TV Review - Insecure: Season 4

It's been nearly a decade since Issa Rae created her web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011), which became a hit on YouTube. With the help of black, comedic writer, Larry Wilmore, she adapted that series into the format that it is now. I checked out the pilot episode back in 2016, as well as a few more episodes in the first season. Unfortunately, I didn't keep up with the show as it progressed through the years. I did realize that the show tapped into a market that until 2011 had been thoroughly under-served. That market was that of film and television having a contemporary black woman as the lead and the focus. After Rae's web series tapped into that market, we finally got Scandal (2012), which was produced by Shonda Rhimes. It allowed for more shows to have black female leads. There's still not enough for most people's liking and the majority involve some high-concept. Rae's series is beautiful in its simplicity. It doesn't have some crazy premise. It's just simply a black woman living in a major, urban area exploring her dating life and work life.

Issa Rae, who starred in two films this year, The Photograph and The Lovebirds, plays Issa Dee, a young black woman in her late 20's and early 30's who works in the nonprofit space, often doing things with education or social organizing. She lives in Los Angeles. This season, her current project is putting together a block party in Inglewood, which is the neighborhood where she lives. Her goal is to use the event to highlight black-owned businesses and the African-Americans in the community. Like with a lot of Black and Latino people throughout the country, she's trying to push back against gentrification. She casually dates a couple of men, but it's clear that she still has feelings for her long-term boyfriend with whom she broke up in Season 1, named Lawrence, played by Jay Ellis. Rae's writing seems to be on a trajectory that will probably have that particular boyfriend be the endgame of this series, possibly. Issa's dating life with men don't interest me this season as her friendship with one particular girlfriend.

Yvonne Orji co-stars as Molly Carter, the best friend to Issa. They've known each other since college. They talk and hang out all the time. Molly is a lawyer who has issues advancing in her job or getting compensated what she thinks she deserves. She's had issues in her dating life for the past few years, but she's now in a relationship with a guy named Andrew, played by Alexander Hodge, and she really wants to make it work with him. The way that the show has been written, it's easy to become invested in Molly's relationship with Andrew, and I do, even more than I do Issa and Lawrence, even as the series strains to keep Issa and Lawrence tethered, despite the two of them being broken up.

As mentioned, the true love affair that I care about more is that between Issa and Molly. Since the pilot episode, the two of them have had blow outs and fights or arguments that cut to the core, threatening to separate them permanently and end their friendship. This season puts them in peril even more so. It might be contrived, but this season really pushes the two to extremes that it could mean the end to their friendship. It's funny to see people joke that Issa is gay because her relationship with Molly at times feels like it has the passion of a romance, except they don't have sex. Regardless, it's compelling because it's rare for a show to delve this deep into the friendships between black women. Some could point to the UPN series Girlfriends (2000), but it's been nearly a decade since that show.

Rated TV-MA.

Running Time: 30 mins.

Available on HBO.