Living Single: Check-Check-Check It Out

[TMC]

https://25yearslatersite.com/2020/12...-check-it-out/

by Cat Smith

It’s an absolute crime to me that Living Single doesn’t get more love than it does. You walk into Box Lunch, or one of those stores that capitalizes on TV nerd merchandise (I love those stores; they get SO much of my money at holidays and birthdays), and you find t-shirts, mugs, and hats bearing the logos of Friends and Seinfeld. Maybe Living Single merchandise exists somewhere (probably on Redbubble, or one of those fan-run, indie artist sites). But in a corporate store that sells officially licensed merchandise? I’ve never ever seen it. And that’s a crying shame, because the show was so very very good.

Living Single was the brainchild of Yvette Lee Bowser, and ran on Fox from 1993–1998. It starred Queen Latifah, Kim Coles, Kim Fields, and a stunning all-Black cast. I’m told it’s a similar premise to Friends. Never having seen Friends (or having any interest in doing so), I’ll have to take that on faith. Bunch of friends, sharing adventures and misadventures in New York City. Eye candy for days (I had a crush on most of the cast, especially TC Carson and Erika Alexander). I don’t know that there was anything particularly groundbreaking about the stories that it told—but maybe that’s what was so good about it. They were telling stories about these people, living these lives, because they are part of the human race and they are beautiful and interesting and why wouldn’t everyone want to watch a show about them?

I’m not super large with traditional comedies. With the exception of The Golden Girls, or anything from the brain of His Royal Highness Norman Lear (All In The Family, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, so many others), your basic half-hour comedy that everyone else in the world seems to love so much is typically lost on me. Living Single wasn’t a show that went out of its way to make heavy social commentary through a comedic medium, like those other shows I mentioned. Which is fine, because it’s not like it was hardcore fluff either (nothing against hardcore fluff—lots of people love Happy Days, I’m just not one of them). And I don’t really fall into the show’s demographic…aside from the fact that I’m a human being, and these are human stories.

I really don’t want to make this about me, but just so you get where I’m coming from as I write this—I’m not Black, and I never lived with a bunch of girl friends. In fact, at the time, I wasn’t particularly good at having girl friends. I was one of those twentysomethings whose friends were mostly guys. The magic of female friendships hadn’t truly appeared in my life yet (I had the odd girl friend, but I didn’t have a group of “girls” whose company outranked men). My social experience with women growing up hadn’t been the best either—I was horribly bullied in school as a kid, and the girls were the worst. They could be bitchy and vicious and knew exactly what to say to make you cry. This was how the white girls at my school were to me.

Strangely enough, the Black girls were, more often than not, kind. I have no way of knowing if they actually liked me, or what their motivations really were—but they weren’t horrible to me, whereas the girls who looked like me were “mean girls” long before the eponymous movie. So maybe that was part of why Living Single appealed to me. I got to look in the window at this group of women, and I could tell myself that they probably wouldn’t have rejected me either. This was one of my early examples of female camaraderie, before I had a group of “girls” of my own.

One of the things I noticed about Living Single was that, though they did everything they could to build up the Black community in every way, they didn’t need to vilify white people to do it. George Jefferson and his tendency to call everyone a honky would not have fit in with this crowd. And on Living Single, everyone liked each other! Again, I can’t speak to Friends with any real authority, but even fans of the show tell me that much of the humour comes from snark, and the “friends” taking digs at each other (like I said, I haven’t seen Friends myself, but this is a comparison that is always loudly made to me whenever I mention the dynamic to people I know who watch both shows). On Living Single, even when there was feuding (or Max and Kyle’s on and off guttersniping at each other, which was actually extended foreplay), there was always a feeling of warmth in the room. Playful, sure. They’d tease each other. But it was good-natured. It never felt bitchy.

The big challenge for me on how to write an article on this show that I love was how to properly cover it from all sides. I can give my personal take, which I’ve done—but I also don’t want to make it all about me, so I think I’m done doing that. I can wave pom-poms in general about what a great and well-made piece of television it was, which I have been doing, and will keep doing. But there’s no way I can speak for the Black community, for which the show’s relevance was huge and unquestionable. So I enlisted the help of a couple of friends (both actresses, both Black, both gorgeous), who were kind enough to share their perspectives with me.