Kenya Barris expects the worst. "I'm always nervous," he tells me. "I always think I'm going to fail."

It's late October in Los Angeles. We're standing on the set of #blackexcellence, the upcoming Netflix comedy series that Barris not only created but also stars in as...Kenya Barris. He zips his navy-and-orange Nike tracksuit jacket over a thick gold chain and gestures around the set. "This," he says, "is probably going to fail."

Possibly he's joking. Possibly he's not. Either way, his resume suggests that he's wrong. Barris is the man behind the ABC sitcom Black-ish and its spin-offs Grown-ish and Mixed-ish and cowriter of the surprise smash movie Girls Trip, which sparked Tiffany Haddish's ascendancy. He has half a dozen major movie screenplays in the works and at least as many television projects. His work is funny and rich enough for Michelle Obama to call Black-ish her favorite show, while Donald Trump rage-tweeted, "How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled 'Blackish'? Can you imagine the furor of a show, 'Whiteish'! Racism at highest level?" Clearly, Barris is doing something, and possibly everything, right. After an unexpected break with ABC—about which both sides have been studiously cordial—Barris signed a massive deal with Netflix, which has launched him into the showrunner stratosphere. Along with Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes, who have also taken up residence at the streaming giant, he's part of a great migration away from network television and will help the company dominate an increasingly mobbed streaming universe.

Not that any of this makes him any less angsty. Barris stands an imposing six-foot-three but slouches slightly, as if he's used to bending down to talk to people. He has a neatly trimmed graying beard and tattoos peeking out from under his sleeves. Bravado and a gentle, almost Eeyore-ish anxiety seem to battle it out beneath his skin. He is a man who would rather brace for calamity and let the universe pleasantly surprise him. Later, he will tell me that his mantra is "We'll see what happens."

Barris has never acted professionally before, on top of which he's making a show about his family (he has six kids) at a time when, off-screen, he is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Rania Edwards-Barris, M.D. All this might be adding to his sense of precariousness. Barris had initially planned to cast an actor in the #blackexcellence lead but found inspiration in one of his heroes, Larry David, who emerged from behind the scenes of Seinfeld to make a mockery of his own life on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Playing himself, says Barris, was also a way to do "something I was really afraid of." And so nearly every morning for five months, he made one of the more surreal commutes in human history, leaving his family's glass house in Encino and stepping into a nearly exact replica across town at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. The #blackexcellence set duplicates Barris's real home down to the gray, L-shaped modular sofa that dominates the living room, the Warhol-ish portraits of hip-hop trailblazers by Knowledge Bennett, the sleek turquoise pool, and the piano festooned with whimsical drawings by Hebru Brantley.

"it's totally bananas!" marvels Rashida Jones, who plays Barris's fictional-ish wife, Joya, on the show, as well as writing and directing on the series, "it's like a Black Mirror episode. I feel like I'm going to get a letter that says, 'Well, you were partaking in a very large psyops experiment! ' The man walked out of his home in the morning, and then back into his home at work. I don't understand how he is okay...but clearly this is how he's chosen to process his life."

OVER THE YEARS, the #blackexcellence hashtag has been used to celebrate everything from high school graduations to job promotions to flashy new suits. On the 2011 track "Murder to Excellence," Jay-Z and Kanye West exulted, "Black excellence, opulence, decadence/Tuxes next to the president." But, of course, the phrase is also loaded with complications in a country like this one. As poet Claudia Rankine once wrote in a New York Times essay about Serena Williams, " There is a belief among some African-Americans that to defeat racism, they have to work harder, be smarter, be better. Only after they give 150 percent will white Americans recognize black excellence for what it is." Even then, she notes, they are subject to the white gaze. Black excellence is "not supposed to swagger, to leap and pump its fist," and the daily pressure of representing blackness in a racist culture can wear a body down.

How to translate a hashtag into an idiosyncratic comedy about the pleasures and pressures of a prosperous African American family? Where Larry David's character on Curb cluelessly fuses entitlement and perpetual grievance, sees himself as the aggrieved party in all situations, Barris's doppelgänger is fully aware of his precarious position as a black man in Hollywood. In a scene at a fancy L.A. restaurant, he imagines how the chic folks see his boisterous family, then feels self-conscious as he and an even more successful white TV producer each wait for their cars afterward. The valet hands Kenya the keys to his ostentatious Acura NSX sports car, while the white dude gets into his dirty Prius and gives him a patronizing thumbs-up.

That moment at the valet was inspired by a real experience with Jeffrey Katzenberg. Barris didn't think that the mogul was being condescending, he says, "but in my mind, all I heard was, 'Hey, look at the black guy spending all his money on a car!' I wanted to take it and burn it up in the middle of fucking Fairfax." But it's a no-win situation, "if I pull up in a shitty car, I'm a black dude in a shitty car. If I pull up in this car," he says, gesturing toward his garage, "I'm just a black dude who spent all this money on a car."

Having driven up Barris's driveway in my white woman's Prius (one desperately in need of a car wash), I tell him I feel sheepish.

"That's the whole point," he says with a chuckle. "You can do that."

BARRIS GREW UP in South Central L.A. with "two completely different belief systems": His mother was a Jehovah's Witness, his father a black Muslim. He started writing when he was a little kid, creating comic books with his best friend and selling them for a quarter along with a Blow Pop. Although his fellow students initially just wanted the lollipops, they soon got hooked on their stories of Robin Hood-esque criminals. Barris had asthma and spent a lot of time at home losing himself in the set of World Book Encyclopedia that his mother, who sold insurance and later real estate, had saved up to buy.

He had good reason to seek escape. His younger brother had died of leukemia, and his father was physically abusive. One night after his parents divorced, Barris's father broke into the house and his mother shot him. Barris was six years old at the time. His father survived, and the family never talked about the incident—until 2016, when he told The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum this story and the magazine's fact-checker insisted on confirming the details with both parents. Barris panicked. "I was like, 'Guys, I've never had this conversation with them.' " He ended up arguing with his mother about how many times she had pulled the trigger. His mom said twice. Barris remembered six.

Stretching out on the gray velvet couch in his living room, Barris grows vehement. "I was six years old, and this is my version of the story I'm telling!" he remembers explaining to his mom. " I had to have a real talk with my therapist. I was like, 'But it's my life too.' " These are quandaries he regularly grapples with as a writer of semi-autobiographical material. "You take aggregates and archetypes of people you know and make them part of your characters. You try to tell the most honest version of your story."

I point out that some of what he does now involves processing and reimagining stories about his family, and yet this primal trauma from his childhood never got discussed. "Never, ever," he says. " I think if I didn't have writing and my job, I would probably be in the hospital. Because I have been through a lot of personal trauma growing up, as I think a lot of kids where I grew up did."

BARRIS SPENT CLOSE to two decades toiling in other people's writers rooms, working on series like Soul Food, The Game, and I Hate My Teenage Daughter. He wrote 18 pilots of his own before he landed one on the air with Blackish. (He did make bank along the way by helping create the reality TV juggernaut America 'sNext Top Model with his friend Tyra Banks.) The fact that his show about a thriving black family was watched by many white folks was crucial to him. "People might get upset at me for saying it, but it was incredibly important to me that my show was on ABC after Modem Family, " he says. "As much as I really, really want my people to watch, I know they're going to tune in. I also want other people to see us... being unapologetically black."

A sharp-witted, politically conscious sitcom in the classic mold of Norman Lear (one of Barris's role models, along with Spike Lee), Black-ish drew laughs from the quandaries of Andre "Dre" Johnson Sr., an advertising executive, and RainbowCinnamon Johnson, or "Bow," an anesthesiologist, trying to raise their black kids in an upper-middle-class white Los Angeles enclave. ("Rainbow" is also the nickname of his real-life wife.) Now in its sixth season, the series has received 15 Emmy nominations and wrangled with police brutality against African Americans, gun control, postpartum depression, the N-word, and intersectional feminism. That has made it unusually polarizing for network prime time.

At ABC, Barris made compromises, as every broadcast showrunner does. Then, after the 2016 presidential election, ABC announced its desire to speak to Trump voters and put in place a plan that centered on a reboot of Roseanne, which became Black-ish's lead-in to the prime-time block. The association with Roseanne Barr and the stream of conspiracy theories she emitted via Twitter was bad enough. (The network agreed, ultimately evicting Barr from her own show.) But in 2018, Black-ish became a front in the very culture war it commented on when Barris butted heads with ABC over an episode called "Please, Baby, Please" that wove current events such as NFL players kneeling in protest and the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville into a bedtime story. Rather than allow the episode to air in a defanged state, Barris agreed to pull it. He then asked to be released from his deal with ABC/Disney and landed a reported $100 million overall deal at Netflix.

"Trump had a huge part in me leaving," says Barris, rubbing his beard pensively. "I have a really twisted personal relationship with him. He tweeted against me. I feel like I'm even getting audited more now!" He laughs, but the smile slides off his face almost instantly. He says that he's gotten hate mail from racist supporters of the president whom he calls cicadas, droning louder and louder since Trump's win. "I sometimes think, Can I say that? Is this going to affect my kids?"

When I ask Barris about his conversations with Disney CEO Bob Iger, his tone grows diplomatic. "You're looking at a situation in which the media world has never seen something like what we're going through right now.... It's as close to a George Orwell book as we've ever been. And the person who decides a lot of how mergers go through is our president. And so I think the idea of the reach and the influence that [Trump] has unfortunately affects a lot of different things." I ask if he's suggesting that Iger chose to placate the president because Disney had a merger with Fox pending. "I don't really know," he says. "I think they also felt I was ready to tell different stories. They did not have to let me go, but they did."

Channing Dungey was ABC's president at the time; she left the network shortly after Barris did to become an executive at Netflix, where she's overseeing some of his drama development projects. Reflecting on the ABC conflict, she says now, "This was very much about him telling the story the way he wanted to tell it and that wasn't going to happen. And so it was a mutual decision to just move on." The first African American woman to serve as a major broadcast TV chief, she looks back on Black-ish's "juneteenth" episode, about the way America honors the exploits of Christopher Columbus but not the day that American slaves were emancipated in Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as one of her proudest moments at the network. After it aired in 2017, Barris says CEO Tim Cook added Juneteenth to the Apple calendar. Barris is now hell-bent on making it a federal holiday.

"Kenya is a very passionate person and he is a very emotional person and he has a big personality, and the combination of those three things can sometimes be a little bit explosive," says Dungey. "Even in those moments where his passionate exuberance causes him to just be like"—she makes the sound of a bomb detonating—"what's great about Kenya is that he is a tremendous collaborator. He loves to engage in the discussion and the debate."

When Netflix bosses Cindy Holland and Ted Sarandos first met with him about a possible deal, Holland recalls that Barris "talked about how for a long time in his career he'd been writing what he thought people wanted to see on television or what he thought audiences might want. After Black-ish and Girls Trip... he really had found his voice." Barris says he's not contractually beholden to Netflix for a particular number of projects. "I could do none!" he says impishly, before acknowledging, "I feel like I owe it to Ted and Cindy, because they bailed me out of a really bad situation."

ON A HEAT-BLASTED fall day, #blackexcellence is filming in the plush white reconstructed interior of a private jet. When I arrive at the soundstage, three boys are perched in front of a bank of television monitors, intently watching three similarly sized actors on the screens. As soon as the take ends, Barris strides over and throws a soft punch at the smallest one's shoulder. The toddler dissolves into delighted giggles, and it dawns on me that these are Barris's real sons, Beau, 12, Kass, 9, and Bronx, 3. They've got the day off school because fires are engulfing the west side of L.A. and have spent the morning watching their dad pretend to fly to Fiji with his fictional family.

The scene involves a lavish trip that Barris's character hopes will wow his kids; instead, they are perfectly blasé. The only person actually impressed by this feat of financial excess is Kenya's assistant. Barris breezes through several improvised takes in which he tells the assistant he's just like family, then tries to shoo him away from using the fancy toilet in the back of the plane. "Captain has a rule that only immediate family can use it," Barris says with a shrug. Afterward, while the child actors take a break, Barris's real son Kass pats him on the shoulder reassuringly. "You said he couldn't use the bathroom. That was funny, Dad!"

In America's Calvinist-descended capitalist society, wealth and worth are inextricably connected. #blackexcellence takes on the clash of class and race in ways that sometimes make the characters look less than admirable. Jones says that whether or not you like or relate to the fictional Barris brood, she is glad they will be "struggling with their materialism" on TV and helping "to fill in the story that there's different ways to be black in this country."

"If I didn't have writing and my job, I would probably be in the hospital. I have  been through a lot of personal trauma."

That, of course, was one of Bill Cosby's motivations for creating The Cosby Show back in the 1980s, though class was rarely remarked upon in the series's wholesome upper-middle-class milieu. Barris, who was partly inspired to apply to historically black Clark Atlanta University by Cosby Show spin-off A Different World, says he was devastated by the revelations about Cosby. " You have a lot of different heroes," he says, meaning white people. "For so many of us, this is the only hero we had. There's so few of us who get to get these opportunities to do these things. The weight and cost of them, it's a lot."

Later, Barris returns to this theme and tells me that he "cried gutturally"

on his recent visit to Tyler Perry s massive production complex in Atlanta. His eyes well up even as he says it. "The idea that this guy, on an old plantation that became a Confederate base, has now built a black-owned studio that is bigger than Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Universal combined—a black man who can go get stories made without interference from outside forces...is beyond powerful."

TALKING TO BARRIS at his home induces an unnerving deja vu when you've just seen him on an identical set wearing an identical tracksuit. In real life, his bedroom is flanked by closets that would make Carrie Bradshaw squeal. Three-year-old Bronx's room is a wonderland of kiddie street style with a black Captain America mural standing guard over his toddler bed, while the older children's spaces are more muted. Barris is currently sharing custody of his six kids and has a room for each. "They have been incredibly resilient, and they seem to be doing better than I am, which is—not a good sign?" he says, laughing. "But they each decorated their rooms, which I've been told it makes them feel like they're a part of the place."

I note the challenge of trying to create a show based on his family life when he's in the middle of a divorce and ask if the parents on #blackexcellence will split too. " I wanted to leave it open," Barris replies, "that maybe they will divorce, maybe they won't. I wanted to make it as fluid as a real relationship and a real family is."

Jones, a veteran of unorthodox comedies like Parks & Recreation and Angie Tribeca, says that playing Joya has been "fun and chaotic and really different than anything I've ever worked on," at least in part because Barris's emotional entanglement in the series keeps things off-kilter. During one scene I watched them shoot, Barris accidentally called Jones's character Bow instead of Joya, Bow (or Rainbow) being his real wife's nickname, as well as that of the character on Black-ish played by Tracee Ellis-Ross. This hall of mirrors he's built is tricky to navigate.

"I do get the sense that Kenya is working out a lot of his marriage stuff in this show," says Jones. She was particularly struck by a scene in which Kenya lashes out at Joya, a lawyer who has become a stay-at-home mom, mocking her for being obsessed with her social media persona and all the trappings that come with money. "My character is trying to find her identity, to figure out how she fits into this weird world that is so different from the life that they thought they were creating together."

As for Barris himself, even just the sheer scale of his work life seems to be therapeutic. He has those movie screenwriting projects in his back pocket: The Witches and Coming to America 2 are scheduled to be released this year, with Uptown Saturday Night and Last Dragon in the works. Barris is also developing a stage musical about Juneteenth with Pharrell Williams for the Public Theater. At Netflix, under his Khalabo Ink Society banner, he's executive-producing projects like the new sketch comedy show Astronomy Club, as well as Kid Cudi's forthcoming animated music series, Entergalactic. He's hoping his Netflix slate can also include stories about slavery and the conversation about reparations. Sitting in his living room, staring at a glimmering painting called Infinite Blackness made of diamond flakes and ebony lacquer, he muses, "I could easily make that my life's mission."

In addition to all this, of course, there's the fact that Barris is not just a creator now, but an actor as well. On the set, he seems surprisingly charismatic and agile. Hale Rothstein, an executive producer on #blackexcellence who's been working with Barris since The Game, admits that he'd been nervous about the decision to have him star. The second day on set, however, they were chatting about basketball while waiting for shooting to begin. "The director yelled 'action' and Kenya just completely switched on," says Rothstein. "All of a sudden he was saying the words and I thought, Oh wow, he's really an actor. This was the right choice."

Barris, of course, retains his right to be anxious and skeptical to the end. "The moment I think, It's going to be great," he says with a shrug, "shit falls apart."