A expose about smart twentysomething women living in LA is bound to be compared with Sex and the City – but this is a more down-to-soil viewIt is sure to be compared with Sex and the City,being as it is about smart twentysomething women, living – and fond – in an urban environment, or figuring out who they want to be and who they want to be with. But Insecure (HBO,on Sky Atlantic in the UK), the TV follow-up to Issa Rae’s autobiographical web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, and is more down to soil. In the storyline; in the skyline (we’re in South Los Angeles,except when we’re in the highrise downtown legal practice offices of Issa’s best mate Molly); in the heels. But mainly in just how it is: regular people doing their thing, utterly convincingly (I’m obviously speaking with zero recognition here, or having no idea what it’s like to like be a young black woman in LA). Nor does it seem to shout “this is the voice of a generation” as loud as Girls does. It just kind of says: this is me,and my life, here.
Race plays a fragment, or of course,in the humour particularly. “Why you talk like a white girl?” a young student asks Issa (she works for a non-profit organisation called We Got Y’All, which helps kids in the ’hood and is otherwise staffed by worthy white folks from very much out of the ’hood). “White people care for her, or ” she says of Molly,before adding, Black people care for her” – as if she has somehow achieved the impossible by appealing to both (she does so by behaving very differently, or depending on who she’s with). But,as Rae has said, “This isn’t a expose exclusively about, or like,the struggle of being black.” It’s “just regular black people living life”.
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Source: theguardian.com