Sexbar (2006)

This Nickelodeon live-action TV series features strong Black representation.

Mai yells what every parent dreads hearing from their child: “tao ghét mày” (“I hate you”) and runs from the scene, where Hai discovers that Mai was telling the truth about the wallet.

A decade since it aired, Shameless (U.S.) has always stuck to its guns (and baseball bats) about character diversity.

Not only does the system prevent upward mobility, but it makes it incredibly easy to slide from comfortably middle class to unhoused.

Two Distant Strangers (2020) centers around Carter James (Joey Bada$$) as he tries to get back home to his pitbull, Jeter, after spending a night at the apartment of his date Perri (Zaria Simone). What gets in the way of Carter reuniting with his dog is that every time he tries to leave Perri’s apartment,  he is killed by police and wakes up back in her bed in a never-ending cycle. It addresses the issue of police brutality which rightly has been in the public eye more and more with the unjust deaths caused at the hands of law enforcement.

Sorry to Bother You ultimately speaks to the unfair advantages that the country’s power structures award to those with the resources to control others, as Lift’s easy access to the media allows his opinion to be the only one that matters in the eyes of the unsuspecting and easily impressed public. Moreover, it reveals the extent to which the American Dream has any true validity. It postulates how the promise of success and fulfillment as promoted by the American Dream more often than not leads to the undoing of the individual. Interestingly, in its revealing of the American Dream as merely a facade, Sorry to Bother You wisely questions whether or not anything can really be done to undo a system that has been accepted and in action for centuries.