In the current climate, for both media and politics, we're oversaturated. We're at peak TV, peak reboots, peak outrage, and peak fatigue towards having to stay active, alert, and woke.
Under the circumstances, it's tough work for a television show to not feel like excess; why here, and why now? Spike Lee may not have planned for his updated She's Gotta Have It – a black and white movie from the '80s that's now a vivacious and colorful Netflix show – to release into that landscape, but the series thrives on adversity. Born into a perfect storm of sociopolitical context, She's Gotta Have It is more than its circumstances or the sum of its parts; it's just good.
Based on the 1986 film of the same title, She's Gotta Have It is the story of Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise), a polyamorous pansexual artist trying to make her way in Brooklyn. When she's not working on her art (and she does the work), she's passing time with hyperactive Mars (Anthony Ramos), arrogant Greer (Cleo Anthony), or pretentious Jamie (Lyriq Bent). As Mars, Ramos is disarmingly endearing, stepping into the role Lee himself originated – but no man can draw you in the way the magnetic Opal (Ilfenesh Hadera) does, although she shows up in fewer episodes.
The show follows a mostly traditional format but is less concerned with plot and chronology than characters and their interaction. From time to time it breaks format, including characters talking into the camera and interludes with album covers for the show's music (a welcome gift, honestly).
As it sheds the safety blanket of style, She's Gotta Have It breaks through as an extremely compelling character narrative. It's the same general formula as Girls, Insecure, and Broad City – a millennial women living her life (that too in Brooklyn) – but the difference here is Nola. This wild, wondrous, fully-formed sexual and artistic character is the reason the show and many like it should exist.
In fact, it feels contrived, even lazy, to compare any of the aforementioned shows about female millennials, but the diversity of stories coming out of this demographic speaks to its complexity. Girls isn't Broad City, which isn't Insecure, which isn't She's Gotta Have It. Refreshingly, there's no pretension about Nola, especially with respect to her artistry. She isn't obnoxiously self-involved or obsessed with sounding smarter than she is.
Since it is, after all, a Spike Lee joint, She's Gotta Have It is sharply political, but never too on the nose – and not as overtly as Lee's usual fare. Perhaps Nola's corner of Fort Greene is experiencing that political fatigue and focusing more on day-to-day hustle than social justice. It would be hard to blame them. The first episode shows Nola, stubbornly independent, walking home and getting grabbed by a man whose catcalls she tries to ignore. The experience leads her to cover her neighborhood with charged feminist street art. A powerful opening montage shows the characters dealing with Trump's election, and in another episode one of Nola's lovers has to discuss the N word with his mixed-race son.
The show only gets lazy for a few minutes; an inexplicably drawn-out scene where Nola is stuck in a cab with a faceless driver squawking inappropriate comments at her in a South Asian accent more offensive than Apu's. There's no punch line to this extremely un-funny joke, and it's shockingly out of place in a show otherwise doing wonders for the representation of people of color.
There's a scene in which Papo (Elvis Nolasco), the "mayor of Fort Greene" who wheels his possessions around the neighborhood, gets the cops called on him outside Nola's building. She and Mars are outside and get caught up with him, the police, and the white neighbor who called them. As the argument escalates, it has flashes of the pivotal scene with Raheem in Do the Right Thing – a moment that jumps three decades to remain relevant for this show and this era.
Over the course of the season, Nola's paramours grow insecure about each other's existence (and by that we mean the men; Opal is so beautifully dignified that it feels rude to count her along with the males in Nola's life.) You find yourself caring less about the de facto premise of the show – Nola's love life – to the point where it feels like you never cared at all. Wise is too charismatic from the start for character to not eclipse plot in this show.
If everyone on this show, from affluent, bourgeois Jamie to Queens-or-die Mars, has one thing in common, and that's that they are satellites in Nola's orbit. By the end of the season, within a few episodes, or even during the pilot, you'll find yourself falling for Nola Darling – for her strength, her smarts, her smile, or the truly mesmerizing combination of all three. This is a woman who knows what she brings to the party and is not ashamed to flaunt that -- long may she reign.
She's Gotta Have It is now streaming on Netflix.
Topics Netflix
