Jordan E. Cooper and Patricia ‘Ms. Pat’ Williams on ‘The Ms. Pat Show,’ showing a ‘grown-folks sitcom’
The BET+ smash hit returns for a second season and theGrio caught up with show co-creator/director Jordan E. Cooper and its co-creator and star, Patricia "Ms. Pat" Williams.
“The Ms. Pat Show” is back and theGrio caught up with show co-creator and director Jordan E. Cooper and its co-creator and star, Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams, to discuss the second season of the hit series, the acclaim they’ve received and their plan to shift what a sitcom can and should be.
When it premiered last year on BET+, “The Ms. Pat Show,” starring the titular comedian, was an immediate smash hit. It garnered a rare 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, earned a rabid fanbase, and even an Emmy nomination for “Best Directing in a Comedy Series.”
Cooper described it as a “grown-folks sitcom” based on Ms. Pat’s life and family. Now, the show returns for Season 2 with more laughs and deep topics that in a short time fans have come to expect.
“If you liked the first season, the second season gonna hit you across the head like an armed robber at a convenience store,” Williams quipped.
“That’s how good it is!” Cooper added. “We’re so excited. There is so much fun that happens this season and we also go a little bit deeper and turn the heat up a little bit.”
Now that they’ve established the world and characters in their first season, they can take things to the next level in their sophomore season. “I think the show for us, with Pat’s life, the format of the sitcom and the R-rated and the rawness that I wanted to bring to it, it was like a big experiment,” Cooper explained.
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“We didn’t know; we thought we were crazy, like, ‘are people gonna watch this? Are people gonna vibe with it?’ It was just cool to know that the experiment worked and that people really do want to see real families in the sitcom format and see Pat and her story. We are really shifting the landscape of what a sitcom is and can be.”
Williams appreciates her character’s relatability. “I’m just excited to have my life on TV but also to have so many people that can relate to it,” she told theGrio. “Like, I’m not cooking like the normal mom. I’m trying to build a career. I’m running around the world. I’m plus-sized … it’s just nice to see somebody that’s out of the ordinary that can be the focus of the whole show.”
Deeper topics and themes have also become a vital part of “The Ms. Pat Show,” which dives straight into things like gender identity, drug addiction and more. These issues are intentional, noted Cooper.
“The show really does use comedy in order to have these hard conversations. I think the benefit of the sitcom is that we’re so used to them being so light and fluffy and something you just put on in the background,” he said.
“It’s kind of something that you let into your house without realizing that it’s a Trojan horse to actually have hard conversations. So that balance is exactly the thing that we aim to execute in every episode. I’m just glad that we were able to really push these stories forward and that BET trusted us to tell these stories.”
The second season of “The Ms. Pat Show” is currently streaming on BET+.
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