3 out of 5

Developed by: Zakiya Dalila Harris, Rashida Jones

There’s a long-winded talk I’ll inevitably get into down below about horror movies / shows that are heavy on commentary, but it boils down to: they rarely work. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, or keep trying them out; doesn’t mean the messages aren’t important. Just that the priorities in such projects – and perhaps because horror is such a trope-leaning genre, somewhat requiring any project in the genre to kowtow to those tropes – are often a mish-mash, making neither the commentary or the horror very strong. The Other Black Girl, in its mid-section of episodes, actually starts to nail the formula in a thrilling, binge-worthy fashion, but its bookends are its weakest points, making it hard to appreciate its accomplishments. Even given that, if not for losing its own thread in its final episodes, some fantastic performances and strong themes making it above-average for “message” media projects, and shows promise for how we can keep iterating on this to get to some even better examples down the road.

As part of this long-winded talk, let’s also cover that I am not a black girl, or a black person; obviously my opinion is informed by that, directly and indirectly, which is relevant to say in general, but also specifically because… well, some of the surface level talking points in TOBG feel pretty obvious. Nella Rogers’ (Sinclair Daniel) white coworkers want to talk to her, constantly, about being an ally; about how they’re not racist; about touching her hair. The kind of tasks she’s given, and certain assumptions that are made seem further likely tied to her skin color, and we see such behaviors repeated throughout the show, never really presented beyond this eye-roll-this-happens layer. On the one hand, I want to equate this to any kind of social commentary that’s shown to us similarly: I’m not very moved by that. And it’s almost back-patting in a way, that you either nod in approval because you’ve experienced it, or you’re a white guy like me who gets to say: Oh boy, glad I don’t do that, right? At the same time, I’m underlining my non-blackness here because I might have my read on whatever b.s. narrational critical level, but I have to acknowledge that I certainly don’t know what it’s like to face these behaviors day-in and day-out, when they’re endemic and probably down to very minute levels I don’t even register (and that I likely commit), and that we need to speak to this stuff both for exposure and also because it is eye-roll-this-happens. In some ideal future where equality is more equal, maybe such commentary can be more subtle, but I can appreciate why it’s still at this volume currently.

Even given this, I think TOBG plays those cards fairly well. Nella is the only black employee at book publisher Wagner Books, until Hazel (Ashleigh Murray) joins, which is where our show picks up. There’s instant camaraderie there, but it turns inside out on Nella right away: Hazel’s promise to back her up on some matters flips to throwing her directly under a bus of scrutiny. So while the Karen and white person stereotypes are pretty loud in the show, and sometimes we swerve to show those things solely for comedic – i.e. non-plot – purposes, it’s a fair parallel to what Nella starts to experience with Hazel, which opens up a really interesting part of the conversation: the way we, as humans, tear each other down, even when we sincerely claim to be bonding in the same breath. Combine this with the black experience (or that of anyone who’s in a minority of whatever form), and it’s a really fascinating angle that I think we’re only starting to explore in more depth in media. TOBG tweaks this by bumping it into thriller territory, playing with the Single White Female concept (womp womp) of the X From Hell – this time being the coworker from Hell.

Staying in that realm, TOBG is often quite amazing. The constant ups and downs Nella experiences with Hazel – every time the two team-up, only to clash over some backstabbery that turns out to be misunderstanding – are believable, and well-handled. Nella comes across a bit too flip-floppy naive, perhaps, but the scenarios which cause these flip-flops don’t feel forced, and are recognizable across most social scenarios. And the show starts to push this into a weirder direction, as maybe Hazel’s social media only goes back a year; maybe she went by a different name; maybe she has a cadre of friends who seem slavishly dedicated to her… but by keeping the tone of this walking a quirky line and not outrightly dipping into anything too bizarre (helped into comedy territory by good turns from Brittany Adebumola and Bellamy Young), TOBG still remains pretty top-tier stuff, managing its surface-level commentary with its deeper explorations.

But: I’ve skipped over the supernatural stuff. Because there’s some spectre of old editor Kendra Rae Phillips (Cassi Maddox) haunting Wagner – the editor on black author Diana Gordon’s (Garcelle Beauvais) The Burning Heart for Wagner, which was both the publisher’s first claim to fame, and also an inspirational read for Nella. And all the bits where TOBG tries to do ghost jump scares, and spoooky suggestive sightings of these hauntings, and set up some heavy-handed mystery involving Kendra’s disappearance and etc… it just doesn’t work. It never feels like it has a “place” in the story, and is too busy against the workplace dramedy and Nella’s relationship with Hazel. Indeed, when we return to this later, it never quite syncs up with what’d been working for the show, jumping through a lot of subject matter that feels like a rundown of hot topics the writers wanted to touch on (and were maybe better fleshed out in the source novel), but pile up for a resounding stack of loose ends that requires some very clunky clean-up as we go along. And it’s a bummer, because I think the level of weirdness the show ultimately decides on as being “okay” is acceptable within the tone they establish, but the route by which they get there doesn’t sell it. Things get silly; the show doubles down on getting serious to balance that; it does not balance.

I also haven’t touched on the white boyfriend (Hunter Parrish), who seems – initially – shittily unsupportive of Nella, and the show’s varying tone is such that I couldn’t tell how purposeful that was. But just file that under the headline of things being uneven.

Circling back around, The Other Black Girl’s thoughts on race are both casual and complex, which is a satisfying blend; massaging that into a light thriller works well, but going too genre with it – leaning into horror, maybe some sci-fi – makes too many calls to what are feeling like tropes from Get Out (which is even name-dropped), and doesn’t allow the series to nail a consistent vibe, which ends up way confusing the messaging. And so if you can’t nail the messaging, and can’t nail the genre, well, it definitely limits the overall impact.