All
day long, Mary Jane Paul puts out fires: saving a friend from a
possible suicide attempt, tough-talking a niece who wants to do
pornography, squaring off against unscrupulous co-workers who want to
damage her reputation, talking in depth about her sex life with the wife
of the man she’s sleeping with.
The
idea, as proffered by the new Black Entertainment Television drama,
“Being Mary Jane,” is that Mary Jane is the one in control, the one
others turn to when their lives are crumbling.
But,
of course, it’s Mary Jane (Gabrielle Union) who’s collapsing. A
well-known cable news personality at a station experiencing cutbacks,
Mary Jane is the emotional and financial center of a sprawling family
whose members are largely unemployed; in her own love life, she’s a
wishy-washy self-destructor, with jelly for a backbone. She’s standing
tall amid ruins, but in this extreme melodrama, she’s ruined too.
“Being Mary Jane” — scattered, sometimes loopy and always heavy-handed — plays as an extremely self-serious version of “The Mindy Project.”
As Mary Jane, Ms. Union has poise but not gravitas, ease but not
looseness. The premiere caroms from one explosion to the next, barely
giving Ms. Union an opportunity to breathe, and most of the supporting
cast members remain frustratingly one-dimensional. (The treatment of
Mary Jane’s family, especially, verges on Tyler Perry simplicity.)
This show, which was introduced in July with a movie-length pilot that attracted four million viewers,
is part of BET’s slow crawl from a network heavily dependent on music
videos to one that spans a wider range of black creativity. It’s the
first scripted drama developed for this network, though this is not
BET’s first dance with Mara Brock Akil, the executive producer and
creator, and her husband, Salim Akil, executive producer and director.
In 2011 the network rescued the couple’s marquee show, “The Game,”
after it was canceled by the CW network. The result was the
highest-rated ad-supported scripted series premiere in cable history at
the time. But “The Game” had a fleshed-out ensemble cast and a milieu —
the world of professional football — with abundant natural tension.
“Being
Mary Jane” isn’t there yet. Romantically, Mary Jane is torn between an
earnest playboy, David (Stephen Bishop), and a duplicitous hunk, Andre
(Omari Hardwick), who hid his marriage from her; both men are blunt,
with little shading. And this show is less adept at capturing the
behind-the-scenes dramas of TV news than, say, “The Newsroom” or even
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Certainly,
“Being Mary Jane” is a needed drama with a black female lead, but
unfortunately she’s someone less complex than, say, Kerry Washington’s
canny Olivia Pope on ABC’s “Scandal” (which has lately been seen in
reruns on BET). The variety of African-American life on scripted
television has become lamentably thin in recent years (unscripted
television has done better, to be honest), and shows like this serve as a
corrective. As they did on “The Game,” the Akils demonstrate a keen eye
for the micro details of black professional life, especially in terms
of wardrobe.
But
both the summer movie and Tuesday’s premiere feature plot points so
severe and odd that they destabilize the show’s narrative. At the end of
the movie, it was Mary Jane salvaging her partner’s sperm from a used
condom and storing it in a vial in her freezer. In the premiere, it’s at
work, where Mary Jane’s producer Kara (Lisa Vidal) cruelly urges her to
draw out an interview with an older couple riding out a hurricane in
their home, right up until the camera cuts out. (Whether the couple
survives, we’re not told.)
The
result is omnipresent unreliability: In this world, people can’t be
trusted to look out for others, or themselves. Especially Mary Jane: For
every fire she puts out, she strikes a match and sets another
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