Emmy Episodes: Black-ish

It’s always my policy to watch every Emmy-nominated episode each year, which leads me to sample a handful of shows that I don’t tune in to on a regular basis. For the third year in a row, I’m making a special effort to spotlight each of those installments to offer my perspective on shows that I don’t review each week.

Black-ish: Season 4, Episode 6 “First and Last” (B)

This was probably the most solid of this show’s six submitted episodes for Best Comedy Series that I’ve seen thus far, the fourth and the first that gets us away from the first few episodes of the season. This show does manage, every once in a while, to be relatively poignant even as it typically overextends itself on its representation of what family dynamics can be like. Diane was at perhaps her most believable in this episode, telling her very eager mother that she knew what it meant to get her period, as Bow had to resist the suffocating presence of both Alicia and Ruby, who had their own ways of dealing with this momentous event. Jack calling Zoey to come console her younger sister was very sweet, and I enjoyed the fact that she was, for her, very nice and appreciative to him as he was thrilled to discovered that he was going through his own transformation requiring the immediate and frequent application of deodorant. The Junior that I’ve seen in almost every episode of this show that I’ve watched has been a major dunce, and therefore it was strange to see him catch on so quickly to Dre’s psychological warfare scheme to knock him off his game before their big match. Ultimately, Dre did win by not letting him have that victory, staying one step ahead of him on the mental battlefield. The overarching plotline of Connor trying to kill his father is moderately amusing and probably one of the stronger recurring comedic elements I’ve seen on this show.