‘TV is full of black women fighting’: Issa Rae on kicking stereotypes into touch with her HBO comedy ‘Insecure’ Few new television series have as cool a pedigree as HBO’s latest comedy Insecure. The show is written by Issa […]

Few new television series have as cool a pedigree as HBO’s latest comedy Insecure. The show is written by Issa Rae, the Internet sensation who made her name with a hugely popular web series, The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl; directed by Melina Matsoukas, the award-winning music video director who most recently helmed Beyonce’s ‘Formation’; and features a fantastic LA-based soundtrack supervised by Queen Bey’s achingly hip sister Solange.

“Yeah that’s insane,” admits Rae with a half-disbelieving laugh. “I knew it was really important to get the music right because it’s the soundtrack to these characters’ lives and then Melina said ‘Well, Solange is really interested in getting into music supervising do you think you might like her to work on the project?’ I was like what are you talking about? Yes, of course, ask her right now.”

The 31-year-old Rae is aware there’s a lot riding on her show. Early reports tried to link it to Lena Dunham’s Girls, presumably on the grounds that both shows feature young women making their way in the world and are on HBO, but Insecure is a far warmer, more likeable affair. Its heroine, also named Issa and played by Rae, has a job as youth liaison officer for a non-profit organization, a long-term boyfriend who she cares for even though the relationship isn’t really working out, a successful best friend…and an overwhelming fear that she’s simply drifting her life away.

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“My character in ‘Insecure’ is me if I didn’t know what I wanted to do”

“She’s me if I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” says Rae, adding that there were times in her twenties when she had similar insecurities. “I had friends who were going to med school or practicing law or doing academic research and we’d all get together at Christmas and they’d say ‘oh you’re making videos on YouTube Issa…[awkward pause] good for you’. Constantly comparing yourself unfavourably to other people is a huge thing that a lot of people do and I wanted to reflect that.”

On her multicultural upbringing

She was determined too that Insecure wouldn’t simply be a retread of Awkward Black Girl (also the title of her best-selling memoir published last year). “I feel as though the 24 episodes of Awkward Black Girl exist on line already and I wanted the TV series to be something more grounded and rooted in reality.” That said there are similarities: Issa’s insecurities echo those of Black Girl protagonist J, there are similarly sharp scenes about being the only person of colour at work and both women let out their tensions in a series of raps. “Sure, there are similar themes,” says Rae. “We took the bathroom raps from the web series because I liked the idea of that being the place where she can finally be honest. In the bathroom she can let all the bravado out and the aggression and what ever else she needs.”

“Twenty years ago representations of black people were everywhere on television and then they just disappeared”

That sense of living two lives, the public and private, is clearly something Rae understands. She grew up in a large family – she has four siblings – in the well-to-do Los Angeles area of View Park-Windsor Hills where her Senegalese father Abdoulaye ran a paediatric clinic. Her mother Delyna is Louisianan. Rae, whose full name is Jo-Issa Rae Diop, attended a mixture of private and public schools in both LA and the largely white suburb of Potomac, Maryland and has said previously that she felt too black for the private schools and too white for the public schools.

Television provided a lifeline. It was the era of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Family Matters, In Living Color, Sister, Sister, hugely popular shows starring black actors and written by black writers. “Twenty years ago representations of black people were everywhere on television and then they just disappeared,” she says, adding sardonically. “Which was weird because we were still living life in the way every other human does.”

There’s the sense that she grew up navigating a number of different cultures: for a brief period the family relocated to her father’s home country of Senegal, but it didn’t work out and they returned to LA where Rae attended the respected King/Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science just south of Watts before heading to Stanford University where she majored in African and African-American studies. “The scene in the opening episode where Issa is in front of a classroom of kids and they keep asking why she talks like a white person that’s happened to me,” she says. “All the questions they throw out, bar one, are questions I’ve been asked in my lifetime so in that sense it does reflect my experience of being a black woman.”

On definitely not being the ‘voice of a generation’

Still she’s keen not to be labelled with the ‘voice of a generation’ tag that has both helped and hobbled Dunham. “I don’t want there to be all this pressure on the idea that I’m speaking for everyone,” she admits, laughing. “Not every black person is going to like this show or relate to it watch it and that’s perfectly fine with me but there are definitely universal elements. I hope.”

“It’s always irked me when black women are relegated to the sidelines – there’s more to us than the occasional funny line.”

Chief among those is the relationship between Issa and her best friend, the high achieving lawyer, Molly. “It was really important to me that Insecure portrayed a realistic picture of female friendship and female bonds,” Rae explains. “Television is full of black women fighting, particularly in reality TV, and that’s not my reality. I wanted to show a sympathetic black female friendship that was based on the friendships I have. It’s always irked me when black women are relegated to the sidelines – there’s more to us than the occasional funny line.”

The show’s other great strength comes from its depiction of Issa’s relationship with her boyfriend Lawrence, a likeable slacker with whom she has drifted slowly into a rut. “It would have been easier to fall in with the trope and write him as a shitty boyfriend but Jay (Ellis, who plays Lawrence) gives him so many dimensions and I think as the series goes on you really feel for him and even root for him to do better. That was very important to me – it might be a comedy but I wanted these people to remind you of your own friends.”

“I always write for my friends and family”

Rae is a keen fan of the comedy of embarrassment singling out “the pettiness of Seinfeld” and “the British Office because that was just excruciating” and Insecure contains some exquisitely written scenes of social anxiety between Issa and her white co-workers, who ‘think I’m the token with all the answers’. “I didn’t want to bang people over the head and say this is the real message of the show but at the same time this is the sort of the stuff you deal with every day being black, it’s constantly in the background. Sometimes it affects you and you feel really frustrated and sometimes it’s just another day in the office. It is what it is, you know.”

Having been burnt previously by attempts to bring Awkward Black Girl to network primetime and by a failed attempt in 2012 to develop a comedy for ABC under the aegis of Shonda Rhimes, she’s clearly pleased with how smooth her current experience has been. “It’s been a great process working with Larry [Wilmore, who helped create the series before heading to Comedy Central] and particularly Melina because it’s really the first time for both of us. It’s been a bit like a dream.” Most of all though Insecure is ‘the story I set out to tell and I’m extremely proud of it’. “I always write for my friends and family. If I can make my brother laugh and relate to what I’ve written then I know it’s good. That’s good enough for me.”

Insecure starts on Sky Atlantic on Tue 11 October at 10.45pm