On Sept. 11, 2000, Mara Brock Akil’s groundbreaking series Girlfriends premiered on UPN. It followed four close friends in sunny Los Angeles, Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross), Toni (Jill Marie Jones), Maya (Golden Brooks), and Lynn (Persia White), as they navigated their careers, their relationships, and the deep—and often complicated—friendship they’d spent years cultivating. And like any true girl group, no topic was off limits. They were free to talk about their hopes, their fears, and their anxieties. As a result, Black women were represented in a fuller and more complex way onscreen than ever before. And it happened during a time when the most popular friend groups on TV, like those in Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City, were mostly white.
Girlfriends inspired many Black women who would go on to create their own ensemble shows, like Issa Rae with Insecure, Leigh Davenport with Run the World, and Tracy Oliver with Harlem, the last of which premiered 21 years later on Prime Video. Though set in an entirely different era, much of the heart in Harlem was the same. This time, the quartet included Camille (Meagan Good), Quinn (Grace Byers), Tye (Jerrie Johnson), and Angie (Shoniqua Shandai) against the backdrop of New York. It only made sense, then, to pair Brock Akil and Oliver together for a heartfelt conversation about art, representation, and the beauty in portraying Black female friendship onscreen—from the early aughts to present-day.
Mara Brock Akil: Early in my career, I thought I was going to be a journalist, and I looked at the world like a story that needed to be urgently told. When I was developing Girlfriends in 1999, Sex and the City was on. It was refreshing because it was centering women as opposed to seeing them as sidekicks, but there was no color on the screen. It was set in New York and not even the extras were Black. I remember a lot of people were upset about that, but I saw it as an opportunity to document what Black women were feeling, doing, thinking, aspiring to, and stumbling over at that time.
Girlfriends was about the Black women that I knew. I wanted to give voice to their thoughts, concerns, and dreams. And I wanted to tell it through the lens of four Black friends that had an anchored background. At the turn of the century, a lot of us moved far away from home to pursue our dreams. Because of that, I wanted there to be a chosen family element. The friendship dynamic had a lot of dysfunction in it because it had a lot of love in it. It also had a lot of individual insecurities in it.
Jill Marie Jones as Toni, Tracee Ellis Ross as Joan, and Persia White as Lynn on Girlfriends.
Tracy Oliver: I have to say, there would be no Harlem without Girlfriends. I was very much inspired by ensemble friendship shows like yours and Living Single. I also didn’t love the lack of diversity on Sex and the City and I wrote Harlem, like you, to address a need at the time. But initially, when I wrote it on spec and sent it around town, it didn’t go anywhere. I kept hearing, “Shows like Girlfriends are of a different era.” And I was like, “So suddenly Black female friendships don’t matter anymore? How did that happen?” So what ended up happening for me was that I wrote Girls Trip and then people suddenly said, “Let’s revisit Harlem.” I was inspired by my days in New York and I wanted to write about my friends, my family, and people that looked like me, and I point to your work constantly.
Brock Akil: Tracy, thank you. I really appreciate that. It is so empowering to say, “I value the story inside of me.” That’s what we need more of. You just get tired of feeling invisible or distorted. So after the success of Girls Trip and when Harlem got greenlit, did you still feel connected to the material, or did you have something else that you wanted to explore? As a writer, I’m curious about where you were at the time.
Oliver: That’s a good question, because I had changed a lot, so I aged up the characters. When I wrote it, I was in my twenties and then when it was greenlit, I was in my thirties. A lot of the anxiety that I wrote about was still there, surprisingly. I still related to that part of myself—the fear of failure, the fear of not finding love, the fear of not having things come together in your life. But I also had a lot of anxiety about the show flopping and failing. One of the things that I’ll be really candid in saying is that when I had written it originally, nothing on the air was like it, and then all of a sudden there was Insecure and Run the World.
Jerrie Johnson as Tye, Meagan Good as Camille, Shoniqua Shandai as Angie, and Grace Byers as Quinn in Harlem.
Brock Akil: I think people started to confuse Harlem with Run the World.
Oliver: Mine was definitely first. [Laughs] I will not go into details on that situation, but it was disheartening because it looked like a copycat. I was disappointed because had it actually come out at the time that I’d written it, it would’ve been more original and felt more necessary. The marketplace was weirdly oversaturated when it dropped. It’s hard to make a splash and it’s hard to carve out a unique place when you’re constantly defending why it’s different from the other Black content. So to answer your question, I think that was how I was feeling. I was proud to get it out there and proud to get it made, but I had a lot of anxiety, too.
Brock Akil: It’s interesting, I think, to be led by your own voice. I remember in season six of Girlfriends as the characters were aging, the truth was that they were going to start withholding from the friend group because the friend group is an accountability mirror in a lot of ways. You come to the table or you come to Joan’s house and everybody shares their woes, their highs, their lows. So it was interesting to me that Joan would suddenly want to hold back more because she wasn’t achieving certain things, and that there would be that instinct. But the show requires that the girls share their problems and have opinions so that everybody can laugh about the different perspectives.
I wanted to be really honest about exploring the truth about friendship between Black women. At what point do they become your all? And at what point does the mirror become too much? At what point do you want to hide? I was exploring the idea about what female friendship really is, when you don’t feel completely successful in certain areas of your life, and how that changes the dynamic. I think it was interesting how many women resonated with that. A lot of times our shows are set up where you have to tell your girlfriends everything, and I don’t know that that’s actually true in all of our relationships.
Oliver: Sometimes I think it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around not holding on to characters as they once were. With Harlem, I have to make sure it evolves with me on some level. This past season that we just finished is so grown. It’s so different than how we started, because the characters got older and so did I. It just feels weird if we’re not treading in more mature waters.
Brock Akil: In the time it takes to get to get something on the air, we have lived whole ass lives three times over. That’s one of the challenges of TV right now—how are human relationships and friendships changing as a result of this new era?
Oliver: Harlem was really a case study. It was nonstop between being shut down because of COVID and then the strike. So many things interrupted the flow. I had to embrace it and adjust. So suddenly we had a high-achieving character dealing with depression. I felt like a lot of us lost our purpose [over the pandemic], or at least questioned why we worked so hard and what we were doing it all for, because suddenly it all felt meaningless. Then you realized that relationships were more important than all the grinding that we were doing. We had to address that feeling in the show amongst the friend group. For the audience, mental health needed to be addressed. To be in your mid-thirties and to suddenly not know what you’re doing anymore is scary. We didn’t lean too heavy into the drama of it all, but there were some heartfelt moments and dramatic parts.
Oliver collaborated with Issa Rae on The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Rae would go on to create and star in HBO’s Insecure, which was also celebrated for its portrayal of Black women’s friendships.
Run the World, created by Leigh Davenport, follows a group of friends navigating their lives and careers in Harlem. It premiered on Starz in 2021 and ran for two seasons.
Brock Akil: In order to earn the comedy of it, you have to be honest about the realness of it.
Oliver: Exactly. I can’t not do a comedy. At the end of the day, Harlem still had to stay funny, but it also needed to live in a much more grounded place than I had originally thought.
Brock Akil: I remember a moment when we were in the Girlfriends writer’s room at a time when HIV/AIDS was hitting Black women at alarming numbers. I just remember thinking, “This is happening on my watch while I have this show. I wanna talk about it.” I remember the thud that hit the writer’s room. But I knew it was going to serve the Black women who were showing up week after week supporting the show, and I felt like I owed it to them. So if you go back and look at that arc, all the girlfriends are reacting to it in a very significant, honest way, and we were also trying to make it funny.
Oliver: How did you guys find the funny?
Brock Akil: In the other storylines. Kimberly Elise’s character Reesie was introduced and she was connected to the girls because they all went to college together. So part of the fun was that this allowed us to go into the past and see what college life was like for her, Joan, and Lynn. And then, of course, we included a bit about Joan having another man problem. [Laughs] Toni’s storyline was also really funny. But the purpose of those episodes was to shake the shame. We’ve got to be able to talk about it so that people can get to the help and the services that they need, and we allowed this character coming back into their lives to affect them in a very powerful, interesting way. And of course we had other storylines going in conjunction with this arc. But I believe the short answer would be that we allowed for the grimacing honesty. We let the characters admonish each other and try to correct themselves and then call each other out. Joan was playing around like everything was fine until Reesie cut herself with the knife and Joan wanted her out of her house. It was honest.
Oliver: When you’re the creator and the showrunner, you are the person that’s responsible if something doesn’t work out. So sometimes if I’m feeling strongly about something and the studio or the network or the other writers don’t get it and I still proceed anyway, it’s a very vulnerable feeling. And sometimes it’s not even a fight. Sometimes people are like, “Well, it’s your show.” And then you think, Huh, I’m not getting any pushback. So I start spiraling on that. It’s lonely in the sense that the buck stops with you and you are the visionary and the person who’s calling the shots. And sometimes we’re doing it off of intuition.
Brock Akil: That’s the magic, though. I think that’s why we tell stories—to connect to spirit. I think it’s the most human thing. It goes back to what you were just saying prior about vulnerability and loneliness. That’s what I’ve been trying to dig to the core of in a lot of ways. I want to expose the complexity of Black women so we can take up more space—to accept more of themselves and their human journey. Through the lens of Black friendship, I think, culturally, Black women have been depicted as truth tellers, but sometimes we don’t tell the truth about ourselves.
Mara Brock Akil.
Tracy Oliver.
Oliver: It’s how we were raised, too. I was raised to not emote in professional settings and have this image of strength. And so juxtaposing that with what I know to be a very sensitive, vulnerable person is hard sometimes. And, also, I do feel a greater pressure as a Black [creator]. I want the freedom of just creating without the burden. Sometimes I envy white writers, because they just get to make something and they’re not worried about what it says about all white women or all white people. They’re just creating their truth. Sometimes I get so scared about what the Black community is going to say. How do you feel about that?
Brock Akil: You’re probably exhausting yourself. Yes, I definitely have experienced it. But in this current state, I have created practices so that I can access my voice and remind myself of who I really am. I also lean into the beauty of us as Black women, how we constantly make a dollar out of 15 cents. I lean into the majesty of us more and more. I’ve got this bat in my hand and I’m going to swing and do my best. Right now, you’re overthinking—concerned about the Black audience, concerned about serving everybody. And I would ask you to lean in and trust that you already love and care about the audience. Surrender and create from a place of joy and exploration and expansion. Try not to worry about getting it wrong. There’s enough of that coming in.
The Tracy who got out of college can recognize that there’s an urgency to write something like Harlem. Keep exploring and allowing yourself enough space to hear a question, to wonder, and to fill a void and know that you’re the one to do it. Use your ego in a good way by saying, “Y’all need me.” We need more bravery in those swings. I was happy to hear that in your newest season of Harlem, you swung the bat on what you felt. I wish you all of the goodness that can come with that. And hopefully when you left the editing room, you felt like you already won. So [the response] is just the cherry on top, right? That’s freedom. And we’ve got to give it to ourselves first. I wish that for you, and I wish that for me.
Oliver: Can we just call out the irony of this perfect girlfriend advice moment? I really needed to hear that.
Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Queen Latifah starred in Oliver’s 2017 comedy Girls Trip.
Brock Akil: There’s so much joy in locking into who you really are.
Oliver: I can see there’s a love for Black women that we both share—a genuine curiosity, a genuine joy, and a genuine care. We both write from a place that’s very protective of Black women, and it shows up in the work that we do. And for me, whenever I think about writers that inspire me, your name always comes up because I see so much of myself in your work.
Brock Akil: I love that you picked up the mantle and kept running. You’re breaking new ground and creating a path, so thank you for what you’re doing. You said it really well: we do care. And I’m going to surrender my anxiety to the idea that they care about us, too. They feel us loving them and caring for them. We’re storytellers and they’re really great listeners, and we need that sisterhood, right?
Oliver: Yes.
Brock Akil: So I’m going to lean in more toward the grace of that relationship. That’s who the real girlfriends are—our audience. They can hold us just as much as we’ve held them.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Juliana Ukiomogbe is the Assistant Editor at ELLE. Her work has previously appeared in Interview, i-D, Teen Vogue, Nylon, and more.