'Mixed-ish' season 1 episode 1 review: 'Black-ish' spinoff shows young Rainbow grappling with her identity
When 'mixed-ish' (created by 'black-ish creator Kenya Barris) starts it looks like any other 'black-ish' episode. Dre (Anthony Anderson) and the kids are trying to pick something to watch and when Dre suggests the 1984 breakdancing film 'Breakin' featuring Jean-Claude van Damme as a background dancer, his kids mock him. When Dre looks to his wife Bow for support, she tells him she hasn't watched it. And so Bow's history of growing up in a commune comes up. When Dre remarks that it's weird that the two met at all, Bow says that they did because the elders of her commune were "detained for 3 to 5 years" causing Bow's family to move in with her paternal grandfather.
This is how Bow begins narrating her story of moving to a world she and her younger siblings, Johan and Santamonica, are new to. Forced to move into his capitalist millionaire father's fully-furnished rental in order to ensure the survival of his family, Bow's father Paul makes a pact with his wife, Alicia, to uphold the values of their post-racial commune.
At first, this would seem like a simple arrangement, with Paul deciding to grow vegetables to sell and Alicia deciding to join a socially-responsible law firm. Later, Alicia ends up joining her father-in-law's law firm when she realizes that living in the outside world is much harder than they expected. Paul is upset with this (it's easy for him without having to struggle to find a home to house himself, his wife, and three kids) until Alicia points out that anywhere else, she's a black woman, that "it's different for me and it's different for the kids".
But the central focus of the show is on Bow and her siblings. It is only in the outside world where they realize that being interracial makes them different and might subject them to ridicule. It's important to keep in mind that it was only in 1967 that interracial marriage in the United States was legalized. Further, it was only in 2000 that the United States census allowed people to choose multiple races on census forms. And so, Bow and her siblings are faced with the question of choosing a side.
While her brother Johan chooses to identify with his African-American side to fit in at school, her sister Santamonica chooses to channel the 'Material Girl'-era Madonna. But Bow struggles with her decision, not wanting to choose to be only one part of her cultural identity.
It's clear from the outset that 'mixed-ish' intends to deal with difficult subjects, more so since it is set in the 80s. As Bow narrates, today's biracial kids have celebrities like Drake, Meghan Markle, and former President Barack Obama to look up to, but back then, it was relatively unknown. This is questionable, certainly -- being biracial is not something that just came up after interracial marriage was legalized -- and the show needs to fine tune how it deals with these issues, especially white privilege. One thing the show will have to address (even though it would prefer not to) is how Bow's mother is more dark-skinned on the prequel than the original 'black-ish'.
