Has "Black-ish" officially jumped the shark?

[TMC]

Between Bow quitting her job, DeVante being forgotten half the time (the fact that they added a fifth Johnson kid was already a tale-tell sign that this show was bound to run its course), Jack being more stupid that Junior, and now this melodramatic four part story arc about Dre and Bow splitting up.

Even the promos might as well have dropped all pretenses and labeled them "very special episodes".





When did Black-ish morph into This Is Us!? And naturally, they had to further sell the concept of this being a "serious storyline" with the muted palate and camera filters. This show has always dealt with real life issues, but usually its only for an episode, or they at least throw some jokes in here and there, or it feels like good commentary.

To make matters worse, Dre has become such an unsympathetic character inside the house, that in order to try and put the "struggle" on equal footing they had to knock down Bow's character. So ultimately, they're both joyless and undeserving of any empathy from the viewers. Plus, Dre has always been a childish over the top guy why would all of a sudden this be a big thing.

[AB]

I thought Black-ish was considered a comedy not a drama. I don't know why they are changing the direction of the show.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by AB

I thought Black-ish was considered a comedy not a drama. I don't know why they are changing the direction of the show.

When The Laughter Fades, And Comedies Take A Turn For The Dramatic

black-ish, on the other hand, has both a longer track record of successfully going dramatic and two leads in Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross very clearly at ease at it. (Anderson’s career has been almost evenly split between comedy and drama.) So the current arc about Dre and Bow’s marriage coming unglued should be right up everyone’s alley. But while these recent episodes have been more successful than “Show Me Going,” the idea and the execution never quite fit.

It’s not just that the show has gone almost entirely dramatic these past few episodes, though I can understand the complaints of viewers who feel like this isn’t the experience they signed up for, at least not for weeks on end. It’s that this fissure in the Johnson marriage simultaneously feels like it came out of nowhere, and like something that the show has been joking about for too long to view as a serious problem after four years.

Dre Johnson is a good man whom the show usually sides with on the basic thrusts of its arguments, but he’s also always been portrayed as an insufferable manchild who’s forever slighting or outright insulting his patient and loving wife, without even realizing he’s doing it. So on paper, the idea that Dre and Bow might drift apart — as black-ish creator Kenya Barris and his own wife (Bow’s namesake) did during the show’s first season — doesn’t seem that outlandish. But until a few weeks ago, black-ish shrugged off all his behavior as ridiculousness on par with whatever insane thing Charlie just said, and even Bow’s annoyance with his behavior was written and played for laughs. It’s an incredibly jarring tonal shift for this stuff to suddenly have them on the verge of splitting up, particularly when this week’s episode, “Blue Valentime,” was peppered with new scenes of the spouses fighting in the past — where all the arguments and offenses are far more mild than the things Dre has said and done to her in prior seasons.

It’s something of a no-win scenario for Barris and the other writers. If they pull an M. Night Shyamalan and reveal that Bow was feeling genuinely hurt the entire time, and just swallowing it for the sake of getting through the day and being there for the kids, then the show as it originally existed simply can’t anymore, even assuming the two reconcile by the time this arc is done. It would prevent the show from tapping into one of its most frequent and richest veins of humor, or else it would reveal this current arc as a fraud. And coming up with brand-new (and less awful) sources of conflict between the two of them flies in the face of what the audience has been watching for four seasons. Moment to moment, these episodes have been fairly strong because Anderson and Ross are up to the material, but it doesn’t really fit with what black-ish was before and will likely create problems whenever the arc is done, unless the plan is for it to evolve into a very different show.

[Donthe2nd]

Well I for one don't like it, and I'm going to stop watching if they don't lighten up soon. "Dramedy" never works for me - I want to either laugh or cry, I can't do both at once.