By 2013, a year after a half-hour comedy calledwhich premiered in 2016. Now in the writers room for season five, Rae discusses getting back to production during COVID-19, pay parity and what it means to craft a legacy:"To be able to have the ability to bring other people in, who I think are massively more talented, it’s something that brings me so much excitement."I love it. I’ll walk in my neighborhood all the time because that’s the only exercise I’m willing to do.
But Yvonne was like,"They’re watching and they’re seeing the work we’re doing." To be a four-season show, to have it happen now, is not lost on me because there’s so many new and amazing shows. To have the culture support our show, it’s a FUBU [For Us, By Us] show in every way … I feel so blessed and we love every second., it took so long and every draft was like,"No, this isn’t it. No, this isn’t it. No, this isn’t it." I was just like,"Oh, OK.
All of that was early on. I remember the biggest thing back and forth we had was with the former president [Michael Lombardo], and the show title. He wasn’t super insistent about it, but he was passionate about the fact that he didn’t think thatfit because he was like,"I see these strong, confident Black women, and they’re fierce." And all the terms that we use to describe ourselves, but I was like,"Ooh, that’s not … No, they’re not specifically.
A hundred percent. There’s no question that some of the input that we would get would be different. I’m also really happy that there aren’t a lot of executives on our show. Part of the intimacy is that we have two people [Amy Gravitt, HBO’s comedy head, and Amy Hodge, vp original programming], where at a network, you have two people here, three people here, two people there, and it’s just so many voices. Can HBO improve in terms of their hiring practices? A thousand percent.
Sara [Rastogi, who is the vp development at Issa Rae Productions] was like,"What do you think about bringing it to Jordan Peele or pairing with them?" So it was as easy as that. They were into it and then it was up to us to convince the writer, a young white female writer [Leyna Krow], that we were the best people for the job. She said in an interview what intrigued her the most was that the ideas that we had extended beyond her perspective.
geez you're really running with this aren't you.
YvonneOrji IssaRae What a wonderful article written by Jessica Herndon. When she asked Issa, 'why do you prefer to keep things private?' and Issa answered 'I guess because it’s private', I legit read that in her voice. This felt like a conversation between friends thankyoumoreplease
IssaRae That would be making history also Hollywood reporter