There's a familiar dance that me and my husband take part in every time we have enough downtime to get to watch something together. "Wanna watch something later?" He'll ask. "Sure!" I say. "What do you want to watch?". "Don't mind...you can choose". "No, you choose nuh, you're more fussy than me". An hour or so later we both flop down on the bed and spend about 20 minutes as I click through Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime, trying to find something we'll both find bearable.
Sometimes I'll manage to persuade him to watch Love is Blind (largely because having a running reluctant Trini commentary on how "dotish" most of the participants are makes for almost as much entertainment as the show itself) and sometimes I'll concede to watch some sort of action film, covering my eyes at the spurting blood. For the past two weeks I'd kept suggesting Supacell, but kept putting it off because I had a feeling there would be a decent amount of guts and gore. I was correct.
As a South Londoner from the age of 3 - I was born and made my escape from the infamous Northwick Park hospital before moving South- I was excited to see a series that represented my area, and as a Black doctor it was heartening to see the focus on sickle cell which often doesn't get enough mainstream attention.
The opening scenes were fairly harrowing - a middle aged Black woman, terrified and hunted down, shot in the back and then dragged on her back down shadowy, corridors, her blood mopped into the floor by her afro. It signalled that this wasn't going to be a light-hearted superficial watch, and I braced myself for a few more bleeding bodies as the series progressed - and I got plenty.
As we were introduced to the characters, I felt a sense of familiarity - Michael and Dionne, a young Black couple deeply in love, trying mold a life with each other amidst the stresses of modern life and Michael's newly discovered, unsettling superpower (although how they've managed to buy a flat and new car in 2024 South London on a social worker and delivery driver's salary is almost as other-worldy as telekinesis).
Andre, Tazer's and Rodney's stories aren't wholly unfamiliar either -anyone who has grown up Black in South London will either know someone or know someone who knows someone who knows someone, who has been impacted by gang violence, drugs or the institutionally racist criminal justice system. Watching Andre navigate trying to build his relationship with his son who he clearly loved dearly, and find a stable job despite the the constant discrimination he encounters as a previously incarcerated man, humanised the experiences of Black men like him who are too often dehumanised in British media.
And as someone who worked as a doctor in the NHS for many years, seeing Sabrina try to cradle the stresses of her job, the micro and macro racial aggressions from patients as well as juggling her personal and family problems was cathartic.
Most importantly for me, the link between the character's super powers and sickle cell, a disease that affects mainly people of African descent, was incredibly creative and powerful.
Despite this, I found myself irritated at various points in the series with the writers and creators at the choices they'd made.
It's almost passé for me to write a blog about portrayals of Blackness in media.
Recently, African-American movie mogul Tyler Perry came under fire again, for his latest offering, Divorce in the Black. People criticised him for a sub-par storyline, unrealistic scenes and the all too common trope in his movies of Black women in traumatic and abusive relationships. Perry hit back at critics in an interview in which he pointed out that the people who the movie was made for, loved the movie and that "highbrow negroes" didn't understand him or the people it was made for. " So, you’ve got this highbrow negro who is all up in the air with his nose up looking at everything, then you got people like where I come from, and me, who are grinders, who really know what it’s like....Don’t discount these people and say their stories don’t matter. Who are you to be able to say which Black story is important, or should be told?"
So I anticipate that some people might receive my criticism of the portrayals of Black men in particular, in Supacell, as yet another critique from a "highbrow negro" who doesn't intimately understand the context of the characters, but I'm going to tentatively attempt to explain myself.
There are several things that can be true at once - including the fact that Supacell is a necessary and enjoyable watch, Rapman doesn't carry the responsibility of ensuring the totality of Black British male (or indeed Black London) representation on Netflix , but also that the scope of representation in Supacell of Black men in particular, felt limiting. I use the word limiting instead of stereotypical, because I think the phrase "perpetuating stereotypes" is often used to centre white people and their gaze at the expense of allowing working class Black people in particular, to tell authentic stories. What matters more to me than the white gaze is how Black people see themselves - in a world of myriad possibilities of Blackness, there seems to be an inordinate focus on stories that depict enormous amounts of trauma.
Out of the 5 main Black male characters in Supacell, 4 of them were either actively involved or had been previously involved in some sort of criminal activity. REACH media did a report in 2011 in which they found that 7/10 of portrayals of young Black men in British news linked them to criminality or violence. My issue isn't with stories like Tazer's or Rodney's being told in Supacell - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells us of the danger of a single story, and a series set in South London in which every unrelated Black male character was a finance bro working at Deloitte with a semi-detached house in Dulwich, or who owned a chain of Caribbean takeaways, would feel as unrealistic as the scope of Black male representation in Supacell. If given the choice of narrow representation of Black men, British media seems to almost always choose to skew towards gangs and violence as opposed to Cosby show-esque middle class utopia, and although neither can capture the totality of the Black experience in the UK or London specifically, it does make one wonder why?
In my opinion, Supacell had the opportunity to demonstrate that sickle cell is no respector of persons in the Black community - everyone, from a senior partner at KPMG, to a young girl in reception at a local primary school, can be affected by it.
It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the myriad other shows and films with Black British casts in recent years that have told diverse stories. Queenie, Dreaming whilst Black, Boxing Day, Riches, Champions and Three Little Birds all come to mind as showing different aspects of Black British life, but they haven't managed to garner level the social media hype and broad viewership of series like Supacell and Topboy. Not discounting the quality of both these shows , this is partly because Netflix as the largest streaming platform compared to smaller productions by the BBC, ITV or other streaming platforms, has a larger local and global reach. The most popular Black British shows on Netflix from what I can gather are Top Boy, Supacell, and I Will Destroy You. Rarely does a Black British series on Netflix that does not focus heavily on the characters experiencing repeated and graphic trauma, seem to be well marketed and supported. There is no Black British version of Friends, Big Bang Theory, The Office, Sex in the City, Blackish, Everybody Hates Chris - light-hearted comedies or rom coms that allow you to relax and not consider racism or gender based violence as primary to the storyline, that have achieved much mainstream success. Chewing Gum comes to mind as the most recent offering along those lines , but I can't think of a series depicting two Black British people in love or a show with a Black British woman as the primary love interest being the central plot. We all know that being Black can at times be difficult and even traumatic, but there is also a great deal of joy, laughter, love and play that fills the experiences of ordinary Black people. If anyone deserves to be able to find shows they can switch off and relax to, its us!
My hope isn’t that shows like Supacell don’t continue to get made - on the contrary, I plan to watch Season Two and hopefully Three, but my hope is also that we will continue to find worth in multiple Black stories - the lighthearted and the heavy ones, and that the stories that highlight Black joy can gain as much traction as the ones that highlight our pain.
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Thoughtful review. I haven’t got to Supacell yet, it’s on my list. Yes we do need more multi faceted stories. I think we have to write and tell our own.