‘Mike’ Has A Black Woman Problem

It doesn’t take long for “Mike” to really derail. And despite personal complaints from former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, on whom the show is based, it’s not due to the fact that producer and screenwriter Steven Rogers didn’t go through him for approval.

The Hulu series features an original storytelling issue, which premiered on-stage on Thursday. As many viewers will note minutes into the first episode, there’s really nothing new in the narrative that Rogers and showrunner Karin Gist tell here.

It is well documented that Tyson, portrayed by Trevante Rhodes, had an unfortunate upbringing. He was the youngest of three children raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York City by single mother Lorna May Smith Tyson (Olunik Adeliei), with whom he had a tumultuous relationship. Even a quick Wikipedia search can tell you that Tyson was raised by then-instructor Cus D’Amato (Harvey Keitel) when his mother died at 16.

Prior to this, the boy was constantly picked up in and out of prison by his classmates for various petty crimes, for his stamina and his weight, in and out of prison throughout his teens. But one detail that “Mike” comes back to over and over is how damaging his mother was to his life.

Through a tragic depiction of Tyson’s younger years by both Zayden James and BJ Minor, we see Lorna May continually devalue her son and tell him he will be nothing.

Mike suffers almost from the moment the series begins in the first of several fourth-wall-breaking narrations by adult Mike, and continues through at least the initial five episodes made available to the press.

“There’s a lot of mess that we’ll find,” Mike tells us.

and it’s all done To Him. When it is not his mother who is giving him grief, it is someone else. In a later episode, “Mike” hints at promoter Don King (Russell Hornsby) misappropriating boxer’s money. The series has plenty of potential to explore how white Hollywood modifies young black male athletes, yet it ends awkwardly.

Instead, Geist and Rogers choose to hammer home how their mother and the other women in Mike’s life, who are most notably black, helped harm them – ex-wife Robin Givens (Laura Harrier). ) to 18-year-old Desiree Washington (Lee Eubanks), who accused her of rape.

To be clear, “Mike” doesn’t openly spoil any of these women. But each of them is drawn in a single-dimensional way that makes Mike look like the more complex human we least understand, even if we don’t agree with his actions.

When he does something that definitely hurt these women, the series is quick to show us how he’s hurt too — and sometimes by them.

Rogers isn’t beyond reproach just because he’s a white man who can’t understand how damaging this framing is. As a producer of a show with black female characters, it’s her job to make sure.

But this approach is especially shocking when you consider that Gist, who is famous for black female-focused shows like “Girlfriends,” told members of the press during a Television Critics Association panel this month that he’s strongly about women. Feels like they are part of “Mike”. ,

And yet, this is what we got: hackneyed portrayals of black women.

Tyson has said that his mother was emotionally and physically abused when he was growing up. In the series, she is also shown taking time off from work or from her daytime routine to pick up Mike from the police station after 37 arrests. She is a single black mother with two other children in New York, still in the midst of a horrific post-civil rights movement. None of this nuance is ever considered in “Mike”.

Granted, the series never ceases to remind us that its story is clearly told through Mike’s personal lens, which makes Tyson’s displeasure for the show all the more awkward. But the fact is that these women don’t get equally fine portrayed, resulting in a different watch.

This brings us to the moment “Mike” Swan takes a dive off a cliff. It’s a series premiering in the #MeToo era that claims to re-examine the way women are represented on screen, but it’s set in a period—at this point in the show, the late ’80s. In – he was nothing.

While “Mike” tries to redefine Tyson’s story for a more conscious audience, it doesn’t extend the same grace to the black women on the show. A few episodes into “Mike” — amounting to only an hour or so of the series, as each episode is mercifully half an hour long — Givens decides to hang it up to dry.

This is when many have revisited the 1988 Barbara Walters interview where Givens alleged that Tyson abused her during their one-year marriage. This is when she was constantly maligned in the press for being a “gold digger” and speaking out against her then-husband.

That’s even after hearing that in 2017 “Boomerang” director Reginald Hudlin said that Givens, an actor featured in the 1992 film, “was a very controversial character because of his history with Mike Tyson.” Hudlin said that “there was a lot of discussion about the decision to cast her amid rumors about who she was as a person.” The story around him marked Givens’ career.

It is also as The New York Times contributed a recent re-examination of Givens’ legacy to critic Salamisha Tillett in the present era, realizing her undeniable value and contribution to the screen portrayal of black women with consideration that How wrong was their discussion.

What happens is once “Mike” really delves into the relationship between the boxer and the actress—without spoilers for the way the story is told in the episode that airs next week—he’s back in that corner. paints in which she was during the ’90s. , And it’s annoying.

This might If the series weren’t so hellbent on portraying all of its black female characters in this way, it would be overlooked. For him, it is impossible to ignore, and it should not be so. We also couldn’t spend much time on the show without Desiree’s painful account of her experience, telling us about the impact it had on Tyson’s career and psyche.

“Mike” is a strange creation designed primarily to conjure up multiple truths about a man who has only adhered to a negative narrative over the past few decades.

The issue isn’t about portraying Tyson through the binary lens of a villain or a hero; The series doesn’t shy away from his rape allegation or his cheating. Rather, it is about extending the compassion and desire to understand the nuances of the black women who circled their lives. Without it, “Mike” turns out to be like the opposite hype.