Left Turn Only

While [the Tyler Perry, Madea cinematic universe] does serve an audience, I don't know if it's taking that audience or pushing that audience in the direction that I need that audience to go in as a means of like, you know, affirming and supporting my humanity.
[...]
But again, Tyler Perry's not interested, I would hate to say, in Tre'vell Anderson's humanity...
Tre'vell Anderson
'A Madea Homecoming' isn't complicated, but our feelings about Tyler Perry are
Pop Culture Happy Hour

And this raises an interesting question. Why should Tyler Perry's Madea movies take or push an audience in a direction that suits Tre'vell Anderson's needs? Why should Tyler Perry be interested in Tre'vell Anderson's "humanity?"

To a degree, it was a shame that the podcast was intended to address both Tyler Perry, and his new movie, "A Madea Homecoming," because the three panelists could have spent the entire runtime talking about Mr. Perry, and maybe that would have given them room to discuss more openly an undercurrent that ran through their dialog.

In addition to Tre'vell Anderson indicting Mr. Perry for a perceived lack of interest in "Tre'vell Anderson's humanity," there was also criticism of Mr. Perry for being the sole writer of his scripts. And there were two aspects to this. Tre'vell Anderson initially criticized Mr. Perry for the fact that his one-man script-writing leads to impoverished writing. And this makes sense. As Anderson concedes, Mr. Perry is "writing what he knows," one of the common pieces of advice given to writers. And the Black community in the United States (to the degree that it can even be characterized as a single community) is large enough and diverse enough that no one person can know all of it well enough to speak to it in writing. Postcast host Aisha Harris, on the other hand, is critical of Mr. Perry writing his movies by himself because it doesn't give other Black writers the chance to write his movies. She accuses him of "cutting a lot of Black people, Black writers out of a writer's room they could be in."

Despite Tre'vell Anderson basically saying that Tyler Perry should be free to do what he wants to do since other people can take on the things that Mr. Perry doesn't want to do, and the understanding that there is an audience for his movies, which they serve quite well, the podcast comes across as a complaint that Mr. Perry isn't doing more to bring the socially-conservative elements of the Black community that enjoy his work into the more liberal, or even progressive, space occupied by the average National Public Radio listener or staffer.

But it never addresses why that should be. It's simply taken for granted that Mr. Perry has these responsibilities, to the "queer, nonbinary trans" segment of the Black community or to Black comedy writers that he's not fulfilling, and that's bad, because now that he's built a media brand and quite a bit of influence for himself, he has a responsibility to use those things to make certain other people's lives better. And while I understand the impulse, I don't think that it should be taken for granted. But, of course, that's because I'm not really in the National Public Radio demographic. So the assumptions that underlie it don't automatically strike me as obvious.

One of the assumptions that I think is out there is the idea that people are really quite flexible, when it comes to media; both in producing it and in experiencing it. So it should be easy for someone like Tyler Perry, who has always been the writer of his work, to bring on a writers' room of diverse people and cede some level of control over the presentation of his vision to them. Likewise, the audience for Mr. Perry's "faith-adjacent, Southern, old-school Black culture" are really an audience for Mr. Perry himself, and as such, he can lead them in a different direction, one more cosmopolitan, secular and diverse, and they will simply follow, learning to enjoy whatever he places in front of them without defecting to find something that is more to their initial tastes. I don't know that I buy into that assumption, and so maybe it's worth breaking it down, to see what it's made of.