What Issa Rae’s “Insecure” Gets Right

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One June morning last summer, Melina Matsoukas, a director and executive producer of the HBO comedy “Insecure,” was shooting scenes for an episode from the show’s first season at a middle school in Los Angeles. Dressed in a gray hoodie with a white flouncy trim and gray sweatpants, she was a commanding presence on set, her voice rising and suffusing everyone else’s. Black and Latino child actors were assembled in a classroom; the main character on the show, played by Issa Rae, works with children and is also an amateur rapper. The students were going to disrupt class with one of Rae’s songs that they found online.

“Guys, remember you’re going to get all in Issa’s face,” Matsoukas said, from behind a tangle of cameras, and then called action.

“Maybe it’s really rough,” a boy sang.

“Maybe it had enough,” a second boy chimed in.

“Broken pussy,” another said.

“Broken pussy!” the children chanted together, and then started laughing.

Matsoukas called cut.

“I feel like a teacher,” she said. “Teaching the wrong health class.”

“Please get some attitude on this one,” she went on, and then yelled action again.

Larry Wilmore arrived on set and put on headphones as he looked at the monitors, which were placed outside the classroom. Wilmore is an executive producer of “Insecure” and co-wrote the series pilot. He wore a blue button-down, white shorts, and sneakers and smirked as he watched the scene.

“I love that they’re getting the kids to say this,” he said.

As the second season of “Insecure” premières, that raunchiness is essential to the show’s perceptive, and often raucous, portrayal of the struggles and absurdities of being young, black, and striving in a big city. The first episode picks up not long after last season’s finale, as Issa recovers from a breakup with her longtime boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), after he discovers her affair. The next three episodes follow her as she determinedly, if somewhat unhappily, tries dating again. The results are predictably awkward, and, as before, the show’s sharpest insights come from its knowing gaze on a slice of black life. Much like the best shows and films of last fall that featured mostly black casts, such as “Atlanta,” “Insecure” doesn’t go out of its way to translate the specificity of the world it portrays, and this defiance can be gloriously funny.

I laughed out loud during a scene from the second-season première in which Lawrence’s friend Chad (Neil Brown, Jr.) is seen watching a fictional slavery series in which a slave woman and her master are having an affair—seemingly a riff on the interracial love story in “Scandal.” As the master’s wife comes across the slave with a book and then snatches it away, Chad groans. “Aw, bitch,” he exclaims. “Let the bitch read.” His reluctant fascination, and accompanying frustration, with the scene captured the obsessions in black communities with shows that have entertaining but deeply flawed depictions of black subjects and story lines. At another point in the episode, as Issa is collecting her mail on her way out of her apartment complex, an elderly neighbor peeks her head out of her door to tell Issa to “put some lotion on those ankles,” a phrase that most black aunties have uttered at some point to their younger relatives. Later in the season, at a club, Issa refers to a woman who tries to hijack their table as a “Fashion Nova-ass bitch,” a reference to the slightly trashy, Instagram-notorious clothing brand popularized by the gossip account the Shade Room.

The show continues to deepen its depiction of the relationship between Issa and her best friend, Molly (Yvonne Orji)—two black women who are, in many ways, radically different but equally supportive of each other. They don’t resemble some of the most visible black female characters currently on television—the reality-show train wreck or the reality-show diva. They don’t compete for men or scheme against each other, and their concerns range from the serious, like emotional fulfillment, to the gleefully superficial, like getting laid. The authenticity of their relationship harkens back to such nineties shows as “Living Single” and “Girlfriends,” series that feel like artifacts of what black-female friendship can look like onscreen if written by people who know what they’re talking about.

Some of the unevenness of the first season—writing that didn’t always land and plotting that could feel jerky—feels smoother this time around, though still with occasional moments of faltering. But that’s to be expected for a series as daring as “Insecure,” which is trying to draw lives that haven’t been shown on television in a long time. And most shows, especially those centered on an inventive writer and creator, need time and backing to grow, and to become even better. Lena Dunham’s recently concluded “Girls,” also on HBO, had six seasons to fully develop, and the payoff was in its fully realized and powerful last season. Viewers can only hope that Issa Rae gets the same chance.

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