Join Jada at the ‘Table’
Pinkett Smith talks the talk on streaming show.
Jada Pinkett Smith’s “Red Table Talk” has become appointment viewing for fans over the past three months.
The Tuesday morning Facebook Watch show has been engaging – and controversial – from the debut episode in May (on Mother’s Day, no less) featuring Smith sitting down with her husband Will’s first wife, Sheree Fletcher.
The weekly episodes, which air on the social network’s video-on-demand service, run between 20 and 25 minutes, and have featured guests including Tiffany Haddish, Gabrielle Union and August Alsina. Driven by the Smith women, it’s a show that redefines the way celebrities tell their stories onscreen. And viewers are coming to join Smith around the table on Facebook Watch, a platform that has struggled to produce breakout programming since its launch in August 2017, with the show recently adding 13 more episodes. Twenty-seven million people have watched the show’s debut episode, and last week’s episode, which features Alsina and Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, drove 21 million views.
That’s a big win for the streaming service, which saw big numbers early with its first round of shows before steep declines. “Ball in the Family,” which follows the basketball family lead by patriarch LaVar, premiered with viewers in the tens of millions but has flattened out to 3-5 million in its third season, and now has 1.5 million follows to 2.9 million for “Red Table Talk” – numbers that still dwarf the majority of Facebook Watch shows.
Beyond the numbers, what makes “Red Table Talk” worthwhile watching is the way the show transcends its status as yet another celebrity talk show. Through a combination of insightful guests, no-holds-barred topics and Smith’s magnetic hosting presence, we’re not just granted access to the un- conventional family at the show’s center – we’re drawn closer in ways that don’t just feel like celebrity PR.
In a Hollywood climate where every move by a famous person is assumed – often correctly – to be in service of his or her brand and bank account, Smith still plays the celebrity game, inviting her big-name friends on the show and gifting them big-ticket items like a Valentino bag for Haddish and a Tiffany bracelet for Union.
Yet, despite the occasional celebrity trappings, her and daughter Willow’s truth-telling looks much different than, say, Kris Jenner and her immaculately media-trained clan.
The stories can be salacious, sure – Union joining Smith to quash the actresses’ decades-long beef, Willow talking about walking in on her parents having sex and her history with self-harm, and Smith opening up about her hair loss and sex-addiction past. Unlike the web of other celebrity TV shows featuring manufactured family drama and few moments of actual clarity, though, the revealing conversations on “Red Table Talk” have authentic, difficult lessons at their center.
Smith’s sex-addiction real talk came during an episode in which her mother detailed her 20-year addiction to heroin. In her episode with Fletcher, they hashed out the difficulties of co-parenting and talked about the pain and mistakes that followed Jada and Will’s coupling. Even more revealing was the episode in which Smith discussed her son Jaden’s “gender-bending” style, revealing that Will initially had issues with Jaden appearing in a Louis Vuitton women’s campaign, telling her, “My son is not supposed be in Louis Vuitton wearing skirts.”
Similarly, many of the show’s most insightful moments have featured Smith reckoning with the difficulties her kids have faced in growing up with fame. Willow admitted she engaged in self-harm following her success at age 9 after the release of “Whip My Hair,” shocking her mother, who didn’t know that Willow, in her own words, had “totally lost her sanity.” On an episode with Jaden, Smith recalled her son asking to move out when he was 15, calling it “one of the most heartbreaking moments of my life.” For viewers who have only seen the public-facing side of the Smith kids’ kooky antics, their “Red Table Talk” episodes reveal the private pain that comes with childhood and teen celebrity, and tellingly, they don’t absolve Will and Jada for their roles in that pain.
These aren’t conversations that happen often in the airbrushed world of celebrity TV. And while the Smiths haven’t excavated all the skeletons from their closet just yet – there’s the issue of Jada Smith’s past interactions with Scientology, which would certainly make for an illuminating episode – the inevitable headlines that emerge from each “Red Table Talk,” that frame the episode’s discussions as tabloid fodder, miss the point of the show. Celebrity gossip is cheap, and the hard-won wisdom of “Red Table Talk” is worth much more.