NY TIMES: With ‘Being Mary Jane,’ Mara Brock Akil Specializes in Portraits of Black Women
This is a repost from New York Times' article entitled "With ‘Being Mary Jane,’ Mara Brock Akil Specializes in Portraits of Black Women" written by Jada F. Smith.
A group of young women crowded around Mara Brock Akil as she spoke in the sun-soaked penthouse of a Manhattan hotel on a September afternoon. As Ms. Akil, a TV writer and producer, answered questions after having shown several preview clips of the new season of her BET series, “Being Mary Jane,” members of the group — mostly fans invited to a promotional screening — gave strong head nods and “Mmms” at her answers. One pulled out paper to jot down notes.
Later, they circled around her. One woman asked for advice on books to read that would improve her writing. Another wanted to know what products she used to achieve those big, fluffy curls.
Ms. Akil, 45, has been eliciting such enthusiastic reactions from women — especially black women — for more than a decade. Her breakthrough show, “Girlfriends,” about a group of women in their late 20s and early 30s who seemed to be in a perpetual state of getting their lives together, ran from 2000 to 2008. “Being Mary Jane,” which explores what it’s like to have reached the late 30s and early 40s and still not quite have it all together, is the No. 1 series on BET and has its third-season premiere on Tuesday.
Though she’s had multiple successes, they have been limited to smaller outlets like UPN and BET. But at the end of this third season, Ms. Akil will step down as the show runner of “Being Mary Jane” to begin a multiyear deal with Warner Bros. TV, where the plan is to develop a show for a major network.
“Moving on means creating an opportunity to grow,” Ms. Akil said of her decision to leave the show in someone else’s hands. “That’s part of the business side of what I do. And the Warner Bros. deal is going to allow for me to keep painting pictures in more places.”
The pictures Ms. Akil paints depict fabulous, upwardly mobile women having the same kinds of conversations that Carrie Bradshaw would have with her “Sex and the City” friends — if any of them were black. They spend hundreds on shoes and discuss their sex lives; they talk about colorism among black people and wonder if a certain dress is appropriate for the office; they ask if it’s racist that they have to work on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday and grapple with how much responsibility they should shoulder for their ailing families and communities.
At a time when show runners like Shonda Rhimes and larger-than-life characters like Olivia Pope on “Scandal” and Cookie Lyon on “Empire” loom over the TV landscape, Ms. Akil takes a different tack. Though “Mary Jane” is an hourlong drama, it doesn’t veer into soap opera territory like either of those shows.
Ms. Akil praises the work of both Ms. Rhimes and Lee Daniels, the creator of “Empire,” and tries to deliver portrayals of black women that are subtle and complex, stories that hit a little closer to home.
“She has an authentic way of writing black voices,” said Stephen Hill, BET’s president for programming. “It sounds simple, but there just aren’t many African-American characters written on TV by African-American writers.”
The title character of “Being Mary Jane,” played by Gabrielle Union, is a successful news anchor who quotes great thinkers at the end of her broadcasts. At home, she cries at diaper commercials and downs shots of tequila to blur her sadness over remaining unmarried. The character was conceived around the same time that a misconstrued statistic began to circulate, about how 70.5 percent of black women had never been married. (That number actually referred to women between the ages of 25 and 29.) Ms. Akil wanted to explore the human side of that number and wanted each episode to follow Mary Jane through a day in her life.
Viewers see her scroll through Twitter while using the restroom, smoothing down the edges of her hair with a warm curling iron, planning a second baby shower for a niece barely out of her teens and conflicted over whether to expose a fellow black journalist who fudged some facts in a story but whose articles led to widespread prison reform.
“I’ve seen characters written like this in the past, but they never made it on screen,” Ms. Union said. The ones that do are either “much more watered down,” she said, or “made saccharine for mass consumption.”
Ms. Akil began her writing career in 1994 as an assistant on the one-season Fox series “South Central.” The impact of shows like “Living Single,” “Martin,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “The Jamie Foxx Show” and “Moesha” — all thriving on network television in the 1990s — was not lost on her. Ms. Akil would go on to write for “The Jamie Foxx Show” and “Moesha” before creating “Girlfriends,” which ran first on the now-defunct UPN network and then on CW. In 2006, she created “The Game,” a “Girlfriends” spinoff that ran for three seasons on CW, was canceled, and then was resurrected on BET, where it ran for six seasons.
She sought to create characters who were unapologetically black (“black on purpose,” as she likes to say) while working under the producer Ralph Farquhar on “Moesha,” who said in an interview that he had to jump through hoops to get the network to allow the title character, played by a teenage Brandy Norwood, to wear her hair in braids.
It was a seemingly small thing that would go on to show a generation of black girls that they didn’t have to straighten their hair to be cute, or to be respected, or to be depicted on network TV.
Ms. Akil hadn’t planned to pitch an hourlong drama about “a single black female” (a phrase that was the original title for “Being Mary Jane”) to a network, because she couldn’t fathom that one would be interested. “It may not appear so today, but back then it was very hard to sell a black woman as the central character,” she said.
“Back then” was 2010.
It’s easy to forget, after the 2014-15 network TV season, when three shows starring black protagonists were hits, but before “Scandal” debuted in 2012, there been a dearth of major network TV dramas with a black female lead since the early ’70s.
Even though “Mary Jane” has been successful and a boon for BET, which used its partnership with Ms. Akil and her husband, Salim Akil, to begin its move toward scripted programming, the network doesn’t have the same promotional muscle or reach as a major network. That may be why Ms. Akil’s name is rarely mentioned alongside her contemporaries.
Her new deal with Warner Bros. TV will begin in May 2016, when she and her husband (a frequent director on the show) will create series through their Akil Productions, which the studio will then distribute to one of the many channels it works with. Even though she will be staying on as executive consultant, Ms. Akil still has some loose ends to tie up with BET, including, she said, trying to find a female show runner to build on the foundation she has already established. She doesn’t know who that will be, but she is excited about the opportunity to help her get her voice out there.
“I would love to find that next fresh voice, a female voice to empower and keep ‘Being Mary Jane’ going,” she said.
She noted that after three seasons, she’ll leave having touched on issues like suicide, egg freezing, the business of medical marijuana and the prison industrial complex.
“I’ve been able to say a lot,” she said.
Ms. Akil doesn’t yet have an image in her mind for the characters she’ll be developing at Warner Bros., “but you know what I’m relying on?” she asked at the hotel penthouse once all the women were gone. “That as soon as I lock in, I’ll find my next muse. Or muses. I hope it’s more than one.”
