Publish and Perish

The Onyx Collective is a Disney brand designed around providing better reputation for POCs, although this being the official branding, all 12 of their projects seem to largely be about African-Americans. Onyx Collective shows run a wide gamut of genres, including the documentary film Summer of Soul about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, the lawyer drama Reasonable Doubt, and the docuseries adaptation of the infamous 1619 Project, all on Hulu. The Other Black Girl is every bit as eclectic as these other projects, though without some of the more questionable political undertones.

Based on the 2021 novel of the same title by Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl deals with Nella, a token black editor at Wagner publishing, who’s joined by a new hire, Hazel. Hazel at times assuages and provokes Nella’s anxieties about working in an overly white industry over the 10 episodes of the still-incomplete Hulu series. It’s quite some time before the half-hour drama makes it clear whether Nella’s just being paranoid or if Hazel’s more sinister than she seems.

The Other Black Girl actually departs quite a bit from the ethos of other Onyx Collective projects, mainly in its depiction of white supremacy. White people are the more typical villains of Onyx Collective projects. But in The Other Black Girl, it’s the structures of power, not the skin color of the people in charge, that cause these problems.

As with any well-paced twist, that technical spoiler of the story’s narrative arc doesn’t give any obvious clues as to how the story really shakes out. The Other Black Girl has excellent pacing to assist with this. Quick, clear establishing shots and visually distinctive characters allow the story to move quite briskly. Nella’s an oddly appealing character, seemingly self-aware of the fact that her heavy immersion in a white working environment makes her easy for white viewers to understand, begging the question of how effective she really is at representing for black people, or whether that’s even a reasonable thing to expect of her. Her best friend Malaika pokes at Nella’s identity while still being supportive enough neither Nella for the viewer questions her interests, and her boyfriend Owen is more straightforwardly supportive. But he’s also white, which does no favors in the ambiguity department.

While Nella is the obvious cipher, and certainly interesting in her own right, Hazel’s identity as the titular other black girl drives much of the show’s more unsettling tone. The initial conflict is about Wagner’s most popular writer Colin, whose attempt at an airport bestseller about the opioid epidemic has a few problematic elements. Nella goes about trying to solve the issues in his book bravely but clumsily, while Hazel is more slick about it, such that the office conflict ends up being one of tone.

What makes The Other Black Girl so on-point is that the show openly questions the usefulness of conciliatory posturing in popular culture. The publisher brutally rebuffs Nella’s attempts to bring in a popular black podcaster, not all that unreasonably, since Wagner’s whole business model already teems with unfixable racism. There’s a definite sense of sunk cost thinking dominating Nella’s psyche, since having dedicated this much of her life to the publishing industry already, there aren’t really any other options for her to even try to make a difference anywhere else.

For all these strengths, there a couple of typical Onyx Collective style hiccups that bothered me a little. Nella’s favorite book, Burning Heart, becomes a major plot point as time goes by, especially when Nella learns of the book’s original ending, which ended in a much darker direction dealing with domestic abuse and misogyny in the Black Panthers. In a show that’s otherwise comfortable with namedropping Alice Walker, I found it a little odd how The Other Black Girl seems to take it for granted that themes like this were unpublishable 35 years ago, when you could far more accurately describe them as the predominant theme of African-American literature at the time.

But this is odd mainly because acknowledging that the woke pop culture cycle is, well, a cycle, that we’ve already tried it before and it didn’t work, would be incredibly on-brand for all the show’s themes. The Other Black Girl especially sells this when it delves into Hazel’s backstory, as well as her group of friends. The question The Other Black Girl seems to be posing is very Zen. Is white supremacy still white supremacy if black people are using it to popularize black culture?

Get Out posed similar questions, but The Other Black Girl frames them in in a much more deliberately uncomfortable way, since there are surprisingly few white villains and the show portrays most of them as either not intelligent or not well-connected enough to be a threat to anyone on their own. Of course, if the main thing you liked about Get Out was the crazy action of the second half and not the cerebral worldbuilding of the first half, you’ll have to wait for the second season to get to that part. I hope The Other Black Girl gets a second season, since the first season is definitely good enough to warrant one, even bearing in mind that it ends on a cliffhanger.