![]() For anyone who felt like the narrative catharsis of the Season 1 finale signaled a parallel breakthrough for David as a character, this will feel like a low blow. If 14-year-old David’s ritualized code-switching/mask-wearing was a product of trauma-a kind of armor protecting his soul from a world that meant it harm-then 30-year-old David’s inability to outgrow it is a sign that his trauma has just compounded. In “Barrel of Oranges,” it’s David himself, breaking the fourth wall with a tight, indecipherable smile to pass it on to the audience. In “David’s Sky,” it’s the ghost of David’s murdered father figure, Sky (Isaiah Johnson), giving him that advice. Once he finally gets where he’s going, we see him take a deep breath, plaster on a bracing I belong here grin, and head into a majority-white space awaiting his big presentation. Once the sun is up and his morning obligations are through, we see him don his shirt and tie, shrug on his backpack, and try to shrink himself into the crowd, as an officer associated with Miami-Dade public transit attempts to goad him into some kind of reaction. When he inevitably fails, we see him painfully try to shrug off getting caught. We see him get up while it’s still dark, strip the sodden sheets from the bed, and try to sneak out behind his building’s watchful guard to start his day. In both outings, we meet David as he’s waking up from a fitful, sweat-soaked sleep. In what’s clearly an effort to underscore just how little David has been able to heal in the 15 or so years that have elapsed since the end of the first season, the episode that opens Season 2 (“Barrel of Oranges”) parallels the pilot (“David’s Sky”) with an almost eerie precision. This, though, seems to be the thrust of the new season-if David was closed off to the world when we met him as a 14-year-old, he’s a locked vault as an adult. ![]() We know David is a good and caring person, of course, but what he’s describing (and how he’s going about accomplishing it) feels on the verge of shady. Given how much of David’s life since we last saw him is still a mystery to us as the season starts, it’s uncertain if this vision is informed more by wanting to support the people he left behind at the Ville when he went off to Hurston Prep, or by wanting to tear down a place that’s haunted him since Sky died. How David got to this point is an open question-especially given how much trauma he’s still clearly carrying around-but what he’s aiming to do now that he’s there is clear: He wants to go back to the very place that left him with all that trauma. Hall) who lives in his building, and a deeply tense relationship with both his little brother (Arlen Escarpeta), who’s since become a smart-mouthed police officer, and his now-sober mom (Alana Arenas), who’s since become a foster parent for queer youth in one of Miami’s leafier suburbs. Jump, it turns out-15 years into the future, where David (played as an adult by Kwame Patterson) is a successful Miami businessman with a classy downtown apartment, a distant-but-satisfying friends-with-benefits arrangement with a yoga-loving architect (Brittany S. What could a second season of David’s story even do? The pilot and the finale echoed one another the trauma David spent the rest of the season working hard not to have to acknowledge finally broke through in a way that seemed to promise open skies ahead. As a portrait of one particularly devastating year in one particular young man’s life, the first season of the series was nearly perfect. That said, as exciting as it was to know there would be more David Makes Man in our collective future, it was also a bit confounding. When I realized that, living as it did on OWN’s proprietary streaming app, the series would be next to impossible to convince anyone to seek it out, I despaired.īut then the series was renewed for a second season, and then it won a 2020 Peabody Award, and then, when HBO Max launched, it picked up the series’ streaming rights so fast that I’m not convinced the app itself was even live yet on most devices. When its short 10-episode season brought the most important emotional arcs of the series satisfyingly back around to where they started, I cheered. At once a tense meditation on the trauma inherent to being a Black teen boy in 21st-century America and a lyrical, innovative coming-of-age fantasy full of the joy and discovery of youth, the series-piloted by the devastatingly layered performance of its extraordinary young lead, Akili McDowell-thrived in defying expectations. When Tarell Alvin McCraney’s David Makes Man debuted on OWN in the summer of 2019, it was a revelation.
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