Over the course of eight seasons, Black-ish carved out a name for itself by finding comedy in the rough parts of life, particularly when it came to being Black in the United States. And the series was mostly successful in its mission. That wasn’t true for the arc at the end of Season 4 when Dre and Bow came dangerously close to divorcing. There weren’t a lot of laughs to be found in those particular episodes.
When the series kicked off, Dre and Bow had been married for years. They had four children and were professionals in their respective fields. Over the course of their time together, they had forged a bond that was the basis of the entire series. While there were a lot of great characters on the show, it’s impossible to deny that some of the best comedy in the series came from the strange dynamic between the couple. The humor they generated was undeniable.
At the root of that was how different they were. Dre was raised in Compton with difficult parents who fought, split, got back together, and repeated the cycle. Bow, on the other hand, was raised by a Black mother and a white father, often in cult-like settings and communes. Ultimately, Dre and Bow grew up to become two incredibly different people. Those differences made for great comedy, but they also created a lot of strife between them.
Both characters would make jokes about how their friends and family often expected them to split. It often seemed like they also expected their marriage to fail. Until Season 4, they were just jokes. In Season 4, Episode 20, things began to get a lot more serious. Their marriage was in a bit of a funk leading to Dre and Bow fighting a lot more than usual. As it turned out, this was just the beginning.
Over the next few episodes, Dre and Bow fought more and more, drifting further apart. They eventually decided to split with Dre moving out. These episodes were shot with a blue filter that was atypical for the series. This set the tone that something different was happening, something sad and difficult. There wasn’t much to laugh at in these episodes. It was the death of Bow’s father in the Season 4 finale that finally helped Dre and Bow bridge the gap between them and get back together.
This was not an easy arc to watch. There was a level of dramatic intensity to these episodes that felt more like something out of This is Us than Black-ish. And that was necessary to make the narrative of that story work. It was the only time that the show told one complete story essentially spanning four consecutive episodes. The only problem with it was that story really didn’t fit the series that well. It diverged from the tone of the rest of the series so thoroughly that it was a bitter pill for some fans to swallow.
While the story itself was quite compelling, that may have been for the wrong reasons. A lot of viewers watched in agony as they hoped Dre and Bow were going to work things out. Television has conditioned people to believe that everything will work out, and it ultimately did on Black-ish. But that doesn’t mean that the journey getting there was easy. It definitely wasn’t.
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