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 fervently celebrated sitcom, which began its fourth and final season Thursday, makes a heady, candy-chili stew out of deeply surreal comedy and profound, often heartbreaking explorations of morality. Chidi, more than his fellow humans and the extra-dimensional beings in their orbit, 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 more often than not. 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. And I do feel seen. It’s exciting, unnerving even. It’s as if, in his being called up to centre stage, I can feel that tug, too.
When asked, Harper describes himself as a nerd. He claims he can go down rabbit holes with the things he’s passionate about: He loves tabletop board games like the Settlers of Catan and Pandemic; he really likes indie rock and Steely Dan. None of these things would necessarily get you banished from the cool kids’ table at school. It’s just that, once upon a time, if you were a young Black man who was into things that weren’t stereotypically associated with Blackness, you were confined to a small box in the minds of others. With that confinement came alienation.
“I definitely got the Carlton thing,” Harper said, referring to Carlton Banks, the affluent dweeb played by Alfonso Ribeiro on “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” (So did I.) “I was into a lot of stuff that a lot of little white kids were into. I definitely caught some grief for that coming up.”