Redefining the black nerd for television audiences
‘The Good Place’ character Chidi seen as part of a broadening notion of black masculinity
William Jackson Harper is nervous. We’ve been on the phone for five minutes and he’s walking around his living room as we speak, analyzing everything he’s saying and hoping he hasn’t said anything stupid.
As a self-described neurotic, he takes his nervousness as a given. Later, he tells me about how hard it is to make dinner plans. He and his girlfriend have talked about it. How there’s something about making the plans in advance that fills him with dread. As he shares all this and more, I can tell he’s smart. Funny. A little awkward. These qualities and idiosyncrasies are just some of what he brings to one of the best roles on television.
Harper, 39, plays the eternally indecisive Prof. Chidi Anagonye on NBC’s “The Good Place.” The celebrated sitcom, which began its fourth and final season Thursday, makes a heady stew out of deeply surreal comedy and profound, often heartbreaking explorations of morality. Chidi is the philosophical heart of the show.
He’s also a huge nerd. He’s scholarly, prone to stomach aches brought on by intense anxiety and he can talk at length about Kantian ethics.
Chidi is the sort of character who, in past generations, might have been the butt of the joke. Instead, he’s a romantic lead on one of television’s most beloved shows. (It probably helps that he is, as Kristen Bell’s Eleanor Shellstrop once said, “surprisingly jacked.”) For a viewer like me, who grew up being compared to characters like Steve Urkel, the uber-nerd portrayed by Jaleel White on the ’90s sitcom “Family Matters,” he summons a welcome, if skewed, sense of recognition.
Watching Chidi is like looking at my affable yet vexed reflection. But more broadly, that reflection, for me, shows how much more space there is for a wider range of black performances in mainstream entertainment. There are many more complex characters of colour now, characters freer to express themselves in more layered, nuanced ways.
Harper said that Chidi is him “on steroids.” That, even if Chidi is a heightened character conceived by the show’s creator, Mike Schur, and writers, Harper’s nervous inner monologue still comes through in many ways. Chidi, then, becomes a way for a certain stripe of black nerd to be seen a bit more clearly.
Nerds in the collective imagination tend to be coded as white. Consider Urkel, who “was really adhering to all of the stereotypes that were already in place for white nerds in culture” like Woody Allen, Groucho Marx and Harold Lloyd, said David Gillota, the author of “Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America.”
Which is not to diminish Jaleel White. But the past 10 years alone have exploded ideas of what’s possible for black men onscreen: Think the codeswitching comedic personas of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. The understated brilliance of Sam Richardson as Richard Splett in “Veep.” The thwarted genius of Donald Glover’s Earn in “Atlanta.”
Chidi Anagonye is on the vanguard of that shift. Megan Amram, a writer-producer on the show, told me that he represents something audiences may not have seen before. “The Good Place” was written to capture the experiences of people all over the world. With Chidi, who is Nigerian-Senegalese, viewers get to watch an African man who is “sweet and fun and funny and flirty and also neurotic and informed and scared all the time,” Amram said.