‘Harlem’ Comes to a Close With Unconventional — and Groundbreaking — Choices
As Tracy Oliver came of age in the Nineties and early 2000s, sitcoms like Girlfriends, Sex and the City and The Golden Girls dominated. Ultimately, their themes surrounding love (or the lack of it) and friendship helped form the blueprint for her own show, Harlem — but she implemented her own flair. “The one thing I felt was different from my group of friends versus those shows was the fact that everyone I went out with wasn’t straight,” says Oliver. “It was so interesting that everyone was heterosexual in these shows, and it wasn’t true to my friend circle. So with Harlem, I knew at least one of them was going to be queer.”
Now in its third and final season, Harlem (which premiered Jan. 23 on Prime) is still reshaping the modern-day archetypes for Black love and friendship onscreen. This season, the show dives deeper into the explorations of mental health, relationship styles, and family dynamics. While the love lives of Camille (Meagan Good), Tye (Jerrie Johnson), Quinn (Grace Byers), and Angie (Shoniqua Shandai) are very much spicy and nuanced, it seems the writers room this time around was focused more on the characters’ internal worlds than their latest conquests. “We’ve done a lot of relationship stuff throughout the show,” says Oliver. “So for this season, the characters choose themselves and go in a direction that empowers them, without consideration of somebody else’s desire for their life.”
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Oliver and her writing team poetically illustrate how endings and beginnings are often one in the same. At the end of Season Two, Camille is processing a breakup with Ian (Tyler Lepley), wondering “Who’s going to lick my pussy?” while simultaneously walking away from her dream of becoming a tenured professor at Columbia University. After dating around so carelessly that she unknowingly winds up in a love triangle with a mother and daughter, Tye turns to celibacy, and pours her sexual appetites into her new tech adventure “P,” a dating app for polyamorous couples. Quinn tries to find the lover within herself following a heartbreaking ending with Isabella (Juani Feliz). And Angie settles down with fiancé Michael (Luke Forbes), showing how marriage is possible for sexually liberated women. But is any of it enough?
“I went about it in the opposite way you would normally do it because I see that in life,” Oliver says about writing this season’s script. “We did the messy version because that’s what life is and they’re going to figure it out and it doesn’t have to be unhealthy.”
Season Three finds each member of this “Brown Skin Girl” quartet navigating these crossroads. Camille is learning to trust herself as a freelancer both in love and work; Quinn is signing on high-end clientele for her styling business, while trying to balance her intense emotions as the Cancer sun we learn she is. Tye is reckoning with her habit of sabotaging relationships, like the one with her family, whom she’s alienated out of fear they won’t accept her sexuality. Angie positions herself for a future in Hollywood, surprisingly by way of a performance of a song called “Drugs in My Booty” (a reference to the movie Girls Trip, which was co-written by… Tracy Oliver).
Harlem also brings fresh perspectives this season to conversations its audience is having online. Topics like ethical non-monogamy, the decentering of romantic love (especially with men), forgiving and healing from toxic behaviors, and different versions of creating a family — be it through fertility treatments or single parenting — push the show’s boundaries even further.
“One thing I felt like we don’t see enough of is single motherhood,” says Oliver. “It’s usually in a package deal with a husband and a child and you did it in this order. It’s like the Cosby thing and that’s what you usually see on television. But people are stumbling into motherhood in different ways.” Oliver mentions a colleague who became a single mother by choice using a donor. “She’s doing a beautiful job, and I didn’t see stories like hers onscreen,” says Oliver. True to Oliver’s mission, this season feels groundbreaking in how it shows realistic and healthy relationships that combat negative stereotypes of Black love, and even co-parenting dynamics once romantic love has cooled.
This season introduces new characters such as Eva, the business mogul and love interest of Tye, played by Snowfall’s Gail Bean; Portia, an old friend turned lover of Ian, played by Dear White People star Logan Browning; and Seth, Quinn’s smooth-talking Major League Baseball rendezvous turned runway client, played by Queen Sugar’s Koji Siriboe (who also starred in Girls Trip).
The unconventional romance between Seth and Quinn is sure to be a talking point on social platforms over the season. The ultimate takeaway, Siriboe says, is that when you release your resistance, what you truly desire will find you. “As much as we want to be perfect, life is trial and error, and that’s what you need,” Siriboe says. “With the utmost grace and awareness, they were scratch paper for each other but also a pathway to who they wanted to be. Quinn was like 80 percent there, and one experience took her over the edge.”
The same can be said for Lepley’s character, Ian, who finds himself making hard choices this season after leaving his relationship with Camille because she does not share his desire for children. Harlem is often packaged as a show for Black women, because that’s who it centers, but this season sets a new precedent for Black male role models onscreen, a near-vacant but budding subgenre. “I always grew up thinking that manhood was just about protecting and providing, but what I learned in my experience as a Black man and as a father is that there’s another side to that,” says Lepley, connecting his own experience to Ian’s. “Having strength and virility is good, when you have the vulnerability to go along with it. The marriage of the two is what a man is. My hat is off to Tracy Olivier and the writers room for writing Ian with that in mind, because it’s something we can all learn from.
What has made Harlem stand out in a classic and well-trodden genre is its balance being both a comfort show and a series that’s fresh and thought-provoking. While it leans on the shoulders of shows before it like Sex and the City and Girlfriends, and stands in communion with modern shows of love and friendship, like Insecure, its unique conclusion challenges viewers to consider other possibilities for what happy endings can look like and mean.
Will we possibly catch up with Camille, Tye, Quinn, and Angie one more time?
“People keep asking about a movie, and the cast wants to do one as well,” Oliver tells Rolling Stone. “Maybe I should try to figure this out, I would love it.” But for now, this final season is enough. “This season is about doing what makes you happy and in the process getting your happily ever after, choosing yourself.”
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