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When viewers tune in to the second season of Harlem, the comedy about four ambitious best friends (played by Meagan Good, Grace Byers, Jerrie Johnson and Shoniqua Shandai) navigating life in New York, they’ll find something a little deeper: frank discussions about mental health. Ahead of Harlem‘s SCAD TVfest panel, showrunner Tracy Oliver discusses how the events of the past two years affected the writers room and found their way into the show — and teases what she can about the upcoming Girls Trip sequel.
A lot has happened since the first season of Harlem. What felt most different this time around?
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I started working on the show in 2019, and we broke the whole first season pre-pandemic. When we came together to write season two, we were squarely in the middle of a new reality, and it felt disingenuous to make a light season. A lot of us were dealing with mental health issues and finding it hard to get the motivation to write.
Is there anything that came directly from that new mentality?
Quinn’s [Byers] whole storyline. If someone had told me before the pandemic that we’d be tackling depression in a comedy, I’d say, “That seems a little dark.” My comedies tend to be broad and fun. I deliberately write in that vein. But I was dealing with depression on and off myself, as well as the other writers, so we decided to find humor in it, to channel our hardships into the show.
A lot of people turn on Harlem, or your other projects, for a mood lift. How do you lift your own mood?
Dancing is good for me. I put on ratchet hip-hop specifically. But I will say that I wish more people were doing lighter, more fun content. I think the reason why things like Top Gun are doing so well is that people just want to escape from reality, and there wasn’t enough material doing that. Watching TV and movies shouldn’t feel like work.
Who have you been imagining as the target audience of this show — who do you write for?
When I was working on Girls Trip, I asked [producer] Will Packer how authentic I could be, how Black can it be? His advice was to write as specifically to my experience as possible because you can’t expand your audience without first getting your core demographic. You’ll get no one if you try to please everyone. I came to Harlem with that mindset: Let me get women of color, people who live in Harlem or love New York. It’s why we worked so hard to support Black businesses and make sure the people in the neighborhood felt the love.
You expand the storyline geographically in season two — did you have a wish list for destinations?
It all comes down to budget. In my wildest dreams — and at some point maybe I’ll get a chance to do this — I want them to go to Europe. But that’s expensive. We chose Puerto Rico this season because it felt like a way to get them out of their environment in a way we could pull off.
Is it fair to extrapolate and say that the script you’re currently writing for Girls Trip 2 is the ultimate fantasy fulfillment?
Yes! I feel like we’ve seen people in Vegas or Miami. I want to be able to take us to places where we don’t normally go onscreen. The decision [to set it in Ghana] came from, what’s the biggest wow factor? We haven’t really seen a movie like this set on the continent of Africa — I’m always trying to figure out how to push boundaries.
Was there a day of filming Harlem that was especially memorable?
It was probably filming one of the scenes on their trip to Puerto Rico. We were out on the water and it was 2 o’clock in the morning and everyone was freezing. But it was a beautiful shot and the last of the whole season. It felt like a completion, on some level, and that was what the episode was about, too: cleansing and healing and transforming. It was art imitating life.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
This story first appeared in the Feb. 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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