What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s staff and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on film and TV. 

Disappointing season of your favorite prestige drama got you down? Let down by the big sitcom revival that promised to open up a dialogue, but just wound up taking potshots at easy (and vulnerable) targets while setting up a runway for Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing over at Old Man Murdoch’s place? A thousand Netflix…

On a recent Sunday night (June 10, to be exact), primetime viewers found themselves with multiple options for LGBTQIA+ stories: Pose, Vida, and Claws. And not only are all three on major cable networks, but they were all created by queer people.

Following a stellar performance as both host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, Donald Glover capped off the weekend by dropping a surprise Childish Gambino track that pretty much guaranteed he’d be dominating the trending topics on Twitter. The Hiro Murai-directed video for “This Is America” is a…

When Netflix first announced Justin Simien would adapt his thoughtful and stylish satire, Dear White People, for the streaming service, the reactions were mixed, to say the least. Fans of his 2014 film looked forward to a more extensive discussion of race, while some (white) people on the so-called “alt-right” called…

Anyone wondering when the warm spring weather will arrive might end up reconsidering after seeing Netflix’s May blossoms (read: shows). The second season of Justin Simien’s superb Dear White People series arrives May 4, while the first half of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season four hits the streamer at the end of the…

Even though Netflix is loath to tell us exactly how many of its subscribers are watching what, the streaming platform does release its own year-end list of superlatives like any good media company. And the original series that users couldn’t get enough of, that they binged at a rate of 2+ hours of viewing per day,…

Lena Waithe’s TV career is continuing to take off after her history-making win at the Emmys earlier this year for Master Of None, with her Showtime series The Chi set to premiere on January 7 and Entertainment Weekly now reporting that she’ll also have a recurring role in season two of Netflix’s Dear White People.…

Dear White People director Justin Simien is getting back into making films, with Entertainment Weekly reporting that he’s currently developing a new horror satire about a woman whose hair weave turns out to be evil. Bad Hair will be Simien’s first film since his 2014 debut; in the meantime, he’s been working on the Dear…

Prepare to get schooled some more, because Netflix has just renewed Dear White People. According to The Hollywood Reporter, creator Justin Simien announced the season two order while at the Essence Festival on Friday. Simien adapted his own film for the acclaimed Netflix series. And, given room to breathe as a series, …

From a business prospective, the forecast for TV in 2017 isn’t the brightest: While ratings continue to erode for the broadcast networks, several cable outlets that joined the original-programming gold rush are now backing out, with cash-flush digital competitors like Facebook and Snap poised to stake those abandoned…

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Friday, May 11, and Saturday, May 12. All times are Eastern.

The image above is technically from the fifth episode of Dear White People, but the armed confrontation between Reggie and an overzealous campus cop looms large over “Chapter VI,” which shows the characters trying to cope after the harrowing ordeal. The cold open doesn’t provide backstory for one of the characters or…

Winchester University needed a palate cleanser after the Pastiche party, and so did Dear White People, which has been frozen in that moment since the pilot. Instead, in “Chapter V,” the campus gets a mouthful of poison in the form of a harrowing confrontation between an armed officer and a black student. It’s a tragic…

I have a female friend I’ve known since high school, a gorgeous dark-skinned black woman with arresting eyes and a complexion so smooth it’s maddening. She periodically tells a story about a time she was walking down the street and a car full of black men rolled up to her, shouted at her about how ugly she is, and…

For most students at Winchester, including the black ones, the backlash against the Dear Black People party is a campus cause they’ve opted into. Troy Fairbanks is a unique case. As the son of a prominent dean at Winchester and the frontrunner for student body president, Troy is expected to respond to controversial…

Like the best stories about college life, Dear White People leans hard into the idea of a university as an identity incubator. Though the practical value of higher education is an evergreen debate, almost no one questions the value of introducing young people to new ideas and granting them the freedom and autonomy to…

Even if Dear White People didn’t work in practice, it would be exciting in principle. The concept for Justin Simien’s 2014 film is one that was always better suited to a long format because it’s more about a community at a certain point in history than it is about the individual characters and their storylines. Simien…

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Friday, April 28, and Saturday, April 29. All times are Eastern.

Coming three years after the film of the same name, Dear White People the TV series immediately surpasses its source material. Creator Justin Simien revisits the film’s territory in his Netflix series, but the new format allows the show to dive into topics in a way the movie couldn’t. The original film was too…