In this op-ed, writer Mia Uzzell criticizes the cancellation of Issa Rae's Max series Rap Sh!t and stresses the danger of dismissing underrepresented stories, specifically those of young Black women.
From its outset, Rap Sh!t cemented its place in the colorful onscreen tableau of Miami: Instagram stories of drop-top Ferraris filled with shuddering screams of Mayaimiiiiiii, mega-sized Coronaritas, South Beach shenanigans underscored by Trick Daddy’s “Take It To Da House.” But Rap Sh!t set itself apart by utilizing the city as more than just a backdrop for Spring Break — it illustrated the austere realities of the hard-working, unforgiving hustle of South Florida, anchored by the layered stories of young Black women.
The scripted series, inspired by the real-life story of City Girls duo Caresha Brownlee and Jatavia Johnson, was brought to life by creator Issa Rae and showrunner Syreeta Singleton and premiered in the dead of summer 2022. Rap Sh!t was a salve to the aches of Black womanhood, dosed out through the hilarity of virtual homegirls; it was immersive, innovative, and unflinching… and still deemed inconsequential.
Rap Sh!t is one of the latest Black television titles to be axed by streaming services, following 2023's wave of cancellation of Black content — South Side, The Wonder Years, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Grand Crew, and Everything’s Trash were all abruptly cancelled. On January 18, 2024, Max (formerly HBO Max) announced it would not be renewing Rap Sh!t after only two seasons. The cancellation came a little more than a year after Issa Rae’s beloved reality series Sweet Life: Los Angeles, which featured a friend group of ambitious twenty-somethings mounting the steps of the entrepreneurial world, faced the same fate at the hands of the same streamer.
These successive blows land like a harbinger of regression to Black television creators with the audacity to visually decipher the nuances of Black existence. And to their audiences, there is only a shattered mirror left behind for those who finally caught a glimpse of their own reflection. In an interview with Net-a-Porter published 11 days after Rap Sh!t was cancelled, Issa Rae spoke out against the concerning backslides of the entertainment landscape's diversity, onscreen and off.
“You’re seeing so many Black shows get cancelled, you’re seeing so many executives — especially on the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] side – get canned. You’re seeing very clearly now that our stories are less of a priority," said Rae. Left in the wake of Rap Sh!t's demise are Black Florida girls with big feelings, big personalities, and even bigger dreams, eager to see themselves as the priority.
Rap Sh!t didn’t use Florida as a prop. Brash tongues and “don’t take no sh*t” personas, the overzealous, finagling world of finesse, and the insatiable hunger for liberation across cultures is a palpable and, more importantly, accurate portrayal of the grit and grind of the state. The lingual proclivities of “jit,” “green,” and “grits”; sheen-coated Chevy Caprice donks with 26-inch wheels; golden-fried chicken and fish from Snappers; and 808 beats blasting through every speaker were all characters in Shawna (played by Aida Osman) and Mia's (KaMillion) story.
Shawna and Mia begin as two high school best friends fortuitously reuniting to start a rap duo. Shawna is a Spelman College dropout with hopes for a socially conscious rap career while, ironically, scamming credit cards as a hotel concierge. Mia is a retired stripper at Miami's real-life, infamous club The Office, juggling co-parenting, her OnlyFans account, and her tens of thousands of social media followers. How could a naive scammer slash walking antithesis to the sexual prowess infused in p*ssy rap possibly meld with a Caresha-coded pro-tricking influencer from Carol City? It could only happen in Florida.
Within the first sixty seconds of the pilot episode, Rap Sh!t's viewers were thrust into the hyperconnected POVs of FaceTime, Instagram, and text messaging. Mia teaches her followers how to attract the most financially generous men while her love life offline can’t heal her own emotional fissures, and Shawna critiques those who trade off cultural mores for social capital while compromising her own artistic integrity for career advancement. For Shawna, Mia, and the audience, social media acts as the tragic link between our aspirational, architected personas and the grief of reality.
Rap Sh!t's key use of social media — in plot, character development, and superimposed onscreen — became their innovative signature and a narrative strategy. There was no other TV show on-air that exposed the role social media plays in the damning internal battle of who Black millennials and Gen Z-ers are and who we wish to be.
Chastity (Jonica Booth) is perhaps the best example of this friction. A lesbian party promoter and longtime friend of Mia's, Chastity is the amateur manager who holds the group down, doing everything she can to break into the orbit of industry movers and shakers. When a season 2 attempt to network and make fast cash alongside a prominent rapper fails, Chastity takes matters into her own hands by robbing him and returning to the streets. As Mia admits throughout the series, “The game is the game.” It gnaws at our foundation and we must choose a buttress to keep us from falling into the underbelly of our own respective hustles. Love? Acceptance and respect? Morals? With the increasing weight of marginalization as Black women, we often release our hope in one pillar to wrap ourselves around another — to survive.
Across the wild slopes of their personal lives and ascent in the music industry, both the characters and the audience pursued the answer to the question: What part of ourselves must we sacrifice in our frenzied journey to the top? Rap Sh!t spoke directly to a generation of Black people who are tired of jumping hurdles of opportunity and yearning to overcome the challenges of their environment, itching for more; Shawna, Mia, and Chastity represented those determined to disrupt or entirely forego traditional avenues to success if it meant securing a better life or their ideal version of self.
The season two finale left the audience with the kind of cliffhangers that create insomniacs, unanswered questions clearly planted with the show's continuation in mind. On March 4, 2024, Jonica Booth lamented over the series' cancellation with a post on X. “RapSh*t s3 was about to be crazy… Damn,” she wrote. The replies were flooded with heartbroken and disappointed fans wishing out loud for the show to be picked up by another network.
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After news of the show's cancellation broke, Issa Rae told Variety that she was “proud” of the cast and crew and expressed "much love to the fans that tuned in weekly to root for our girls.” Showrunner Syreeta Singleton added to Rae's sentiment: “We created something fun, raw, and original and we did it our way!”
Rae seems to be thinking more and more about what it means to “do it our way,” telling Net-a-Porter that Black storytellers being shut out of Hollywood post-2020 has “made me take more steps to try to be independent down the line if I have to" — a model already being adopted by her fellow multi-hyphenate Keke Palmer with the creation of KeyTV.
As a Black girl from Florida, I saw a part of myself in Rap Sh!t that I had never seen onscreen — the part of myself that television saw as too laborious, too extra to depict and the world deemed too unimportant to recognize. In the aftermath of its cancellation, I can't help but wonder if I’ll ever catch a glimpse of myself and the culture I love on TV again.