Yogma
Yogma (2018-2019)
Created, starring and written by: Karla Huffman
What do you do when your job requires you to be perfectly balanced but the culture of the workplace is not?
“In the midst of the storms life has to offer, what keeps you sane? Am I fighting the waves, or will I naturally flow with them to keep my sanity?”
Black women in the wellness field are constantly asking this question. Yoga, specifically, is a massive industry that offers incredible benefits to people facing the stress of surviving multiple systems of oppression. But the field is overwhelmingly white, leading many Black women to face barriers to entry and advancement, alongside micro- and macro-aggressions, which can exacerbate stress that yoga is designed to alleviate. The irony!
Karla Huffman’s Yogma explores this tension in her dramedy series that explores a Black woman yoga teacher trying to raise her profile. In season one, she is teaching classes of mostly Black women who come to get for her unapologetically Black spin on yoga, including integrating trap music. Season two sees that practice growing tremendously. As someone who actually teaches yoga in Chicago, Karla could fill large rooms with people looking to take her classes, so she didn’t need “extras” – she just asked her students if she could film for her series. Season two sees her dreaming of a promotion and health insurance, but will this come to pass? Will she, as her character says, be able to “live the life of a carefree Black girl”?
The season two pilot ends with, not for now:
“Now the bills are piling up. I need health insurance, and it would be nice to not eat a pasta meal every night. I would keep it at just that: a dream.”
Yogma is based on real life.
“Yogma came from my frustration as a yoga teacher,” Karla said in an interview. Her experience before making the show was marked by meanness, catty behavior, and getting passed over for promotions, in a field dominated by white women.
The sincerity of her story allowed Karla to attract unlikely supporters, most notably Patton Oswalt.
“Patton promoted the hell out of us from beginning to end,” Karla said. He even gave them money, earning the credit of executive producer.
Karla also eventually worked with Lululemon to promote the show as an official ambassador of the brand, and she pitched a version of the show at the storied New York Television Festival.
Karla ended up becoming one of the hardest-working and reliable producers for the OTV platform. She produced OTV co-founder Elijah McKinnon’s Good Enough and season three of their cooking show Two Queens in a Kitchen, along with several shorts and pilots that went on to do quite well on the festival circuit and for the creators, including Atra Asdou’s Renee, Priya Mohanty’s FOBia, and Stephanie Jeter, Derek McPhatter and Tim Maupin’s HIVE (executive produced by Lilly Wachowski). She also created her own instructional yoga series, Forward Momentum, helping add some wellness to OTV’s library.
Today, Karla is continuing to push herself and working on developing her own creative voice after years of supporting other creators.