Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to the 336th episode of Awards Chatter,

The Hollywood Reporters Awards Podcast.

I'm the host Scott Feinberg,

and on this most somber June 19th,

or Juneteenth, I am privileged to be joined by a black writer, producer, and actor who has made

race and class in America central subjects of many of the shows that he has created on route

to becoming one of the most important and admired voices in television today.

The 2019 recipient of the Producers Guild of America's Visionary Award, he made his name

with Blackish, a comedy series which was inspired by his own family,

which is run on ABC since 2014, which received a Peabody Award in 2015 2015 and for which he received Best Comedy Series Emmy nominations in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

The New York Times has called the show quote one of the funniest

and most daring network sitcoms of the 2010s close quote. He also presided over

two blackish spin-offs grownishrownish, which has run on free form since 2018,

and Mixedish, which has run on ABC, since 2019.

And in April, he unveiled Black AF, a controversial comedy series in which he plays

a heightened version of himself, think Curb Your Enthusiasm in Louis, which is also his first major project for Netflix since he

and the Shrimer signed a three-year $100 million deal with an option for two

additional years back in 2018. I'm talking of course about Kenya

Barris. Over the course of our conversation the 45-year-old and I discussed in

addition to the current moment of reckoning across America, the childhood

traumas that shaped the man he is today, his struggles and frustrations in TV writers' rooms

in the years preceding Blackish, what, despite Blackish's immense success and cultural

...