Insecure finally grew up with its course-correcting Season 4

The Atlantic

Issa's casual sexual encounters in Season 2 "crystallized Insecure’s worst instinct: treating its characters’ dalliances primarily as commentary on real-life Millennial dating, rather than as parts of a larger story," says Hannah Giorgis. "The series especially used these flings to make generalizations about the romantic foibles of straight black people. Issa’s aversion to oral sex could have simply been a personal preference, but Insecure found a way to make it about the hang-ups of heterosexual black women as a whole. Many conversations that Issa had with her friends were full of baffling lines that’d be more at home in a Steve Harvey advice column: I just feel like guys see black women as disposable after you give them head—like you’re forever a ho if you do it. Why do you think black men are out here chasing after white women? In early seasons, such retrograde dialogue sometimes made Insecure feel like a prompt for weekly Black Twitter debates on dating. The characters registered as symbols rather than fleshed-out people. Lawrence (played by Jay Ellis), Issa’s omnipresent ex, was less an interesting figure with hopes, dreams, and feelings, and more an angsty avatar for straight men to identify with. Moments such as the eye scene seemed written entirely to generate chaos online—but Twitter drama alone does not a satisfying TV show make. It’s been a pleasant surprise, then, to see Insecure course-correct in its most recent season. Season 4, which ended this week, deepened its two central relationships—between Issa and Lawrence, as well as between Issa and her best friend, Molly (Yvonne Orji). Though Sunday’s finale still introduced a twist that shocked Twitter, Insecure focused more on the growth of its core characters, even shading in details about them that added more gravity to previous seasons."

ALSO:

• Could Insecure follow Lawrence to San Francisco?: "Yeah. As long as the characters always tether back to Issa, it merits following them," says showrunner Prentice Penny. "That’s what we’re figuring out now in the writers’ room for season five: What does it look like if she’s commuting, or what does this look like if we’re in his point of view? Do we tie things back? Do we bring things full circle?"
• Kendrick Sampson is glad that Nathan's bipolar disorder wasn't demonized or made violent: "There’s a full spectrum of bipolar disorder," he says. "My brother had to navigate that. For me, I have very debilitating anxiety. In media, we like to sensationalize what mental health looks like. But sometimes it’s just a regular mental-health struggle. I think Hollywood has done a vast disservice to people with mental-health issues by constantly portraying them as violent. The truth is that violence is cultural in America. This is a country founded on violence."