Back in December, we shared the trailer for the web series Brown Girls which we were excitedly looking forward to. The Chicago-set show’s titular girls Leilah (Nabila Hossain), a South Asian writer, and Patricia (Sonia Denis), a sex-positive black musician, were surrounded by a great ensemble full of hilarious black and brown girls, including Chicago-born Boricua comedian Melissa Rae DuPrey. It promised to follow in the shoes of Issa Rae’s Awkward Black Girl in offering frank storylines by and about women of color in a budding digital landscape.
And now, after creators Fatimah Asghar and Samantha Bailey dropped the OpenTV show’s full first season a few months ago to great acclaim, the series is headed to Rae’s current home turf, HBO, where they’ll be developing an untitled project based on Brown Girls.
We’re already very excited about the prospect of Asghar and Bailey’s show running alongside Insecure, if only to show that these authentic stories about women of color deserve to be championed and can find an eager audience. As Asghar told Elle when explaining how the show had been received, “It’s a story that folks hadn’t seen before, but is relatable. I can’t tell you the amount of times people have said, ‘This is me and my best friend,’ or, ‘This feels like my friend group,’ or, ‘I can see myself in this.’ Part of it is the lack of representation of many different races in Hollywood in general. And also part of it is the way these girls operate in the web series in terms of their races, their identities, their personalities, and their class background. I think people saw their struggles in a trailer full of black and brown women and wanted to see what the project was without really knowing much about it.”
So if you haven’t yet binged this celebration of women of color—and queer women of color at that—get on it before you need an HBO subscription to see what else Leah and Patricia will be up to.