Stream It Or Skip It: ‘#blackAF’ On Netflix, Where Kenya Barris Plays Himself Being Exactly As The Title Describes

Kenya Barris‘ shows have been among our favorites for some time, even before he created black-ish six years ago. In his first Netflix series, #blackAF, Barris explores just how Black he wants to be while he’s being, as one of his daughters says, “a racial profiteer.” It’s a very meta series. Does it work?

#BLACKAF: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A teenage girl sits by two monitors and says, “I’m making this documentary about my family for my application to NYU film school. But I didn’t ask my dad for any of this.” We pan across to see the massive amount of film equipment plus the cost of each piece. “A seven-man camera crew? Really? They show The Revenant with less than this. I could have shot all this on my Galaxy.”

The Gist: The girl is 17-year-old Drea (Iman Benson), whose description says, “Not an asshole.” Her dad is Kenya Barris (playing himself), whom Drea thinks “hates his money and wants to spend as much of it as possible before he dies.”

Barris is pretty wealthy, having produced shows like black-ish, grown-ish and mixed-ish for ABC and now starting a very lucrative deal with Netflix (all true — this is the first show under his Netflix deal). But he also fights hard to make sure everyone around him, including his family, knows he’s “black as fuck.” For instance, when he runs into Steven Levitan outside the Four Seasons (where he and his family have Sunday brunch every week), he takes pains to show the Modern Family EP his hybrid Acura NSX that he calls “NS Flexin'” (Levitan was driving a Prius).

His wife Joya (Rashida Jones) pretends that she can’t stand the car and how Kenya continuously relates everything back to slavery (the titles of every episode refer to slavery, by the way), but Drea has footage of JoJo screaming at Kenya that he should buy the “NS Flexin'” “If you do not buy this shit, I swear I will go fuck someone with this exact same car. Do not test me!”

Kenya and JoJo have six kids, all of whom roll their eyes at their dad relating everything to the struggle: We’ve met Drea; older sister Chloe (Genneya Walton) is going to USC film school, what Kenya calls “The Harvard of the West”, and just dyed her hair purple; 12-year-old Izzy (Scarlet Spencer) thinks of the leverage she can get over her parents and siblings; 10-year-old Pops (Justin Claiborne) is the sensitive “moist towelette” of the family; 8-year-old Kam (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) has “the face of an angel,” according to Drea, but is “the biggest liar in the world”; 3-year-old Brooklyn (Richard Gardenhire Jr.) is “the only likable Barris”, but doesn’t hesitate to say “I shit my diaper, Mommy.” Let’s just say that Kenya and Jo, who still regrets giving up her full-time career as an attorney to care for the family, have their hands full.

After the incident at the the Four Seasons, Kenya wonders if he’s doing too much flexing for white people; he’s okay with his $2000 sweatsuits, but maybe he needs to get rid of his chain. He even feels his assistant Danny (Gil Ozeri) is giving him the “white gaze,” despite the fact that Kenya barely pays him enough to feed and clothe himself. But after a dinner with one of Jo’s law school frenemies and her husband reveals that they both respond to even the slightest “white gaze” when it comes to their family. So maybe flexing isn’t all that bad.

Our Take: The idea behind #blackAF is that Barris already presented a version of him and his family in black-ish, where Anthony Anderson’s Dre Johnson, the stand-in for Barris, struggles to have his family hold on to their Black identity. In this new show, Barris plays a fictional version of himself, and the show is much more sure of the Barris family’s identity, even if Kenya’s constant battles about his blackness are played up for laughs here even more than they are on black-ish. Either way, #blackAF is a funny, albeit a bit messy, show because Barris isn’t afraid of doing an enhancement of the formula that brought him this success six years ago.

We don’t know for sure, but the format of the show feels very Curb-like, where the scenes are outlined, but the dialogue mostly improvised. Our guess is that Barris, not the world’s strongest actor, writes it that way so he can just be himself. Having Jones, whose years on Parks and Recreation made her pretty good at providing “alts” to what was on the page, by his side helps him up his game in that regard. The mockumentary interview segments, which Drea conducts on a complex two-camera setup, are more scripted, but are a good way to get everyone’s real thoughts on just how crazy the Barris family can get.

By centering the miockumentary around Drea’s perspective, it shows that Barris has raised mostly good kids, because she really doesn’t love the trappings of wealth and excess her father displays. She says, for instance, that her house “is a really nice house for Black people, which somehow kinda makes it less nice.” It’s an honest sentiment that Barris uses to skewer his own persona, which he takes every chance he can get to do.

One thing we wonder is if the series will get too inside when it comes to the entertainment biz. We see Levitan in that one scene, and in another, he and Jo run into Scooter Braun after Jo’s frenemy leaves in a huff. We see fellow filmmakers like Ava DuVernay, Issa Rae, Lena Waithe, Will Packer, Tyler Perry and more in other episodes. TV nerds like us may know who all of those people are, but the average viewer might not. So we understand why Barris wants to show how entrenched in the industry he is, but that might go over a lot of viewers’ heads.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: In an interview with Drea, Kenya just comes right out with it: “I fuckin’ hate white people.” Drea just stares into the camera and goes, “OK…”.

Sleeper Star: Hearing little Richard Gardenhire Jr., who plays Brooklyn, say, “I shit my diaper, Mommy” might have been the funniest moment in the episode. Not that we advocate that toddlers should curse, but when they do it’s invariably hilarious.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some of the throwaway lines are funny but make us shrug, like when Danny spits out, “There are places in Belgium I can’t walk around,” when Kenya tells him that, despite being Jewish, “When shit goes down… you’re white.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. It may seem like black-ish with f-bombs, but #blackAF is still a funny, meta introduction to what Barris will be able to do with the creative freedoms Netflix brings.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream #blackAF On Netflix