do.”
Among the voices that help Penny tell this history is Parham, alongside artists, creators, innovators, commentators and stars of Black Twitter like stand-up comic W. Kamau Bell, author Luvvie Ajayi and trans activist Raquel Willis. It’s an ensemble of experts that highlights Black Twitter’s democratizing effect — putting regular folks on the same level as celebrities and leaders — and illustrates how interaction among them and with real-time events have inspired memes (#BlackGirlMagic), social movements (Black Lives Matter) and entertainment (#OscarsSoWhite).
“Black Twitter is made up of everyone. It is made up of comics like Sam Jay and Amanda Seales; political people like Brad Jenkins, who worked with Obama; and, of course, journalists, like the Wesley Lowerys of the world,” Penny says. “But also, so many of the things that happened on Black Twitter were just through regular folks. I think of CaShawn Thompson, who started Black Girl Magic, and Johnetta Elzie, who was there on the ground in Ferguson [after the fatal 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri]. It was important to have the ‘professor types’ along with regular people, because that’s all what Black Twitter is. It’s a level playing field that’s rare.”
Penny ultimately zeroes in on how this collective of voices and the conservative politicians, personalities and media outlets who have sought to silence them have used Twitter and its technological features — like GIFs, video and hashtags — to shift almost every corner of American society.
“The point I get to by the end is that Black Twitter has left the Matrix. It’s like when Neo learned to fly — he realized no rules apply anymore,” Penny says of how Black Twitter wielded the platform and fueled its on- and offline influence. “Twitter now is a conscious voice that represents revolution. It represents pushback and accountability. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”