WRITTEN BY LISA ROSEN How To Be ISSA RAE CHANGES STREAMS Insecure what, and who, she wants in her life. In each case, she suffers through the day’s indignities, holding in her stronger emo-tions, and then belts them out later in gloriously profane, private raps. So that should all make for an easy transition from stream to screen, right? Alas, the course of de-velopment rarely does run smooth, whether it’s online or on premium cable. Awkward Black Girl took years to move from concept to reality. Rae first envisioned it as an animated series in 2008, but didn’t have the money to make it. Instead, she cut her teeth on an improvised web series about her brother’s rap group, called FLY GUYS pres-ent “The ‘F’ Word.” “That was my first foray into building an audience, and put-ting something out consistent-ly, every Monday,” along with writing and editing, she says. During that time Rae thought of turning Awkward Black Girl into a live-action se-ries. “I had an actress in mind to play it, but she was in law school in D.C., and she was like, ‘Nah, girl.’” After reading an article in which the magazine author wanted to see a black Liz Lem-on (Tina Fey’s nerdy character on 30 Rock ), Rae was afraid someone was going to take her idea. So three years after she first thought it up, she decid-ed to simply star in the show herself. She wrote the first five episodes, asked friends to pitch in, and then built a writers’ room from scratch. F rom the titles alone, it sounds like Issa Rae had a straight shot from creating and starring in the hit web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl to co-creating and starring in HBO’s Insecure . In both shows, Rae is a charm-ing, uncomfortable young woman struggling to figure out 54 54 • • WG WG A A W W WRITTEN WRITTEN B B Y Y NO VEMBER 16 NO VEMBER 20 20 16
Written By November 2016: Page 54
