Netflix wasn’t always going to understand why I was willing to spend a lot of money on a certain song that I knew would speak to a Black woman’s story better than any other or why Nzingha needed extra time to shoot the scene of a Sicilian immigrant having Thanksgiving with his Black girlfriend’s family from Texas - a first for TV, I promise you. The producers weren’t going to get every cultural inside joke. And because of our different lived experiences. Physically, but also by the low-grade panic over spending a shit ton of money on something that was unlike anything anyone had seen before. Everyone was uncomfortable, stretched to their limit. I famously got bit by six bees in 20 minutes in rural Sicily. We shot in small towns with few amenities. We were attempting to make a show about intimacy and human connection - but doing it through layers and layers of PPE. It was the first time most of our crew was going back to work after COVID. From Scratch exists because of their faith, and because they, and ultimately Netflix, believed in a team of Black women creators, believed our certainty that viewers were hungry for a show like this, that the world was waiting to see more of Black women’s complexity onscreen.Įvery production is fucking hard, but this one was a doozy. They trusted us, and they respected our lens on the world. But, more important, they supported and uplifted us and our ideas. Hello Sunshine helped put together this amazing team of Black women. It was a Black woman’s journey of self-discovery that would take place over 14 years and two continents - an international story of love, family, food and travel, that would also ask its audience to face the painful and nuanced reality of loss and grief, while still making them laugh out loud. It is this alchemy of “Black girl magic” that walked into Netflix to pitch an unprecedented series, a show that could not easily be put into a box.
And Zoe Saldaña, who not only gave the most stunning performance of her career, but also produced the show with her sisters, Cisely and Mariel Saldaña. But also our director and co-executive producer, Nzingha Stewart, whose soul is imprinted in every frame.
#Swing it and ding it podcast series
Leon Bennett/Getty Imagesīecause at every step of the way, we - Tembi as the author and the woman on whose life the series was built, and me as the showrunner - had producing partners in Hello Sunshine who believed in this show, who believed in the Black women at the heart and helm of the project. Sisters Tembi (left) and Attica Locke, co-creators of Netflix’s From Scratch. It felt like a very real possibility that this was an experience that Tembi and I would giggle about in years to come: Remember that time when we tried to make a show about your life, where we were both characters in it, and then a global pandemic shut the whole thing down? Well, that was fun. And three, we would need to cast a love interest to play opposite the amazing Zoe Saldaña - over Zoom. Two, the show was in three languages and needed a troupe of international actors. One, nearly half of our series would need to be shot in Italy, a country that had been brutally ravaged by the disease. In those early COVID days, producing From Scratch had a degree of difficulty that felt insurmountable. But making the show suddenly felt like a total impossibility.
Luckily, we had completed nearly all of our scripts. In 2020, the writers room for From Scratch - a show I was running that’s based on the memoir of my sister, Tembi Locke, with whom I had co-created the show - came to an unceremonious end in March when the world shut down because of COVID. 'Burn the House Down': Netflix Unveils First Trailer for Japanese Revenge Series We can and do sense patterns in the wind. And while I bristle at any suggestion that Black women have supernatural wisdom in our DNA, I do know that going through life in our bodies, with our lived experiences, means we pay vigilant attention to the world around us. There is a sense that Black women are diviners of culture.
I’ve seen “Believe Black Women” on T-shirts, mouse pads, coffee mugs and tote bags in Etsy shops. It’s been a hashtag, the title of academic papers and a marketing tool. “Believe Black Women.” By which folks meant trust Black women, listen to Black women, respect Black women’s lens on the world. Sometime in 2020 - in the midst of Stacey Abrams’ voting rights advocacy work that would ultimately swing Georgia blue, saving the country from its worst political impulses and around the time Beyoncé delivered a YouTube commencement address that gave hope and a sense of purpose to graduates struggling in a new and terrifyingly uncertain world - a phrase started to take hold in popular culture.
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