Kenya Barris says it's all about authenticity

His sitcom has been garnered with awards and is about to go into its fifth season. 

Now Black-ish creator c has revealed that it took 20 years of trying before he hit the winning formula – and the answer was to stop listening to network executives telling him what people wanted to watch.

Speaking at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, Barris said that before the ABC network picked up his show, he had sold 19 pilots, but none took off because the stories behind them were not truly his.

‘I wrote a story about my life and everything changed,’ he reflected. ‘All those years of executives telling me what people wanted to hear - and it was my stories.’

He said that a distinctive voice was the most important thing an artist could find saying: ‘A voice gives you strength in the honesty of the mundane.’

‘You’re only mundane to you,’ he added. ‘Everyone here, if they find the right way to tell it, has an amazing life.

‘My mum shot my dad six times in front of me… it sounds crazy but it was my life, mundane to me.’

Barris added that ‘being honest and authentic will always help you to connect’ – and even though Black-ish came from his experiences, people of all backgrounds told him they could relate.

He said his aim for Black-ish was to ‘talk about shit people didn’t want to hear’ – a policy that paid off.

Barris told of a row with the ABC network on only the third episodes of the show, which revolved around black parents spanking their children. 

The issue had flared up in the news after American football running back  Adrian Peterson was accused of beating his four-year-old son with a tree branch, an act he described as a ‘whooping’.

Executives wanted to bury the episode, but Barris insisted it aired or he would quit. The network relented, but only if the writer carry the can for any backlash, In the end, the episode became one of the most acclaimed of the run, and Barris said it helped define he show.

He said he had been inspired by his favourite comedians who had always had the courage not to take the easy route, and go on stage knowing that ‘anything they said could ruin their career’.

And he mounted a defence of free speech saying: ‘As liberals, we used to defend free speech, now we are the "PC, watch-what-you-say party".’

Last month Barris had revealed in the sacking of  Roseanne from her sitcom over a racist tweet, saying it was an ‘amazing’ result, and revealing he was planning to kick up a major protest over his network stablemate.

‘You hired a monster and then you asked why the monster was killing villagers,’ he told executives, indirectly, at a panel on diversity in television hosted by trade paper Variety. 

In Montreal, Barris also revealed that he had a neck tattoo to force himself into pursuing a career as an artist  – saying that he could never get a job in a bank once he’d had the ink done.

Earlier this year, Barris clashed with ABC over a Black-ish episode that planned to address NFL players protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem – an action which has riled Donald Trump.

The episode was pulled, and at the time, he said: ‘Given our creative differences, neither ABC nor I were happy with the direction of the episode and mutually agreed not to air it.’

Published: 26 Jul 2018