TV Review - David Makes Man: Season 2

Created by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonlight (2016), I described the first season of this series as "Moonlight the TV show." The themes and narrative, even the setting of Moonlight was basically being explored again for this series. What made Moonlight special, beyond the incredible and beautiful direction from filmmaker Barry Jenkins, is the fact that seemingly the main character was LGBTQ and ostensibly a gay Black man, which is a character type that isn't often seen in mainstream cinema or cinema in general. There is an argument to be made that the protagonist in Moonlight wasn't gay at all. Even though McCraney's intention might have been to tell the story of a closeted gay Black man, there's a little bit of miscalculation that could have the film be read as not about a gay Black man at all.

For that, my hope was that this series could have rectified that miscalculation. It's not often that we get a TV series that is centered around a gay Black man. It's not often that a gay Black man who is a TV writer would get the opportunity to create a series where he could basically do whatever he wanted. Lee Daniels did so for Empire (2015), and his series included a  gay Black man, named Jamal, played by Jussie Smollett, but Jamal was never the main character. He was a large part of the show but he was easily written off. Steven Canals is the co-creator of Pose (2018), which does have a gay Black man as the protagonist but that series is more about the transgender women of color, and Pose isn't a contemporary show. It's set over thirty years in the past. This series could have rectified that dearth of contemporary gay Black men as protagonists. Unfortunately, it isn't. This series teases that possibility but ultimately pulls the rug out.

Kwame Patterson (The Oath and The Wire) stars as David, a corporate strategist who lives in a luxury apartment in a high-rise in Miami. He's a tall, muscular, buff guy. He has a private gym in his apartment building and he certainly uses it. He has a good job and a good way about him. He seems very well put-together, but he does have psychological problems. For starters, he has night sweats. He literally wakes up every morning soaking wet, so much so that he has to change his sheets every morning when he wakes up, which is usually early in the morning, before sunrise. That laundry task is a part of his daily routine, which has him operating almost like a robot. He seemingly loves order and routine.

Yet, David is in therapy. It's not revealed what prompted his therapy sessions. It's not clear if his sessions are mandatory or voluntary. It might be voluntary to help him with his night sweats, but if one has watched the first season of this show, then one can guess the trauma that David is suppressing and not confronting, which could be contributing to his psychological issues. One of those psychological issues include having hallucinations. David literally sees visions of people who aren't there. Sometimes, those visions include visions of himself as a teenage boy.

Akili McDowell co-stars as teenage David. He was the main actor in the first season, as we watched teenage David live with his mother and little brother in a ghetto that was plagued with drug abuse and violence. In fact, David witnessed a man who was a father-figure to him get shot dead right in front of him. That trauma or PTSD has stayed with David into adulthood. This season though, teenage David is more of a manifestation who interacts with the older David as a hallucination, illuminating how older David suppresses or avoids certain things. Teenage David represents older David's id in various ways.

However, in Moonlight, we see the main character named Chiron start off as a child. As the film progresses, we see the narrative jump and all of a sudden Chiron is an adult who is tall, muscular and buff. He has trouble with his mother who was a drug addict and he had a father figure who was a drug dealer who was possibly shot dead. This series does almost the exact same thing. The first season has David as a child or teenager. This second season has all of a sudden David as an adult, again tall, muscular and buff with a mother who was a drug addict and a father figure who was possibly involved with drugs who was shot dead. This season is really about reckoning with the trauma and mental effect from those things, particularly the gun violence, which is prevalent in urban or Black communities.

The series even interjects a plot line involving gentrification, which is also something plaguing urban or Black communities. It's a political scheme that could have been ripped from the now defunct series Pearson (2019). However, the series is more about David's identity crisis and shattered psyche. It's so much so that it could easily fit into HBO's In Treatment and its most recent season. All of this is good, but, at one point, in Episode 7, after we see him having sex with two different women in two, previous episodes, David tries to kiss Seren, played by Kyle Beltran. Seren was a teenage boy in the first season, played by Nathaniel Logan McIntyre. It's in this episode that I thought it would reveal David to be bisexual or sexually fluid, but, actually the moment only exists to reinforce David being straight.

It's just a missed opportunity for McCraney to have a queer Black character at the center of a series set in contemporary time that would have been unlike any other. Yet, it's almost like McCraney is going out of his way to distance himself from the label of a queer writer only writing queer protagonists. Yes, he nods to queerness but doesn't want it at the center. As such, he's doing Moonlight but taking out the most interesting part of it.

Rated TV-MA.

Running Time: 1 hr. / 10 eps.

Available on OWN.