Good Enough
Good Enough (2018)
Created, directed and produced by: Elijah McKinnon
Written by: Dewayne Perkins and Aasia Bullock
Elijah McKinnon’s Good Enough honors Black queer chosen families in ways we have never seen on television. Funded by university researchers to support an app to encourage queer youth of color to take PrEP, Good Enough uses art to literally heal our community.
The story focuses on a diverse group of Black and Brown queer, trans and women-identified people living in a house, each striving to be “good enough” for themselves and each other. The question of self-worth connects these disparate stories about sex, love, creativity, honesty, loyalty, and freedom. The lesson is that, while we all have our work to do on ourselves, we are already good enough, inherently valuable.
The series opens with the revelation that two people in the house have been sleeping together without others knowing, the scandal amplified by an age difference. The episodes then focus on individual characters and what they’re going through, adding additional context to their relationships before the series finale picks up where the pilot left off to show how every deals with the situation.
What Elijah realized with Good Enough is how sexual health is intimately connected to mental health. Getting young people to take PrEP – the funder’s goal – is really about getting them to see their lives as valuable, even if they’ve made mistakes, which we all do. Black queer people can struggle to love themselves because our families, communities, and the media put so much pressure on us to be perfect or “respectable” as the only way to deserve love and resources. In Good Enough, Elijah shows how even when we make terrible mistakes that betray our loved ones and our own sense of self-respect, we are still worthy of those things.
To make this series, Elijah folded in the many artists, communities and practices they were cultivating within and outside of OTV. They filmed at the Breathing Room, a community-run space for Black arts, healing, activism borne out of the first Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s. They cast were all artists who had work on OTV or had worked with Elijah on their campaigns and creative projects.
As their first scripted production, Good Enough was Elijah’s most ambitious project to date: “it was like my Beyoncé Homecoming,” Elijah said in an interview.
The final result is a bright, colorful, polished, funny and deeply sincere story about how different people come together to support each other and hold each other accountable.