The rest of the season (episode directors include Janicza Bravo and Nelson Cragg) wrestles with how the Emorys balance their public and private selves, the tensions between home and the outside world, and the myth of safety in America. Gracie and Lucky - by far the most interesting characters - try to figure out what happened, venturing into the basement, where Lucky hears, but does not see, the mysterious figure. One night, Gracie wakes up to investigate an unusual sound, only to encounter a dark, shadowy figure the next morning the family dog has died, and Lucky finds a burn-like scar on Gracie’s neck. Within a couple of days (the 10 episodes roughly correspond to the Emorys’ first 10 days in the house), strange events start to occur. The family thirsts for what East Compton offers: proximity to relatives in Watts, a sense of ownership and, most important, distance from their past. They have traveled from rural North Carolina, where they lived a relatively peaceful life until a tragic event forced them to flee. After all, do we really need more images of Black people dying?Īt the beginning of the first episode, buoyed by optimism and hope, the Emory family moves into 3011 Palmer Drive, a dignified yellow house with a manicured lawn. If this kind of art doesn’t say anything new or different about the relationship between Black people and America, then it risks becoming little more than trauma porn. During a time when violence against Black people can so easily be witnessed through screens and social feeds, peddling Black terror without a fresh exploration of its roots or its future is at best a bit boring - and at worst, gratuitous. Unfortunately, unlike Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Us (to which the show has drawn comparisons because of the title and the presence of the gifted Joseph), Them neither taps fully into the shivery potential of traditional horror nor adds much to what many viewers already know about racial terror in the United States.
#COMPTON 1950S SERIES#
Them joins a recent slate of films and series that employ horror as a lens for examining the Black American experience.
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