Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dreaming Whilst Black’ On Showtime, A Comedy About A Guy Who Tries To Live His Dream While Dealing With Constant Microaggressions

Dreaming Whilst Black is based on a 2018 web series about a young filmmaker in a dead-end job who tries to follow his ambitions while navigating just how tough it is to do it as a Black person in a white world. We’ve seen funny takes on the aggressions, both micro and macro, people of color face, but the layers of the show taking place in London in that city’s entertainment industry give the topic a new perspective. It also helps that the show is really funny.

DREAMING WHILST BLACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a man from behind as he confidently walks on a movie set. A tracking shot of him passing everyone who works on the film ends with him sitting in the directors’ seat, and yelling “Action!” Then the same man wakes up in a drab conference room.

The Gist: Kwabena Robinson (Adjani Salmon) is a filmmaker who works a boring office job at a recruitment firm, and he deals with clients like Lewis (Will Hislop), whose CV is riddled with errors and who tries to cover the fact that he’s been fired from 14 different jobs. He has to deal with a wimpy boss and white co-workers who ask him about what movie to watch with a date who happens to be Black. The co-worker keeps suggesting films where rape and/or slavery dominate.

Kwabena ducks out of work early to go to a pitchfest for aspiring filmmakers; for years, he’s been pitching his film based on his grandparents’ meeting after emigrating from Jamaica on the same ship in the 1940s. On the bus, he sees a beautiful woman and imagines that he smoothly introduces himself to her, but in reality, she gets off the bus and barely notices him.

He gets to the pitchfest too late; all the slots are filled. But he then runs into an old film school friend Amy (Dani Moseley), who works for the production company sponsoring the pitchfest. She’s an executive assistant; not quite where she wants to be but to Kwabena, she at least has a foot in the door. After having a couple of drinks — and enduring a white bartender assuming that he’s with the other Black person standing at the bar — he throws a Hail Mary and asks Amy if she can put a good word in with her boss. She tells him to send her a one-page treatment by the next morning.

He goes back to his flat, where he lives with his cousin Maurice (Demmy Ladipo) and his very pregnant wife Funmi (Rachel Adedeji), and writes up the treatment. Good news from Amy: Her boss is interested, but the only appointment Amy can get for him is first thing in the morning. So he calls in sick to work while on the bus. Bad news: One of his more annoying coworkers sees him do it. He gets to the production office and sees Lewis, who completely forgets that they know each other.

Kwabena gets more good news from Amy; they want to see him again the next afternoon at 4:30. He says he can make it, but he also has a presentation to make at work, and after he gets snitched on for calling in sick, he’s on thin ice. He imagines himself quitting, but goes through with the presentation, blowing off the meeting with Amy’s boss. He tries to forget blowing his chance at the office’s karaoke night, but when he gets called up for a duet just so he can say the n-word in a rap song, he quits for real.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dreaming Whilst Black, which is co-created by Salmon based on a 2018 web series, has shades of Insecure, but more set in the London entertainment industry.

Our Take: We enjoyed the first two episodes of Dreaming Whilst Black, because Salmon and his co-creator Ali Hughes aren’t afraid of going there for laughs. The microaggressions that we see both Kwabena and Amy go through are funny because they’re so completely unnecessary; they’re a function of white people somehow feeling they have to be “allies” and performative instead of just being colleagues and friends.

The microaggressions are indeed tiny: For instance, there’s the snippy colleague chiding Kwabena for having his fragrant hot lunch at his desk when all the white people around him are eating hot food, too. The kicker to that scene is when he walks into the break room, an Indian colleague is eating her lunch, and they exchange knowing looks. It’s stuff like that, piled up through the lives of people of color, that make being successful all the more difficult.

In the second episode, Amy finds out from her boss (Peter Serafinowicz) that the company is looking for “diversity of experience” as she throws her hat in for an assistant producer position, but the job ends up going to a white person, anyway. What’s sharp about these situations is how true to life they really are, like when Amy’s boss says he talked to his friend, who “happens to be Black.” Again, these offenses are tiny and seemingly harmless to the white person delivering them, but they don’t have the perspective of someone who hears them over and over for their entire lives.

Salmon and Hughes aren’t afraid, however, to turn the humor around on Kwabena and his family. Maurice is obsessed with everything that could go wrong with Funmi’s pregnancy, and that “fetus envy” is a real thing for men. And Kwabena sometimes can’t get out of his own way, as we see in the second episode, when a rich “auntie” will provide him funding for his film if she films her 60th birthday party; he promises he can do all sorts of shots that requires fancy equipment, even though he has no idea if he can get his hands on any of it.

So the series isn’t going to be about just about the uphill battle that the title describes; it’s going to also be about how Kwabena’s own peccadilloes and quirks, along with a burgeoning relationship with Vanessa (Rachel Adedeji), that gorgeous woman he saw on the bus, diverts and distracts him.

Sex and Skin: None in the first two episodes, though we do see some post-coital bed cohabitation.

Parting Shot: After Kwabena quits, he sends Amy a voicemail thanking her for giving him the kick in the pants he needed to do it. He then sees the beautiful woman from the day before get off the bus; her wig gets caught in the door, and he flags down the bus to retrieve it. She says her name is Vanessa and she asks him what he does; he says, “I’m a filmmaker.”

Sleeper Star: Demmy Ladipo is funny as Maurice, who just can’t seem to get over what could go wrong with Funmi’s pregnancy, as well as other quirks.

Most Pilot-y Line: Kwabena’s co-worker talks about his date, and professes that “I’m not a shower, nor, to be fair, a grower.” That’s certainly the kind of workplace conversation that only happens on movies and sitcoms.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dreaming Whilst Black is a funny take on how following your ambitions is much harder when you’re Black and facing a world of institutional racism, but the show doesn’t hesitate to give its main characters their own ambition-stalling quirks, as well.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.