Hulu's Onyx Collective Is Doing More Than Just Paying Lip Service to Diversity

If 2022 was the year Amazon Freevee broke out as a streaming success story, then this year belongs to Hulu's Onyx Collective.

The Disney-owned content brand launched in May 2021 with the goal of uplifting voices traditionally marginalized by Hollywood, and under the leadership of Tara Duncan (who previously served as the president of Freeform after a stint at Netflix), it has flourished. In Onyx's inaugural year, its first-ever acquisition, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature; the following year brought the release of first scripted series, legal drama Reasonable Doubt, and docuseries The Hair Tales, produced by industry heavyweights Tracee Ellis Ross and Oprah Winfrey.

But as the saying goes, good things come in threes, and that's undoubtedly the case for Onyx Collective. In 2023, the brand — which functions as its own studio within Disney and Hulu — began releasing new projects on a regular basis, including critically acclaimed docuseries The 1619 Project, Kerry Washington's UnPrisoned, and mystery-thriller The Other Black Girl. Though these shows varied widely in tone and subject matter, they were essential to solidifying Onyx's identity as a niche programmer focused on telling stories that are broadly applicable, yet specific in their perspective.

Onyx started off its 2023 campaign strong with The 1619 Project, which serves as both an expansion of Nikole Hannah-Jones' New York Times essay project and a response to the backlash it received from Republican politicians and conservative pundits. In each of the six episodes, which correspond to different essays in her Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Hannah-Jones offers an incisive look at the ways in which racism has shaped (and continues to shape) American culture and society, from the co-opting of Black music to slavery's influence on our capitalist system.

While right-wing critics have deliberately engaged with these ideas, and The 1619 Project as a whole, in bad faith, the "overtly patriotic" show demonstrates just how wrong those attacks are. As Stephen Robinson wrote in his review for Primetimer, "[The docuseries] shows how Black Americans, even when enslaved, believed so strongly in the nation's promise that they fought to perfect a democracy originally designed to exclude them."

Not only did The 1619 Project expand the reach of the original journalistic endeavor — Hulu had 48 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2023, compared to the NYT's 9.7 million — but it established Onyx Collective as a brand willing to engage with big questions and tackle thorny issues head-on. Notably, the Hulu docuseries includes Hannah-Jones' argument that protecting slavery was a major motivating factor in the American Revolution, a claim the NYT later walked back by stating that only "some" colonists fought to preserve the institution, not all. That Onyx opted to leave this point in The 1619 Project reflects a deep commitment to standing by its stable of creative talent, even in the face of intense social and political pressure (something Disney knows a thing or two about).

While The 1619 Project offers a top-level look at America's racist history (though it does infuse personal commentary from Hannah-Jones, who speaks candidly about the challenges of being biracial), UnPrisoned — the second Onyx show to come out of Kerry Washington's overall deal with ABC Signature — tackles it on a more intimate level. Created by Tracy McMillan, the dramedy is grounded in the relationship between therapist Paige Alexander (Washington) and her father Edwin (Delroy Lindo), who has been in and out of prison for most of Paige's life. When Edwin is released after serving a 17-year sentence, Paige reluctantly takes him in; over time, they explore what "rehabilitation" truly means as they work to repair their bond and create a different future for Paige's 16-year-old son Finn (Faly Rakotohavana).

Paige and Edwin's circumstances are shaped by bigotry and the carceral state, but McMillan and showrunner Yvette Lee Bowswer keep the plot focused on how those forces affect this particular family. That narrow scope ensures that when UnPrisoned does choose to comment on the obstacles Black and formerly incarcerated people face every day, it packs a powerful punch, as with standout episode "Nigrescence," in which Edwin is forced to confront his past in Alabama. Still, for all the shrewd points "Nigrescence" makes about the importance of honoring one's heritage and the corrupt nature of the criminal justice system, Washington and Lindo's characters remain at its center, a decision that reminds viewers that their personal history is just as essential to the story as the one they share with millions of other Americans.

Like UnPrisoned, which finds no shortage of humor in Paige and Edwin's struggles, there's an unmistakable sense of joy at the heart of Searching for Soul Food. As Chef Alisa Reynolds explains in the Mississippi-set premiere, soul food may have been "born from a deep history filled with struggle and pain," but it's also a marker of community, as sitting down for a big meal has always united people, in good times and bad. While traveling the globe, Reynolds learns about the importance of fry bread to Indigenous culture in the Americas, Peru's unique blend of cuisines, and the surprising origins of Neapolitan pizza. Along the way, the people she meets and the meals she shares with them lead her to reflect on her own relationship with food and the larger connection between cooking, culture, and history.

With Searching for Soul Food, Reynolds broadens not just viewers' knowledge of "soul food" as a type of cuisine, but our understanding of how different cultures around the world have used food as an act of resistance amid oppression (something it shares with another Hulu travelogue, Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi). That sort of expansive outlook has always been a hallmark of Onyx Collective's unscripted programming, but Reynolds' globe-trotting docuseries cemented it in the most literal of ways, and its success carved out a path for the brand's latest adventure, Drive with Swizz Beatz, an automotive docuseries featuring Beatz and his son Nasir Dean.

Onyx Collective's final scripted release of the year, an adaptation of Zakiya Dalila Harris' The Other Black Girl, marks a major departure for the brand. Determined to climb the ladder at a prestigious publishing company, Nella Rogers (Sinclair Daniel) ignores the many microaggressions she faces every day and goes above and beyond to impress her boss (Bellamy Young). When the company hires another Black employee, Hazel (Ashleigh Murray), Nella believes she's finally found an ally in the office, but it soon becomes clear that Hazel, who abides by the rules of respectability politics, can't be trusted.

Through this fast-paced story, co-showrunners Jordan Reddout and Gus Hickey (alongside executive producers Harris and Rashida Jones) sound off on workplace racism, tokenism, and what's deemed "acceptable" for Black women, as well as the many ways in which trying to fit into white systems and spaces can lead to disaster. Their commentary is biting, but it's never heavy-handed, in large part thanks to the show's many twists — as in any good thriller, there are multiple kidnappings and chase sequences — and the comedic relief brought by Nella's friend Malaika (Brittany Adebumola), the only character to suspect something fishy is up with Hazel. The degree to which The Other Black Girl blends its various elements reflects Onyx's refusal to stay in a single lane: It can handle comedic stories, intriguing mysteries, and sharp social satire, without ever missing a beat.

If Onyx Collective's upcoming slate is any indication, it will continue to fulfill that promise in the year ahead. The brand has a series of major projects in the works, including Mahershala Ali's The Plot (a thriller based on Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel of the same name), Natasha Rothwell comedy How to Die Alone — the first series to emerge from Rothwell's overall deal with Disney — and Sheba, a scripted drama from Ryan Coogler's Proximity Media about the first queen of the African continent. Plus, Kerry Washington's UnPrisoned and Reasonable Doubt have been renewed for second seasons, with Morris Chestnut joining the legal drama as an adversary to Emayatzy Corinealdi's criminal defense attorney.

The creative diversity and curiosity of spirit of the shows released in 2023 (and those coming down the pipeline) embody Onyx Collective's unique set of priorities. The brand isn't just paying lip service to equity and inclusion, as so many companies tend to do; it's practicing what it preaches by honoring the stories of marginalized groups, without reducing them to those experiences. As Duncan told the Los Angeles Times at the start of the year, "I don't think the conversation around where we have to be is limited to the conversation around identity. There are other elements and aspects of our experience that have yet to be fully tapped from a creative point of view."

In that sense, Onyx Collective's work is just getting started. There's no limit to where the Disney-owned brand could go in 2024 and beyond, but after a year like this one, all signs point to a remarkable second act.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.