Here’s what ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ needs to be even better in Season 2

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Nola Darling will be returning to the small screen.

Netflix has given “She’s Gotta Have It” the green light for a second season. The series, based on Spike Lee’s first film by the same name, was highly anticipated on its Thanksgiving debut. The adventures of a beautiful, sexually fluid, young Black woman in modern day (read: gentrifying) Brooklyn is a premise a lot of people can get behind.

Reviews from the target demographic (Black folks) online suggest that the series is in the ‘love it or hate it’ category of television.

For the ‘love it’ folks, there are three things that you can expect from every Spike Lee joint: great cinematography, the classic dolly shot, and the inevitable Spike Lee cameo. All of those things made it into the “She’s Gotta Have It” reboot, and everyone loves those features. It’s other aspects that naysayers don’t appreciate.

To that end, I have compiled a few suggestions that could unite viewers and tastemakers for season two. I’m about helping Black creatives get that long Netflix money.

Update the Dialogue

Stilted or outdated dialogue is perhaps the most prevalent criticism about “She’s Gotta Have It’s” first season. Why is anyone calling weed cheeba? Why is a 12-year-old referencing a Lil Kim album cover and describing things as “dope?” Spike directed all 10 episodes, wrote two episodes, and the rest of the series was written or co-written by seven other writers. Most of the main characters in the series are in their late 20s. None of the writers are in that age range, and that might be part of the problem.

For season two, Spike should consider getting a few talented younger writers to chime in and offer some authentic dialogue and context. This could be a much richer, more believable story with current pop culture references. It doesn’t have to be completely zeitgeist, but it could be more in tune with right now.

Swap out the song choices and ditch the album covers

The music for SGTHI is great. Viewers 30-something and up would recognize pretty much every song, either because the songs were hits during their adolescence or they were old-school songs that their parents played back in the day when they were growing up. That said, why is a soundtrack of mostly 20+ year old music the backdrop for millennials in modern-day Brooklyn?

Many of the song choices were quite literal. For example, Nola Darling was working, so they cued up Maxwell’s “This Woman’s Work.” It would be better to use more contemporary music that speaks to the emotion and drive of that particular scene to move it forward in the narrative. Don’t give me word for word lyrics; give me the feeling.

And for fuck’s sake, please stop it with the album covers. Make that a great little find on the official Twitter page or the official Facebook page or whatever, but seriously—we do not need eight seconds of album covers every five minutes.

Dig more into gentrification

So many communities around the country are being ravaged by what many folks call gentrification—the equivalent of a four-letter-word. The problem with SGTHI is that gentrification in this context is limited to the super obnoxious white woman who owns the brownstone next door to the one where Nola rents an apartment. This white woman literally yells and calls the police whenever a Black man comes near her stoop.

Gentrification does not always look like that. Gentrification is also the Jack and Jill-bred Black Harvard grad who rents or buys in Fort Greene while she endures her first year or two on Wall Street. Gentrification is also the well-meaning but clueless white café owner from Minnesota who has some pretty delicious avocado toast. If gentrification is going to be an undercurrent to the series, it should be more exact and nuanced to reflect the realities of it.

Follow Demetria Irwin on Twitter @Love_Is_Dope and connect with her on Facebook.