EXCLUSIVE: Justin Simien Builds on the Momentum of 'Dear White People' With Netflix Series

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Netflix

Dear White People,
Justin Simien’s hit Sundance film about race relations on a predominantly white
Ivy League-type campus, gets expanded into a 10-episode series for Netflix.

Making its debut on Friday, April 28, the TV adaptation tells
the story of racial tension largely through the perspectives of Samantha
White (Logan Browning), a biracial student who uses her radio show to dress
down white students who appropriate black culture; Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P.
Bell), the dean’s son who is held up to a higher standard; Lionel Higgins
(DeRon Horton), a freshman reporter coming to terms with his sexuality; and
Coco Conners (Antoinette Robertson), a scholarship student who seeks a higher
status quo.

The film, which first debuted at the 2014 Sundance Film
Festival, was a sharp-tongued take on what many thought of as a post-racial
America following the election of President Barack Obama. Picking up where the
events -- culminating with a blackface Halloween party -- of the film left off, the
TV series expands that conversation in an era of President Donald Trump,
accusations surrounding Bill Cosby and the Black Lives Matter movement.

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“It felt more satisfying to continue rather than reboot,” he
says, comparing it to superhero film franchises. “One thing I hate about
superhero reboots is that we have to get the origin [story] all over again. It’s
like, ‘We got it.’ I wasn’t interested in that as a storyteller. I just wanted
to keep going.”

But for all the real-world issues surrounding the series, at
its core, Simien says, Dear White People
is really about what it feels like to be a black face in a white place.

“That’s always been my black experience. I’ve never had the luxury of being surrounded by black people,” he tells ET, refuting any direct comparison to A Different World, the spinoff of The Cosby Show about students attending a historically black college. While A Different World writer and producer Yvette Lee Bowser -- she also created Living Single -- serves as showrunner on Dear White People, that’s where any similarities stop.

“The experience of being a person of color trying to make it
in a world that has decided what you are before you entered it -- that particular
part of the human experience -- that’s what I wanted to get at,” Simien continues.
“I wanted to put characters out there in a culture that are chronically unseen
and [tell] stories that are never really serviced in a continuing fashion.”

To do that, Simien breaks up the show into multiple chapters
told through the perspectives of various characters (Samantha is “Chapter I,”
Lionel is “Chapter II” and so on). “It was really important for me to not
present my point of view only,” the filmmaker says of the show’s expanding
narratives that will surprise viewers as background characters come to the fore
in later chapters.

And when it comes to the new perspectives, Simien credits Star Trek for pushing the show beyond
its core characters. “One of my favorite things about Star Trek: The Next Generation is that when they got into later
parts of the season, you would sometimes just follow a character,” he explains.
“Sometimes you’d just follow a lieutenant you never met before. There’s
something fun about that to me. I thought, What
if we do that every episode?
…That’s certainly something we do in this
season and I’m really excited about doing moving forward.”