The stories weren’t about a new project he was writing or directing, though there were plenty of those; instead, the creative force behind Black-ish, #blackAF and Girls Trip was eyeing an exit from Netflix — the first of the streamer’s nine-figure producers to depart, and only halfway through his multiyear deal.
By January, his reps had untangled him from the pricey partnership, as they’d done with his Disney pact a few years earlier, and hammered out a new deal that gave him equity — roughly a third, according to Barris — and a board seat in what would become BET Studios.
“I’ll call this a diversity play, in some aspects, because it’s important to call a spade a spade,” says Barris, acknowledging that “it’s a special time in this industry if you’re Black and you have something to say.” The plan, at least as he envisions it, is to sell premium content from underrepresented voices to outlets inside and out of the ViacomCBS portfolio.
Seizing on the moment and his growing cultural capital, to say nothing of his bulging Rolodex, Barris quietly added a record label with Interscope, too, along with a book deal with Random House, a podcast partnership with Audible and a first-look film deal with Paramount — and he intends to have them all working in synergy, with him, a self-described “Black dude from Inglewood,” as its nucleus.
The prolific producer had been at loggerheads with his then-employer, ABC, over a particularly charged episode of his flagship, Black-ish, titled “Please, Baby, Please,” which wove events like the NFL kneeling protests into a bedtime story.
“If I was going to step out, I wanted to do something where I could take off all the straps and really hang out of the plane,” he told THR at the time, using words like “loud,” “bold” and “unapologetic” to describe what viewers could expect.
Among the show’s more vocal critics was Charlamagne tha God, who ripped #blackAF on his popular Breakfast Club radio show, telling listeners it was like “white people doing a bad impression of Black people.” Barris would be lying if he said such comments didn’t sting, but claims he’s more interested in cultivating “thought leaders” like Wes Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell, who’ve offered kudos.
He contends that he’s just trying to make TV that audiences, white and Black, want to watch, and maybe even helps them understand each other better in the process.
“For Netflix, say we got 35 million viewers, they were like, ‘Well, it wasn’t Fuller House,’ ” says Barris, acknowledging that he often struggled to present the types of projects that excited Netflix executives, though a forthcoming drama with 50 Cent is said to be a clear exception.
“But I’m sure they do, or they will, and in their defense, they gave me a lot of money to make television.” And he intends to continue making plenty of it for the streamer, too, beginning with more #blackAF, which he reveals is forgoing its planned second season in favor of stand-alone #blackAF family vacation films in the vein of the National Lampoon vacation flicks that he and co-star Rashida Jones grew up loving.
At least one or two have asked that their father stop acting — and though he insists it won’t be his focus going forward, he is eyeing a part in the Meet the Parents-meets-Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner comedy that he’s co-written with Jonah Hill, which he’ll also direct for Netflix later this year.
The network’s new entertainment head, Craig Erwich, had referred to it as Brown-ish in an interview, and the backlash was swift and ugly, with one popular Tweet proclaiming, “black-ish, grown-ish, mixed-ish, brown-ish … na bro I think it’s time for you to FIN-ISH.” Barris, who’s still intimately involved in the “-ish” universe, with Black-ish readying its eighth and final season at ABC and Grown-ish still thriving at Freeform, is hopeful the project can survive the media maelstrom.
As for Barris’ daughter, she would have preferred he clap back in the moment.
Overnight, Barris’ three daughters became active in ways their father had never been; one launched the group Black Kids Who Care with her high school friends; another protested her way to jail.
As his breaking point neared, he called his agent, CAA’s Joe Cohen, and unloaded.
He’d watched as a few timely episodes of Black-ish re-aired as “events” on ABC and “Please, Baby, Please” was finally released on Hulu, and Barris realized how much he’d missed the weekly megaphone of network television.
But now, he wondered, what if he could do something about that? What if he, a kind of talent magnet, could make it cool? So, he asked Cohen, “Do you think they’d give me a $100 million deal?” His agent was certain they wouldn’t, but he had another idea.
And they paid a ton of money for that show, they let me put on Deon Cole’s special and an experimental sketch comedy show , they gave me beautiful offices and they never knocked on my door and asked what I was doing.
Once word of his exit got out, Barris found himself fielding interest from other companies, too, including his former employer, Disney, now under new management, but none were willing to offer him an equity stake as Viacom did — and suddenly the thing that Barris never knew he was capable of getting became the thing he wanted most.
Mills’ perspective on the latter is simple: One of BET’s missions is “to empower Black Americans,” and by helping partners like Barris or Tyler Perry, who Forbes recently named to its billionaire list, add to their considerable wealth only benefits the larger Black community the brand serves.
Plans to line up other major Black producers as equity partners have been a challenge — “It’s still Viacom,” says one top rep — and the general uncertainty in the marketplace only adds complexity.
“Within our business, BET doesn’t have the kind of reputation that they want to have, so what I face is getting people to understand that, under Scott Mills, change is afoot,” says Barris’ manager, Brian Dobbins, himself a major player in Black Hollywood.
I was like, ‘Why are we not telling those stories?’ ” So Barris now has a gang drama about the inception of the Crips, told through the eyes of founding member Michael Concepcion, in the works at Showtime.
And the temptation is always to say, ‘Kenya, focus,’ but then he hits you with that one more idea, and you’re like, ‘That’s a really good idea.
It’s all still so new, and he’s under no illusion that it will be successful during the four or five years that he intends to be actively writing and selling there.
“Maybe I’ll write a book or do a movie a year, or maybe I’ll be an executive, I don’t know, but I’ll definitely be semi-retired, that’s a promise,” he says, acknowledging that he’d spent an inadvisable amount of time that morning looking enviously at photographs from a barbecue Sean “Diddy” Combs had just thrown, which of course Barris couldn’t attend because he was holed up doing rewrites.
The plan now is to sell premium programming from those underrepresented voices inside and out of the ViacomCBS portfolio.
“We try to seek out creative relationships with people who not only move culture, but see where culture is going,” says Interscope Geffen A&M Records vice chairman Steve Berman, who puts Barris squarely in that category.
Among his upcoming projects: a Juneteenth musical with Pharrell Williams and a comedy with Jonah Hill; a Bad News Bears-style film with Snoop Dogg as a football coach; a bisexual rom-com inspired by Queer Eye‘s Antoni Porowski; and an adaptation of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground with New Slate Ventures.
Barris has inked a book deal with Random House, which, he reveals, will kick off with a collection of essays tentatively titled This Is Basic Shit: Things We Know That We’re Shocked You Don’t.
Per Barris, he’ll deliver a minimum of four a year — some to supplement his TV and films; others potentially ripe for adaptation.
“The good news for us is we’re still in business with Kenya on many fronts,” says Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos, “and we’ll be in business with him for a long time to come.” Indeed, Barris is already prepping #blackAF vacation films and still has an animated music series with Kid Cudi and two docs forthcoming — one about civil rights attorney Ben Crump, the other about the friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.