Kenya Barris’ loaded The Hollywood Reporter feature interview had a lot of gems.
One gem you may have missed briefly talked about projects he wants to do at Netfilx.
The feature reads, “The prolific idea generator — who was still passionately pitching projects at ABC Studios even as he was negotiating his way out the door — is already hurling out new ones: a comedy special from Black-ish‘s Deon Cole; a potential series adaptation of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”
Coates’ Between the World in Me is arguably one of the most popular (and important) literary works of the decade.
An official description of the book reads: “Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder.”
As the feature states, Barris was in fact pitching as he left the door, with the last project put into action at ABC being a Bewitched remake with a black lead.