Tyler Perry’s first television drama The Haves and the Have Nots will premiere Tuesday, May 28th, 9/8c, on OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Originally a stage play by the same name, the series has a huge and diverse ensemble cast: Aaron O’Connell, Angela Robinson, Crystal Fox, Eva Tamargo, Gavin Houston Jaclyn Betham, John Schneider, Peter Parros, Renee Lawless, Tika Sumpter, Tyler Lepley, and Perry.
Check out the preview clip.
The producers of MTV’s The Real World, now on its 28th season, are hosting open casting calls for The Real World 29.
Open calls have already taken place in Tempe, AZ and Boston, MA.
Today – Saturday (April 27) – there will be casting calls in Philadelphia, Charlotte, and Atlanta. Keep reading for more info and future nationwide locations.
Color of Change members want to end the dehumanizing images on the Fox television reality-based show Cops by pushing the show out of primetime. They are asking the television network and advertisers to end support of the show.
Cops has aired for 25 seasons, since 1989 and is marketed as being unbiased. However, members of Color of Change allege that dangerous, controlling stereotypes are a recurring component of the show’s message.
Cops puts a black male face on criminality, presenting a world where Black men and boys are stereotyped and punished.
Without question, the highlight of Sunday night’s Academy Awards show was cute little 9-year old Quvenzhané Wallis flexing her muscles. Shirley Bassey (who sang Goldfinger), Jennifer Hudson (And I Am Telling You), and Adele (Skyfall) also put on a show with their standout vocal performances. Yet as usual, the program ran entirely too long at 3 1/2 hours (or more if you watched the red carpet), with all awards the 40 million viewers really wanted to see happening in a short span of 30 minutes.
The 2013 Oscars can very well be described as 3 1/2 hours you’ll never get back, though most viewers probably didn’t have anything better to watch since their favorite shows were running reruns.
If you thought the Oscars were a yawn or didn’t watch, here are five ways we suggest would make the annual award ceremony better:
Black Ink is an African American-owned and operated tattoo parlor in Harlem, NY. The hour-long docu-series Black Ink Crew follows the lives of Black Ink workers, Ceaser, Dutchess, Alex, Sassy, Puma, and O’ Shit, who go by their street names, of course. (Unless you thought someone’s parents would really name them O’Shit.)
Oxygen’s in-the-works reality TV show All My Babies’ Mamas based on Atlanta-based rapper Shawty Lo has been canceled. The show would have featured Shawty Lo and his 11 children by 10 women (all his babies’ mamas), and his girlfriend, who is the same age as his oldest daughters. Black people across the country critiqued the show before its official release after seeing leaked online footage from the pilot – such as this clip where Shawty Lo struggles to name all his children.
The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Bravo’s most successful Housewives franchise, airs its Season 5 premiere episode a week from today, on Sunday, November 4 – @ 9 PM EST.
Watch a sneak peek of Season 5 below:
The cast of Breaking Bad is noticeably different in Season 5 compared to previous seasons. The last traces of Mexico have evaporated. In exchange, we’ve gone two connecting flights over to sample chicken nuggets in Germany and sell meth in the Czech Republic. The show has lost its color. Literally its people of color except for Officer Steve Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada) were wiped out with the defeat of the Gustavo Fring Dynasty.
Now, I’m not one of those people who thinks HBO’s Girls needs people of color. The writer’s vision is just that. But in the case of Breaking Bad, the show built four seasons of its success on the backs of the Mexican influence on the drug trade. And now that the show is heightening in critical acclaim, audience viewership, and actors’ paychecks, the Latino cast is finito.
“Where’s the black Liz Lemon?” Issa Rae asked herself as she looked for someone she could relate to on television. Mainstream audiences and even some within black culture have forgotten the lessons of The Cosby Show.
Audiences have shown themselves more comfortable with the sassy rude sister at the office or the sassy black friend at school. The non-threatening, supportive black friend at the bar or the pistol packing grandma who will knock some sense into your head are far more recognizable than a black Liz Lemon from 30 Rock. Smart black chicks with wry wit? Say what now?
Unfortunately, if black comics try something different, like Donald Glover in Mystery Team (2009), then they’re accused of “trying to be white.”
A petition on Change.org started in April 2012 to boycott VH1′s Basketball Wives and Evelyn Lozada’s spinoff show Ev and Ocho has reached over 32,000 signatures on route to its total goal of 35,000.
Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University Professor of finance and ‘The People’s Scholar’, gave the show a thorough thrashing in the commentary video below:
Once again… we’re talkin’ bout good and bad hair.
Along with Spike Lee’s ‘Straight and Nappy’ musical piece in School Daze (1988) and Chris Rock’s Good Hair documentary (2009), African Americans’ hair issues lingered for decades in the media. With each generation, comes new epiphanies of “how I never knew what my real hair looked like” and “how I discovered my own hair could be beautiful.” It’s a wonder why we don’t keep our young black girls far away from the television. At least, so that we don’t have to have this same conversation about black hair and beauty as each generation of women comes of age.
Clearly, the African American woman’s psyche and self-esteem is deeply affected by too many media images of black women with long weaves of straight hair. It also stems from parents living in white neighborhoods, putting children in all white schools, and having to explain to those children why their unique appearance compared to the rest of the kids they grow up with is beautiful and special despite being the outlier.
“There’s a lot of profit to be made from that pain” said Melissa Harris-Perry, Tulane University political science professor, author, and columnist for The Nation magazine.
On her MSNBC show, she sat down with actress Nicole Ari Parker of Broadway’s Streetcar Named Desire, University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler, cultural critic Joan Morgan, and CurlyNikki.com founder Nikki Walton to discuss the economics and politics of black hair.
Keke Palmer
Rags, the Nickelodeon Original movie starring Keke Palmer and Max Schneider premieres this Monday May 28 @ 8pm EST.
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