“Please, baby, please,” says President Trump’s rise to power as a leader who, like Dre (Anthony Anderson) puts it to his baby son, “de s afraid of Daddy.”
Photo: ABC
De Black-ish episode “Please, Baby, Please,” a broadcast of the grievances of Trump era surrounding Dre’s attempt to calm his grandson, should be aired in February of 2018. That never happened because of what was then characterized as “creative differences” between ABC and Black-ish creator Kenya Barris, who co-wrote the season four episode with Peter Saji. A few months after the dustup, Barris signed a multimillion-dollar contract to develop future new series for Netflix.
Yesterday, more than two years after all that ruckus, “Please, Baby, Please” finally became available on Hulu, as confirmed by a social media announcement from Barris. “We were one year after the election and came to the end of a year that had left us, like many Americans, with the state of our country and scared about its future,” Barris wrote in the post. “Those feelings streamed down the page, 22 minutes of television where I was, and still am, incredibly proud.
“Please, Baby, Please” – which now appears on Hulu at the end of the lineup of season four episodes – really plays out as a creative endeavor that emerged from a flood of strong emotions. While it is more scattershot and heavier than that Black-ishThe other notable post-2016 political episodes, “Hope” and “Juneteenth,” review some of them even more deeply than Barris might have thought in early 2018. What’s most obvious is that it’s even more ridiculous now that ABC is not airing it back then.
Set during a thunderstorm, when baby DeVante wakes up and Dre (Anthony Anderson) is instructed to put his youngest son back to sleep, the episode reveals him as a series of issue-oriented, cross-generation conversations between various members of the Johnson family who also have trouble sleeping. First after reading a children’s book by Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee Please, dear, please, told via a guest voice-over by Spike Lee, Dre’s DeVante tells his own story about “the Shady King”, an American ruler who split his kingdom in two. Then Dre and his father, Pops (Laurence Fishburne) discuss the evolution of American white supremacy and Black pride. Junior (Marcus Scribner), concerned about weighing in on a school debate over whether children can kneel during the national anthem, talks to Dre about Colin Kaepernick and the importance of peaceful protest. And finally, the twins Jack (Miles Brown) and Diane (Marsai Martin) confess to their father that they are afraid of the storm, but not because they are afraid of thunder; the extreme weather is reminiscent of their concerns about climate change. The structure of the episode, in which Dre gets perspective from his elders and from younger generations, is set to lead to an (overly optimistic) conclusion.
Reports back in 2018 cited the dialogue about Kaepernick as a primary reason why ABC pulled the episode, perhaps understandably considering the extra strained conversation about Kaepernick at the moment. De Black-ish episode was aired on the heels of an NFL season in which President Trump indirectly referred to Kaepernick as a ‘son of a bitch’ because he knelt down during the national anthem to protest rational injustice and police brutality, comments that encouraged even more players to take a knee. In that 2017-2018 season, Vice President Mike Pence also made a presentation of running a 49ers game when players kneel during the national anthem.
The president of ABC Entertainment Group, Channing Dungey, later told reporters that the problems of not being focused on the conversation that Dre and Junior had about Kaepernick, and having seen the episode, that makes sense. There is nothing problematic in that dialogue. Dre expresses a pro-kneeling stance, while Junior says he is not sure he agrees with refusing to support during the national anthem, but ultimately supports the rights of players, such as the students at his school, in that way to protest. If anything, the segment of the episode related to Kaepernick goes too far to show both sides of the issue, a fact that comes in louder and clearer in 2020, when professional athletes in other sports follow following the public outcry over the death of George Floyd kneeling and playing with messages from Black Lives Matter about her fields, courts, and jerseys. Despite all the backward steps this country seems to have taken in the past two years, this episode serves as a reminder that we have also taken a few steps forward since then, at least symbolically.
I suspect the story of the Shady King, aka Trump, caused more consternation for ABC executives at the time, who were then excited about their semi-Trump-focused reboot of Roseanne. (If you forgot, that turned out not to be so great.) The story, brought to life with a mix of animation and real news clips, tells Trump’s rise to power as a leader who, as Dre puts it , ‘bang the s – from father. ‘Footage of Trump, Bane’s words parroted in The Dark Knight Rises, is featured. These are cartoons of desperate workers forced to build a wall and toilet paper thrown out of a castle, as Dre describes the Shady King as someone who “gets out of touch” with what his subjects need are.
In his attempt to explain how we won with a Shady King, Dre flies back to 2008, when a figure he calls Prince Barry was chosen, which “was a huge deal for this kingdom, to it was the same kingdom that used to be people like Prince Barry, how do I put this on? Really cheap gardeners. ”Images of Barack Obama appear on the screen during this segment, followed by photos of Black slaves.
Barris and Saji, through Dre, argue that things changed during Obama’s presidency, but too much for the comfort of some Americans. “I mean, do we really need jets for remote control, or to give the Medal of Freedom to a dancing talk show host during the day?” Dre asks, as a picture of Ellen DeGeneres receiving the Obama Medal flies on the screen. “Probably not.” In 2018, when broadcast networks were still full of offensive conservative viewers and DeGeneres’ reputation as the most beautiful icon for gay people was still completely intact, this all probably led to some ABC executives in dire straits.
But nothing about this story was wrong then, and its accuracy is now even clearer. That’s what this episode is about Black-ish, which, if it came out when it was intended, would be a time capsule of where we spent a year as a nation in Trump’s presidency, more than a few bookends speaking then and now. .
There are moments in “Please, Baby, Please” that, apparently unintentionally, strike sharp chords in the summer of 2020. The shadow cast on Ellen, which at the time was perhaps perceived as homophobic, seems more fair saw the recent reports on the toxic culture on DeGeneres’ show, which apparently many people in Hollywood already knew about. Dre has to pause his Shady King story when his wife, Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross), tells him that little DeVante is too young to know how horrible the world has become. “It’s like the only place you can find a little peace is at home,” she says. This is by no means meant to be a low line, but in the midst of a pandemic that seems destined to continue to keep us going for the most part in 2021, it’s now playing out like a cruel little dark comedy. While the Shady King story falls, the Run DMC song, “Hard Times,” plays on the soundtrack. It was a natural choice two years ago, but listening to the lyrics now – “Hard times spread just like the flu / Beware of homeboy, don’t let it catch you” – makes you wonder if Barris is legally psychic.
Then there is the end, which now strikes in all sorts of different ways. While Dre crawls into bed with his wife and children – well, minus Zoey, who, like all children, has grown up and gets her own spinoff – he finds comfort in the tradition of American resilience. “That’s the thing with our country,” he says via voice-over. ‘We’ve been through a lot, but when it’s dark we help each other out. No matter how bad the storm is, we’ll be here for each other. “Listening to this in the midst of a congressional debate on coronavirus relief, a battle over the opening of schools, and continuing with irresponsible selfishness on the part of those who still refuse to wear masks, sounds like a naive conclusion. It used to be naive, we know it now.
But that’s also the heartbeat of watching “Please, Baby, Please.” It captures a sense of dread that was deep and an America that for many in 2018 looked like a disaster. But it’s also a snapshot of a relatively “better” time, when we can not imagine how much less things would get. That draws the conclusion of this episode, which expresses the kind of optimism we expect from family-oriented broadcast network sitcoms to register when it sounds like an alarm. If we look back in 2020 on a politically panicked half-hour television as a sign of lost innocence, imagine what 2020 might look like in 2022.
