The … The episode is set with the Johnsons sitting in their living room watching CNN coverage of a case involving police brutality against an unarmed teenager in Los Angeles and waiting for a grand jury indictment.

While many of these recent episodes have been sobering and serious, there is no precedent for Adult Swim’s Black Dynamite, which put together an hour-long musical special called The Wizard of Watts featuring an all-star cast (Eryka Badu, Tyler the Creator, JB Smoove) and a plot that is – well, it sure is something.

Sitcoms have a long, proud legacy of the “very special episode”. On Wednesday, Black-ish is going to enter into an elite club of very special episodes: shows that have taken on the topic of police brutality. The latest episode, which puts the family firmly in the age of #BlackLivesMatter, is not the first show to tackle black Americans’ relationships with police, Last modified on Fri 12 Jun 2020 12.13 BST. Luckily his dad is there to give the racist cops a piece of his mind.
A later episode features a joke that presages the “hands up, don’t shoot” chant of recent Black Lives Matter protest.

Dre's monologue on Obama's inauguration spoke the truth about what every single black person was feeling at that moment #Blackish #BHM, Dre's monologue really reached down into my spirit and yanked out some tears. "It's scary, but I think we should go down there.". Obama ran on hope. Just remember when Maude got an abortion in the 70s, when Diff’rent Strokes brought attention to child sexual abuse in the 80s, or Ellen DeGeneres finally coming out in the 90s. She admits to being confused and lost: "Everyone I love has been talking about it all night, and I don't know what the answer is. On Wednesday, Black-ish is going to enter into an elite club of very special episodes: shows that have taken on the topic of police brutality. Sandra Bland. Thank you #Blackish for this episode. That is the real world, ‘Bow. While that dilemma is definitely the crux of the episode, the family also embraces different facets of the issue at large. Freddie Gray. You know the ones, when a comedy takes on a social issue of the day and tries to change people’s opinions between the squawking of the laugh track. Simpson trial. When the citizens riot after a young man is beaten by police, Black Dynamite gets hit in the head with a brick and has a hallucination right out of the Wiz, complete with police officers that are literal pigs and a wizard played by Magic Johnson. This was the rare drama that tried to give the police perspective to the story. Tell me you weren’t terrified when you saw that. Ok, now I'm in tears #blackish, Zoey (Yara Shahidi) who seems checked out from the issues for most of the episode eventually makes a statement I think many can relate to, and not just the teenage generation. The cast of Black-ish appear in an episode about a highly publicized court case involving alleged police brutality and a black teenager. In the wake of the Rodney King trial, several sitcoms took on police brutality.
While Black-ish patriarch Dre (Anthony Anderson) wants to teach his children to be afraid of the police, his wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross) wants her children to respect their authority and have trust that the judicial process works. The family's discussion touches on everything from Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray, to the Ta-Nahesi Coates book "Between the World and Me" (which Andre Jr. is reading), to the O.J. The episode titled, “Hope” centers around the Johnson family trying to decide how to explain to their tween twins, Jack and Diane, what police brutality is.

In October, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit ripped a story from the headlines for A Nation Divided which again focused on an unarmed black teen shot by police, but this was complicated by Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) being an officer herself and not knowing which side to take. Last March in an episode called The Lawn Chair, Scandal dealt with a Ferguson-related storyline where a father was grappling with the death of his son who was shot by police and Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) was called in to help prevent a riot, only to sympathise more with the father than the police force she was working for. While Rainbow (who goes by the nickname 'Bow), would rather shield the twins and let them continue to “hold on to their innocence and be kids a little while longer,” Dre says,“They are not just children, they are black children and they need to know the world they are living in.”. One of the most poignant moments of the episode, however, is when Dre gives a monologue about the Obama inauguration after Bow says she wants her children to still have hope: "Oh, so you wanna talk about hope, ‘Bow? Several other episodes would deal with the police’s treatment of black citizens, including an installment where Will (Will Smith) and Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro) get mistaken for car thieves. While Black-ish is the most recent show to tackle this difficult subject, it is certainly not the first. The Wednesday night episode of the ABC show “Black-ish” addressed the issue of police brutality with questions, a little humor, and some hope. It definitely hit home with many viewers. On this episode, the Johnson clan is sitting around waiting to hear whether a police officer is going to be indicted for killing an unarmed black man – a case that sadly has several antecedents in recent history, most notably Michael Brown, whose death sparked the unrest in Ferguson in 2014. Diff’rent Strokes brought attention to child sexual abuse in the 80s, Ellen DeGeneres finally coming out in the 90s, Scandal dealt with a Ferguson-related storyline. Sometimes it takes humour to put these things into perspective or, in the case of Black Dynamite, make them so completely absurd that the fact that police behaviour like this continues in America seems ludicrous. This one is no different, giving voice not only to Dre and Rainbow, but also their children and the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book Between the World and Me figures prominently in the debate. In 1992, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air featured an episode called Will Gets Committed where the family goes to clean up after the Los Angeles riots. And we felt like maybe, just maybe, we got out of that bad place and made it to a good place," he started off.