Dreams, Ambitions, & White Priva-Latte: A Deep Dive into Janea West’s Grown: The Webseries

 “So often, Black women are expected to be perfect and polished…My series Grown allows Black women to be in their process, imperfect, messy, and all the while still worthy” – Janea West 

My sister and I grew up under the stern governance of Dr. Phil and Carl Winslow;our parents grew up with the Huxtables and attended college around the same time as the kids from A Different World. Black sitcoms are not just entertainment. These formative depictions of Black life allow us to imagine ourselves as college professors like Aunt Viv or doctors like Cliff Huxtable—shining stewards of Black excellence pushing back against the Fox News stereotypes and minstrel images that are so often levied against us. I love all of these shows, but I often wondered, growing up, how productive it was to present so many images of immaculate Blackness. Do we have to be lawyers, professors, or doctors to be worthy of empathy or the luxury of having our story told? Was the single parent household I grew up in any less loving or warm than that of the Huxtables, the Banks, or the Winslows? While it is undoubtedly necessary to depict Black people who are upstanding and grandiose, surely it is equally important to show that Black people are worthy of compassion and grace even when they are distinctly flawed. 

Enter Janea West, writer and creator of the hit webseries Grown which has been awarded with commendations from the DC Commision on the Arts and Humanities,, Black Girls Rock Film Festival, and DC Webfest. The show follows four central characters, Najae, Gene, Sasha, and Simone, all Black women, all in their mid to late twenties, trying to navigate adultlife in DC. None of them are doing all that 

well. Najae is a dreamer who struggles to live in the real world; Sasha is sugar baby to a guy she does not want to give any sugar; Gene is an artist without an established audience; and Simone is a writer who is, like myself, discovering that writing does not always pay. In other words, they are a mess, and I think that’s why I grew to love them so quickly over the course of the eight episode first season.

More than anything Grown is a series that forces its audience to look back on their own coming of age stories, from the universal indignity of working a dead end job to the humiliation ritual that is pining after a person who just isn’t all that into you. Each of the characters is distinctly relatable. You’ll find yourself cringing through their awkward moments and celebrating their victories. “The show is about friendship,” Janea noted in our recent conversation. “More than that, it’s about how much a friendship can endure.” Most impressively, the show treats setting as character, and everything from the wideshots of local art and packed streets to the show’s soundtrack immerses the viewer into an epicenter of Black culture. Ultimately, this is a show that you must watch and we at the Lenox & Parker family look forward to seeing what comes out of Janea West next. Watch the second episode of our writer series Chapter & Verse below where we fully break down Janea’s process in developing the show and click here to watch a trailer for Grown.