[Though it’s not an outright race-focused series, the new Apple
TV+ drama is clearly in the vein of shows like ‘Them’ and
‘Lovecraft Country’ ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THE CHANGELING’ AND THE STATE OF BLACK PRESTIGE TV  
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Justin Charity
September 8, 2023
The Ringer
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_ Though it’s not an outright race-focused series, the new Apple
TV+ drama is clearly in the vein of shows like ‘Them’ and
‘Lovecraft Country’ _

, Apple TV+/Getty Images/Ringer illustration

 

This summer, CNN aired a five-part documentary series, _See It Loud:
The History of Black Television_, covering a comprehensive variety of
formats: comedies and dramas, but also reality, talk, and game shows.
The third episode, “Drama Deconstructed,”
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and executives speaking to the limited viability of Black TV dramas in
the 20th century as opposed to sitcoms such as _The Cosby Show_.
There was _Roots_
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of course, but there weren’t many other formidable dramas with Black
directors, Black writers, or largely Black casts until _The Wire_ in
the 2000s and the emergence of Shondaland with _Scandal_ and _How
to Get Away With Murder_ in the early 2010s. Longtime television
producer Garth Ancier, recounting conversations with network
executives in earlier decades, describes fears of a Black cast
depressing advertising rates in prime time. Even in the present day,
former ABC president Channing Dungey—the first Black president of a
major network—struggled to order _Scandal_ to series due to some
internal indifference to its pilot.

The main networks aren’t the whole story, though. Black dramas for
Black audiences (for lack of a better way of describing the commercial
positioning of, say, _Queen Sugar_) are still going strong on OWN
and BET
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But in the past decade they’ve been complemented by the success of
Shondaland on ABC and Netflix, _Empire_ on Fox, _Power_ on
Starz, _Insecure_ on HBO, and _Atlanta_ on FX, to name a few. In
that time, the mainstream spread of Black TV dramas (or dramedies) has
led to, inevitably, a subset of these shows: the Black prestige drama.
It’s already hard enough to specify what exactly qualifies a TV
series as prestigious in this sense, but these series are in large
part distinguished by a Black literary bent—influenced by Jordan
Peele, yes, but also by James Baldwin and Octavia Butler. (FX turned
Butler’s time-travel novel, _Kindred_, into a weakly
received miniseries
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last year.) _Atlanta_ is the greatest TV series of its
generation, in general
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and so it also happens to be the Black prestige drama to beat. But
it’s also a strange case: It was billed as comedy and—with the
exception of its divisive third season—was hardly as earnest as many
of the other shows that I have in mind. Really, I’m thinking of
something a bit more like _The Changeling_.

Apple TV+ premiered _The Changeling_ on Friday, with the first three
episodes immediately available to stream and the remaining five
episodes releasing weekly through October. Directed by Melina
Matsoukas (_Queen & Slim_) and adapted from the dark fantasy novel of
the same title by Victor LaValle, _The Changeling_ is a horror story
about modern parenthood. Lakeith Stanfield and Clark Backo star as
Apollo and Emmy, a young couple in New York City whose marriage takes
a frightful turn once Emmy goes missing following a mysterious tragedy
involving their newborn son, Brian. The narrator in the novel
describes Brian’s birth as “a fairy tale moment, the old kind,
when such stories were meant for adults, not kids,” and this about
summarizes the tone of the adaptation—a series in which
Stanfield’s Apollo often alternates between grounded dialogue and
fairy-tale exclamations. It’s a peculiar show—but also one clearly
crafted in this new style of Black prestige.

The Black prestige drama has recently, outside of _Atlanta_, had a
rough record of consternation and cancellations. The best of these
dramas, I’d say, was Barry Jenkins’s miniseries _The Underground
Railroad_, an adaptation of the novel by Colson Whitehead about a
couple of runaway enslaved people embarking on a surreal tour of both
time and space in an exploration of Black American history. _The
Underground Railroad_ was met with some critical exasperation, as
historical dramas about slavery tend to be these days
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it ultimately outperformed such complaints with a strong cast, sharp
writing, and subversive direction
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The series was the promise of a Black historical prestige drama at its
best.

The most frustrating series, in contrast, at least in my viewing
experience, was _Them_: an overwrought race-horror anthology about
housing discrimination, defined in large part by its excessive
self-consciousness of its creative debts to Peele (down to _Them_, as
a title, mirroring _Us_). Here I should also stress that the Black
prestige TV drama doesn’t exist in a vacuum; _Them_ was made in
the same millennial progressive style and racial reckoning mindset as
recent movies such as _Antebellum_
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couple of years ago, I wrote somewhat harshly
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the worst impulses of these projects, seemingly influenced by Paul
Haggis’s neurotic race-war drama _Crash_. The height of this
absurdity in fictionalized race relations was an episode
of _Lovecraft Country_ dedicated to Emmett Till that culminated with
a white woman role-playing his death, as an empathetic exercise. This
was also a sign of a general tendency of Black prestige dramas,
historical or otherwise, to trivialize themselves, somewhat
paradoxically, with immense self-righteousness and activist fervor.

_The Changeling_ isn’t that, at least. It’s not singularly about
race, though its characters are distinctly Black. It isn’t preachy.
It isn’t Twitter-brained. It also isn’t, I’m sorry to say, the
Black prestige breakthrough that I’d hoped would have materialized
by now. It’s certainly a lot less didactic and obnoxious
than _Them_, but, seemingly as a sort of overcorrection, _The
Changeling_ is often too cutesy and mellow and ponderous for its own
good. The first couple of episodes are, frankly, a slog: both an hour
long and together forming a sort of overextended prologue. Not until
the third episode does _The Changeling_ really sink its hooks and
launch into its main action: Apollo’s exploration of New York in his
desperate search for Emmy. This pacing is true to the novel, for
whatever it’s worth, and the three-episode premiere at least gives
viewers who stick with it a chance to see the series pick up steam at
launch (rather than waiting three weeks for the show to “get
good”). But asking a viewer to stick with those first couple of
hours is asking a lot.

Both the immediate fate and the lasting legacy of the Black prestige
drama seem uncertain. HBO canceled _Lovecraft Country_ after a
single season. Amazon had previously planned to release a second
season of _Them_ in 2023, but the ongoing strikes in Hollywood seem
to have stalled its arrival. _The Changeling_ comes across in some
ways as an uncomfortable holdover from a slightly earlier phase of
prestige television, once the very term “prestige” had stopped
suggesting a certain excellence and only a certain sensibility,
certain gestures, and a certain gloss. I’ve come away from the show
wondering whether Black prestige inevitably suffers the same
problems—bloat, pretension—as prestige television generally; and,
if so, whether it’s time for me to rewatch _Atlanta_ or, better
yet, _Scandal_.

* black television
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* black representation
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* the changeling
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* parenthood
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