15/10/2021
I just found out that the terrific Blindspotting (2018), directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada and starring Daveed D. Diggs and Rafael Casal, has a spinoff series! The series is on Starz and focuses on the character of Ashley (played by Jasmine Cephas Jones of Hamilton fame). At the beginning of the pilot, Ashley's partner Miles (Casal) is arrested and taken off to jail. Ashley has to pick up the pieces.
I loved so much about the original Blindspotting, from the way it was shot to the brilliant magnetism of Diggs and Casal, but especially its intense locality. The film captured Oakland—Black Oakland, actually—indelibly. It brought me right back to the many years I lived in the Bay and worked in Berkeley, running all over the East Bay with friends, and talking smack and hanging around Raider fans (some of the most loyal football fans you'll *ever* meet). The intense locality of the film is not just about the accents or the life or references to the sports teams, but the local lingo and the harsh gentrification that Oakland is now seeing (after being passed over in earlier Bay Area booms). Both are captured in the scene when Miles sells a boat he and Collin (Diggs) had kept after doing a job clearing out an older house that's being gentrified. The film is a gem—a love letter to Oakland, a document of the Black experience in Northern California, and a sharp, poignant, and funny protest against gentrification. The film made me laugh, and it made me sad but I also felt that I understood Oakland, and especially the racial dimensions of its brutal gentrification, much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwc3wQUkAwg
I'll be looking for some of these same qualities in the new series. I was excited to see that the showrunner is Rafael Casal himself, who also reprises his role as Miles. And I expect Jasmine Cephas Jones, who showed impressive range playing both Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds in Hamilton, will be great.
Say what?
