This Week in Hip Hop BET Awards, Erin Hudson and the Family Business go to BET +, BlackAF gets a second season
This is Thursday week of July 2, 2020. On the entertainment front last Sunday we had the BET Awards. The Award hosted by Amanda Seales was the first remote BET Awards due to the corona virus. Sunday was also the first time BET Awards was televised on CBS giving them 1.9 million viewers and 3.7 million viewers overall. The award took a Black Lives Matter theme and paid respect to George Floyd. Award winners included Chris Brown, Roddy Rich and Megan Thee Stallion. Alicia Keys debuted her video “Perfect Way To Die” and former First Lady, Michelle Obama gave Beyonce Knowles the Humanitarian Award.
Speaking of BET their star Ernie Hudson gave an insightful interview on his career and his appearance in Ghostbusters. Ernie stars in the BET flick “The Family Business.” I watched the first season and expected the next season to be on BET. To my surprised the next season will now be on BET +. Really this makes little sense, BET has maybe two hours of new programming every week so they can’t afford to pass up on this show or any other. Why are consumers paying for BET? Mind you, one new show like American Soul is not enough. I have already seen most of their movies, which they repeat frequently. Do we need hours and hours of repeat sitcoms? Viacom or whoever is running the station has to better. If they put everything on BET + they should probably shut down their station.
Last week another show that will be back is #blackAF which got renewed for a second season. This show is on Netflix staring Black-ish creator Kenya Barrios. It got a questionable response, some loved it and some hated it. Either way it’s coming back. My two cents on the show, it was ok. I really liked the episode staring black creators, Tyler Perry, Lena Waithe and Will Packer. But I felt Kenya was just ok as an actor and Rashida Jones was miscast.
Thinking of Kenya, the TV creator always took an episode of Black-ish, Mixed-ish or blackAF to celebrate Juneteenth. So I know he was happy when the holiday got the attention it deserved this year. For those who don’t know June 19 is the day slaves learned they were free everywhere. Recently they brought the cast of Black-ish together to talk about their Juneteenth episode.