All the Brown Girls on TV

Sam Bailey lit a cigarette, lost in what Fatimah Asghar later called “stunned silence.” The women do most things together these days—ever since Bailey, 28, directed and Asghar, 27, wrote a new web series—Brown Girls, set in Chicago, where they live. But that January afternoon, they shared a bench outside Sony Studios in Los Angeles. For days, they’d felt a thrill new to those born black (Bailey) or Muslim (Asghar): affirmation. Hollywood executives loved the world the two 20-somethings made, one where no one is white and everyone is “brown”—Spanish-speaking, black, South Asian, queer. Off-white. The same only in that they are different. Emails from HBO, Comedy Central, and TBS started the day Brown Girls went online. Visions of strange new viewers loomed: accountants in Ohio, yoga-addicted housewives, maybe even politicians in Washington.

They hadn’t meant to stray past their tribe—the friends Asghar kept in mind as she wrote or the strangers who could have been her friends, or characters. Like the girls of color on Remezcla, the Latin site that drove a lot of their views and search traffic from the day their trailer beamed from it like a bat signal. Soon screenings materialized, in London, Spain, the Brooklyn Museum of Art—where brown girls in Hatecopy shirts partied with queer black boys in one of the largest temples to African art in the world. For those primed to get it, the series was “hard to miss,” said Aymar Jean Christian, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, which in part funds the series via the media incubator Open TV (Beta). Founded by Christian, OpenTV (Beta) gave birth to the show. “I’ve been studying web series for eight years,” he told me, “and I strain to think of a web series that got as much press.” Twitter, a measure of what people care about right this second, registered the interest, too. On premiere day, #browngirlstv was high enough to be seen by anyone glancing at the site’s trending hashtags.

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Miles from the gloom of Chicago, Asghar and Bailey were confused. Because the country is confused. Americans are preparing for different eventualities. The president is promising a border wall, even as the nation’s biggest networks pour cash into Telemundo and Univision. This year and last, Atlanta and Insecure and Moonlight and Moana moved the spotlight away from white characters and writers, and eyes and hearts and wallets moved, too. On Rotten Tomatoes, another good scale of popular interest, those four productions together total just shy of a perfect score, at 396 percent. The nation’s heartbeat holds the quick pulses of those brown girls and black boys, and executives tried to match fare to that pace. Others, famously, could not keep up. Kendall Jenner walked into the wrong role—a would-be protester who breaks ranks to bond with cops over a Pepsi. The ad failed; hashtags flew the wrong way. Soda wound up looking more dated than ever before.