Tyler Perry has the platform, but can he PLEASE make better content?
Tyler Perry, someone’s gotta say it
Let’s get the good stuff out the way. Tyler Perry broke into uncharted waters with his 100% owned studio, a venture that will continue to give black actors platforms to earn a living and tell stories. As he would say, instead of scrambling for a seat at the table, he went and built his own. But unfortunately, at that proverbial table sits a legally blind casting director, a scatterbrained editor, the worlds most generic screenwriter and Tyler at the head of it all, deeming it art.
We held our collective tongues as Tyler reinforced stereotype after stereotype in the God awful Madea trilogy. In his films, a world exists where educated black men are always revealed to be blood thirsty woman abusers who can only be brought to justice by Tyler himself, in black grandma drag. We grimaced and cringed as his other films lazily replaced competent location scouts with infomercial quality green screens. But when he kicked things off with his two BET shows “The Oval” and “Sistas”, we had hope that maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t be like the content that he’s vomited out for the past decade. We. Were. Wrong.
https://twitter.com/cypressmoss/status/1187196364394057729?s=12
We toiled with the idea of writing this article, because we would never attack another black mans art without rule or reason. But Tyler’s studio comes with great responsibility to the culture, and that STARTS with telling quality stories. We’re saying that to say that...welp: The Oval makes Empire look like Breaking Bad with how lazily it’s executed. The show kicks things off in typical Tyler fashion, as a curiously scruffy dude playing the president assaults his First Lady just seconds before the inauguration. If that’s how he wants to spark it off, cool. But the fight itself is staged as though he bursted into a third grade classroom and blindly selected one of those poor children to be his fight coordinator.
https://twitter.com/dannikaa_/status/1187179352200482817?s=12
Then there’s the scene where another guy so adamantly refuses a blow job from the presidents daughter that he shoves her down, knocking her out cold. Upon waking up, she randomly accuses him of rape. And don’t get us started about the lack of actual research on politics and White House decorum that goes into this show. We’d literally be here all day.
https://twitter.com/potaylortotstoo/status/1187139655415848960?s=20
Then we have his other show, Sistas. We love the premise of a show led by 4 black women, but again, its more of the same from Tyler. Generic one dimensional characters, recycled character archetypes and Jamaica Avenue wigs.
https://twitter.com/punk_affair/status/1187181544668049408?s=20
So again, while we salute Tyler for establishing his own studio, we pose this question: Is employing skilled, creative black writers to flesh out your ideas too much to ask? There is nooo lack of talent out there, bruh. And while much of black Hollywood remains silent for fear of being reprimanded, we don’t do fear here at Gritty Vibes. Our site is simply a voice for the people and if you let Black Twitter tell it, we’ve had a freakin nuff.
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