When it comes to comedy, Tyler Perry isn’t exactly in the business of writing cutting satire. He deals in broad comedy more often than not, and tends to apply that broadness to shows that might not need it. An example of that is his new Netflix sitcom, which has potential but is buried under really broad jokes that don’t land.
Opening Shot: On a local newscast, Antoinette Dunkerson (Terri J. Vaughn), a city counselor in Jackson, Mississippi who is running for lieutenant governor, is being interviewed.
The Gist: The interviewer challenges Antoinette on a few issues, namely her mother Cleo (Jo Marie Payton) passing out flyers at a funeral, and the fact that she’s a single mother. Cleo is so annoyed by the questions her daughter is getting she walks out of the studio, passing right in front of the cameras.
Also at the station is Shamika (Jade Novah), Antoinette’s cousin/campaign manager, and Basil (Dyon Brooks), Shamika’s boyfriend and self-declared driver for Antoinette. Basil proposes that they pass out flyers at the local strip club, trying to get out the vote on election day any way they can. Cleo agrees, but Antoinette thinks that’s absurd. Shamika talks about “code switching” when it comes to appealing to a broad base of constituents, but Cleo keeps calling it “Morse code.”
Antoinette’s ex-husband Cyrus (Philip Fornah) shows up at the house; it’s his day to parent their teenagers, Titus (Tré Boyd) and Lola (Drew Olivia Tillman). Titus is more in the “goody two-shoes” vein, but Lola is in her rebellious phase. In fact, she convinces her dad she’s going to a friend’s house when she actually is sneaking off with a boy to a house party.
When some churchgoers Antoinette is campaigning to see the video of Lola having a good time, Antoinette speeds off with Shamika, Basil and Cleo to go get her. She doesn’t care how this makes her look to the voters; she needs to let her daughter know what’s what. She doesn’t even care that people are videoing her with their phones when she punches Lola’s boyfriend square in the nose. At this point, she thinks she’s lost the election, but she’s in for a surprise.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take a Tyler Perry sitcom like Too Close To Home and marry it to a political comedy like Veep, and you’ve got She The People.
Our Take: Niya Palmer created She The People along with Perry, who wrote and directed the series. Much of the time the show is silly, and it’s only occasionally funny. But there is a family element to the series, along with the struggles that Antoinette is going to have being heard in the mostly-white state house, that fight to poke through all the silliness.
Those elements are what generate the occasional laughs and make the show worth watching, but we just don’t know if they’re going to be given a chance to breathe under Perry’s usual heavy-handed, joke-a-second writing.
We sort of get where Perry was going with the scripts in the first two episodes; Antoinette’s family is chaotic, loud and messy, and the idea that they’re going to be in and around the stodgy Mississippi state house is a source of easy laughs. But Perry often leans too much on the fact that, for instance, Cleo keeps using “Morse code” instead of “code switching” or that Basil is constantly high instead of diving into the characters and their relationships with each other.
We’re also intrigued by what we saw in the second episode, where the governor (Robert Craighead), who is from a different political party than Antoinette, has decided to not only sideline her but pick her staff, too. We know Antoinette isn’t having any of that, but she’s going to struggle to make her own way at the state house. However, what could be mined for some really interesting satire is obscured by the governor’s Foghorn Leghorn accent and his insistence on calling Antoinette “Nettie,” which Cleo observes is “like The Color damn Purple.” In other words, the governor is a racist. But wouldn’t it have been better if the governor was committing microaggressions rather than being a blatant bigot?
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first two episodes.
Parting Shot: Antoinette gives her victory speech after her unexpected win.
Sleeper Star: Jade Novah has the funniest lines as Shamika, but we’re also happy to see Jo Marie Payton as Cleo; she’s best known, of course, for playing Harriette Winslow on Family Matters.
Most Pilot-y Line: Cleo grabs a drink from a teen at the party and asks, “You don’t have herpes, do you?” And the teen actually shrugs.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite some interesting elements and the steadying presence of Vaughn, the sillier elements of Tyler Perry’s She The People overwhelm what could have been a funny story about messy families and racial politics.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.