There has hardly been a more fascinating moment on television this summer than Jada Pinkett Smith sitting at her famous Red Table with her husband, Will Smith, to talk about their marriage like never before. In the 25 years they’ve been married, Pinkett Smith, in particular, has cultivated a brand born of her willingness to talk about anything and everything in public, except, for the most part, the details of her marriage, a constant source of. But when rapper August Alsina recently alluded to a relationship between him and Pinkett Smith, and with her husband’s blessing no less, he opened the door for those rumors to come back to the forefront.
The talk was so fierce, apparently, that Pinkett Smith decided that he could not ignore it, or flatly deny it, as his representatives initially did, this time. “There is some healing that must happen,” she tweeted on July 2, “so I’m going to the Red Table.” The statement garnered more than 100,000 retweets, and the resulting episode racked up 2 million views on Facebook Watch at the end of its first hour online. Therefore, the Pinkett-Smiths addressing the latest round of public marriage rumors are now not only surprising; He is extremely intelligent.
Recorded last week, the July 10 episode of “Red Table Talk” brought the Pinkett-Smiths to the table to eliminate the consequences. The speculation escalated in a way that had to feel somewhat familiar to the couple. One of the most consistent threads of Hollywood gossip in recent decades has been about the mechanics of their marriage, and many wonder out loud whether or not they are in an open relationship, or even more cynically, in a more business association. than a romantic one. Smith and Pinkett Smith have rarely addressed any of this (and certainly not as half-depth as they did today).
As with any lingering rumor, her silence helped keep the waters relatively calm and added to the mystique of it all. However, in 2018 Pinkett Smith launched “Red Table Talk”, a talk show about how to hold awkward conversations in the interest of growing up and, as he often says urgently, “cure.” Her husband makes enough appearances on the show to keep him firmly within the confines of a family business, but they rarely delved into the details of their marriage, until now.
The new episode is 12 minutes long, heavily edited, in contrast to the series’ usual 40-minute discussions. The couple sit across from each other at the table, each wearing black pants and shirts in the same shade of denim blue, visually presenting a unified front from the start. Pinkett Smith explains the situation from her perspective, saying that she and Smith reached a point where they completely separated before she “got tangled” with Alsina. Smith nods, occasionally interfering with a “yes” or joking (?) Insisting that he thought he would never speak to her again. (Her alternately breezy, cut-off reactions are already tearing up Twitter as a meme, in the tradition of the Internet scandal.) They agree that the experience brought them closer; Pinkett Smith emphasizes that she is grateful for her trip, and that “there are many couples who go through those periods … and they have to separate and think that everything is over.” They laugh; they sigh; all five collide with their “deepest understanding of love … forged in fire.”
It’s a perfect distillation of what “Red Table Talk” and the Pinkett-Smiths do best: dissect a controversial topic with meticulous consideration, an eye for relating it to the audience, and intrigue enough for people to guess what’s really going on. . through their heads.
The Pinkett-Smiths are two of the biggest stars in the world. And yet, unlike a show like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the goal of “Red Table Talk” is not to attract the public to the soap opera of their lives. At the Red Table, the Pinkett-Smiths address timely issues and boil down to their most essential parts in an effort to be like you. Pinkett Smith invites guests to discuss everything from gun control to relationship issues in a safe space. She interviews her husband about his approach to parenting, and her Generation Z children about their own views and passions. Pinkett-Smith’s family business has many weapons, but it is based on a commitment to “transparency” that is nevertheless carefully selected. Paradoxically, they have created a collective # mark on authenticity.
Bringing your own relationship to the Table in as stark terms as they did may not have been something Pinkett Smith or Smith wanted to do before. And yet, that initial real-time offer of honesty, coupled with a controversial issue that they could control, is exactly in line with the way they’ve been running their professional lives in recent years. Setting the record in this way is, in a unique way for the Pinkett-Smiths, both the middle and the end.
