Blistering wit and knowing irony
Maureen Ryan reviews the TV series Dear White People
THERE are sure to be many contenders for the title of Most Quotable Show of 2017, but it’ll be hard to top Dear White People. This smart and necessary Netflix series, an extension of the film of the same name by Justin Simien, is full of incisive asides, witty quips and painfully funny observations.
A student at Tony Winchester University remarks that racism is something she thought only existed “in the ’50s, or in Buzzfeed articles”. An African-american woman’s white love interest is dubbed “Disney Channel Obama”. Characters under pressure decide, rightly or wrongly, to get “whitegirl wasted”.
Dear White People, which focuses on the experiences of black students at Winchester, explores identity politics.
But this half-hour series lightens its load by recognising that all the people on screen are just barely suppressing sometimes unflattering but frequently hilarious views about the outlooks and choices of the people around them.
The same self-preservation instinct that sometimes provokes defensive reactions among Winchester’s most politically aware and ambitious students also provides a blizzard of snappy comebacks that contain a lot of truth. A quick scan of Twitter and a binge-watch of Dear White People both confirm that scathing wit is not just an avenue of resistance but a much-needed pressure-release valve.
In the first half of the season, however, the show’s best jokes often have a crisp focus that certain episodes lack. Moments of outsized satire don’t quite mesh with more low-key but effective elements, like a sequence of character-driven scenes set in a scuzzy off-campus bar, or a deftly handled confrontation in which two characters cross paths in a dorm bathroom at an awkward moment.
Perhaps this is somewhat appropriate for a comedy about college students who are still forming their identities, but Dear White People sometimes can’t quite decide if it wants to be a sitcom that riffs on the doings of broad comic types, or the kind of semi-serious streaming comedy that’s grounded in tangible emotions and important, complicated issues.
The show is essentially about the compromises that young people have to make with the world and with each other, despite differences of class, race, gender, skin tone and political worldview. It’s never an elegant process, especially as the pressures of adulthood loom, and this certainly isn’t an easy time to be a politically and socially aware human being.
The show finds ways to illuminate those kinds of thorny challenges without being preachy, and most importantly, it succeeds in its core mission: it is wise and emotionally acute when it comes to depicting the specific ways in which the deck is stacked against African-americans, even those with terrific grade point averages and enviable resumes.
The characters of Dear White People are constantly in transit among multiple worlds with very different outlooks, and the show finds believable and specific ways to depict the fact that, for men and women of colour, at times it can be overwhelming to navigate all the social nuances, academic expectations, political arguments and interpersonal challenges.
Dear White People is always ready to dole out blistering wit and knowing irony, but it also quite compassionately examines the ways in which its characters rise to the daily challenges they face — or sometimes tune them out with drugs, sex, work, meetings, protests or big headphones clamped down on a weary head.
Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, directs one episode that gets at the heart of a black man’s emotional turmoil so well that it’s impossible not to be moved. Two of the quieter students deserve even more screen time next season – hopefully there is one. – Variety