![]() It’s a promising moment that falls flat, as the show plays it merely as the new girl getting bullied. Newton (co-founder of the Black Panthers) is. Later in the episode, Jade encounters young Black Lives Matter activists at a party and is embarrassed when they call her out for not knowing who Huey P. The show acknowledges her light skin-which it attributes to Jade taking after Cocoa’s mother-within the first five minutes of the pilot. She is quick to challenge the conservative ideals of her family members, and Jackson plays the role with vibrance and smarts. If any character in this series has potential to be compelling, it’s Jade. Though Family Reunion’s episode airs five years later, it feels like it was written 30 years earlier. In 2014, Blackish tackled the issue of spanking with much more thought. One of the most glaring examples of Family Reunion ’s apolitical nature comes when M’Dear threatens to spank Jade (Talia Jackson), the show’s “cool teenager.” The series essentially argues that corporal punishment has value and plays the halfhearted opposition to spanking for laughs. The result is a show that’s more akin to inferior Netflix multi-cams such as The Ranch and The Good Cop, which settle for easy jokes over social commentary. The writers clearly wanted to capitalize on the success of shows like Blackish without the controversy, to profit off Black culture without meaningfully engaging with it. When Cocoa tells her in-laws that she and Moz are “new-school parents,” Moz’s mother M’Dear (Loretta Devine) retorts that “the jails are full of new-school children.” Family Reunion presents the signifiers of Southern Black culture, from cornbread to church hats, but it rarely says anything politically or socially daring. The series quickly unloads the standard tropes of generational conflict. ![]() As they try to figure out what their new lives will look like, they stay with Moz’s parents, setting the stage for an intergenerational sitcom full of heartwarming life lessons. ![]() Moz (Anthony Alabi) is a professional football player who decides it’s time to hang up the cleats and enjoy a quiet rural life with his wife Cocoa (sitcom veteran Tia Mowry-Hardrict) and their children in the town where he grew up. In fact, the glut of Netflix sitcoms that shy away from politics and promote a more conservative vision of family makes you wonder if the tide is reversing.įamily Reunion follows the McKellans, a Black family that moves from Seattle to a small Georgia town. Offerings like Family Reunion, however, show that isn’t always the case. It seemed like television was experiencing a shift to more socially conscious sitcoms that mixed mass appeal and critical thought. The show, along with ABC sitcoms like Fresh Off the Boat and Blackish, marked an era of broadly appealing sitcoms that pushed the cultural and political envelope, highlighting issues important to Latinx, Asian, and Black communities. The internet erupted in March when Netflix canceled One Day at a Time despite the passionate fandom it amassed over three critically acclaimed seasons. " When the McKellan family moves from Seattle to small-town Georgia, life down South - and traditional grandparents - challenge their big-city ways.The new sitcom about a Black family that moves from Seattle to Georgia aims for ‘Blackish’ but winds up closer to ‘Fuller House.’
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