'Insecure' and 'Queen Sugar' Trailers Tease Shows Black Women Have Been Waiting For

With just a few weeks into summer and a promising stack of new and returning summer shows just beginning, is it a little TV-greedy to petulantly whine: “Is it fall yet!"?  

​Not if you’ve watched the recently released and stirring teasers for HBO’s Insecure  and OWN’s Queen Sugar.  These new series are made by and for black women, and look like the TV shows I've been fantasizing about for years...

HBO missed a fantastic opportunity to gain new viewership when there was no black show to premiere after Beyonce’s groundbreaking Lemonade.  I doubt that HBO read my angry tweets, but I'm thrilled that Insecure, a comedy created by YouTube star and author of “The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl” starring Issa Rae (and The Nightly Show’s Larry Wilmore), will debut this fall.  

The comedy reveals that black womandom is just as awkward as black girlhood as it follows two women navigating career, love and microaggressions.  “Black women aren’t bitter.  We’re just tired of settling of less.” Like Lemonade, Insecure looks like a refreshing and tart departure for the normally pale and dragon-infested HBO.

Queen Sugar combines the astounding and award-winning talents of director Ava DuVernay for the adaptation of the Natalie Baszile novel about two sisters who move to Louisiana after inheriting a sugarcane farm.  The painfully short teaser is evocative montage of images paired with heart-pounding percussion: star Rutina Wesley in stunning funeral white, luxurious pools, fights on a basketball court, iconic “I Am A Man” posters, and a dramatic embrace.

After watching these teasers, join me in harnessing all of the black girl magic to make the leaves to change and the temperature to drop.