More than melanated eye candy, Black Is King nourished the souls of Black people starved of joyous news. Released on July 31, Black Is King crashlanded on Disney+ two months after protests erupted across America following the world watching George Floyd’s life be taken from him by a police officer’s knee and less than two weeks after the President of the United States sent federal agents to Portland to aggressively control similar protests against police brutality.
The best television experiences are often the ones that give you a vacation from your reality into a world where anything can happen. Written and filmed prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, Issa Rae’s HBO comedy series Insecure was a comforting flashback to a time when maintaining a roster of casual sex partners was our biggest issue and drunk brunches with friends were still possible solutions.
Before Swizz Beatz and Timbaland’s song battle series VERZUZ brought a semblance of live music back into people’s lives during the pandemic, the place you wanted to be for pandemic-proof Black joy was DJ D-Nice’s Club Quarantine on his Instagram Live.