REPARATIVE MEDIA
Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
We are more connected than ever before.
So why has it felt like our cultural divisions, our deepest collective wounds, are intensifying?
If culture is an ecosystem, corporations control too much land for harvesting our attention, connections, knowledge, and data. They serve us culture and information as fast food: monoculturally farmed then quickly packaged, produced, and distributed for us to binge for entertainment.
Can we cultivate a better system? When we view culture as an ecosystem, we see that diversity, interdependence, and sustainability are key to our collective thriving. Healing our collective wounds—racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate—requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered.
Reparative Media imagines this community-driven process as a cookout: spaces where we all own and share organically crafted and ancestry-informed nourishment. This book offers a story and framework for storytellers, scholars, organizers, and funders trying to start or sustain such projects.
This book explores reparative media through the story of researching and developing OTV | Open Television. You can think of OTV like Netflix but independent, locally rooted, and powered by intersectionality. OTV’s app hosts films and series by Chicago-based artists who identify with multiple communities historically marginalized by systems, or intersectionality.
You can read the full Reparative Media book here. You can read the Offerings for Consent presented to artists in advance of publication here.
On this page, you’ll learn more about the individual films and series discussed in the book.
For a preview of these series, check out this super trailer:
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.
Low Strung
Low Strung (2018-2022)
Created by: Victoria Lee & Shervin Bain
Written by: Victoria Lee, Shervin Bain, Ruth Perret-Goluboff
Directed by: Lili Kryzanek
Over two seasons, Low Strung ranks as one of the funniest, laugh-out-loud comedies on OTV, for me. A Blacker, queerer Broad City, the series follows creators Shervin and Victoria as they pursue sex, love, and infamy in Chicago.
There are so many jokes in Low Strung any review will do it a disservice. It must be seen to be fully enjoyed! The first season of Low Strung introduces the friendship episodically and keeps the laughs coming with off-the-wall improv. Each episode is a contained narrative that demonstrates how they egg each other on in the most dramatic, silly ways. The series opens with a brilliant bottle episode about pre-gaming. The two say they want to go out, almost as if it is what is expected of two queer people in the prime. So they take psychedelics, thinking it will put them in the mood. Needless to say, it doesn’t go as planned and the two spend the night in the apartment. But by the end of the episode, it’s clear they still had fun. The seemingly frivolous narrative communicates a deep truth: when you’re spending time with someone you love, you don’t have to leave your house to have a party. And, yes, drugs sometimes add to the fun.
Low Strung returns to these themes in the first season finale, “Real Friends,” a spoof of The Real World, where the central conflict is Victoria “outing” Shervin: “not outing him in the gay way, but like, outing him for getting drunk at lunch,” she says in a confessional with the worst boom operator ever hired. The friends have a reality-TV style shout out, complete with drink throwing and “I fucked your man” proclamations set to a trap beat. But it all ends quickly when they bond over their mutual exploitation of their white friend, played by Ruth.
The second season ups the ante in terms of story and production value. The narrative focuses on Shervin and Victoria’s quest to become influencers, leading them through a series of misadventures involving OnlyFans sex stars and underground sex cults, culminating in the worst influencer debut party ever thrown.
It all culminates in a friendsgiving where Shervin competes for Victoria’s friendship while guests dine on the only food available: Hawaiian bread rolls. Throughout the season their friendship has been tested by their own individual quests for stardom. Yet they come together in the end through hilarious tragedy.
Sadly, Shervin Bain never lived to see the completed second season. He passed away suddenly during post-production in Chicago. It was among the most heartbreaking situations in the entire OTV project. He was a rising star, and there was interest from executives in Hollywood in working with both him and Victoria. Beyond his work, he was a warm, loving presence. I don’t think I ever saw him without a smile on his face, and he brought joy wherever he showed. Watching him in Low Strung, it is clear he had a knack for making people laugh and bringing out the best in people around him. His loss is a loss for the culture.
I’m so proud of Victoria and the whole team for preserving through grief and completing the final season, a beautiful tribute to Shervin’s excellence. My favorite moment was in the season 2 premiere where Shervin receives a DNA test that says he’s Jewish, so he holds a bar mitzvah, singing the Torah to the tune of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.” It’s then that Victoria realizes that his results were switched with Ruth’s – who thought she was Jamaican (as Shervin was). The scene is a beautiful showcase of Shervin’s gleeful performance style and commitment to being ridiculous that is so essential to any successful comedian.
Rest in power, Shervin Bain <3
Damaged Goods
Damaged Goods (2019)
Created and directed by: Vincent Martell
Written by: Vincent Martell, Zak Payne, KB Woodson
Has Hollywood sanitized stories about young people of color?
Watching Damaged Goods (available on YouTube), you might start to think so. Creator by Vincent Martell, the drama series follows four young Chicagoans who are defying model minority stereotypes. Many studio films and series are afraid to show Black, Asian, and queer people doing/selling drugs, having casual sex, lacking ambition or direction, or pushing back on people in power.
Nominated for Webby, Streamy, and Queerty Awards, Damaged Goods exudes an unapologetic energy that is exceedingly rare for a series with its level of production value. Vincent, supported by cinematographer Hannah Welever, created a series where rich and vibrant colors stand out amid an often dark mise-en-scene. The visuals speak to the themes of how these diverse characters have so much life to give but find themselves in dark circumstances, which is only sometimes their fault.
These characters are admittedly flawed. Caleb (Chufue Yang) opens the series partying all night, showing up late for work stoned, offering to sleep with his boss to keep his job: “I would do anything to remain an employee at this establishment,” he tells his boss flatly, as if to suggest they both knew this was always a possibility. It doesn’t work.
Ezra (Nosakhere Cash O’Bannon) starts his journey as a weed dealer invited to sell meth by an Uber rider, a decision that later costs him his relationship with his roommate Marlo (Abena Boamah). Marlo, to her credit, appears to be holding the group together. She’s a yoga influencer who focuses on women of color, helping them heal from the systems that would “distract” them and throw them off balance, like financial worries, terrible bosses and jobs, and….
“White people! Yeah, they’re a distraction,” she says as they attempt tree pose.
Marlo’s wisdom benefits Sanavi (Aashvi Patel), who is sexually assaulted by her boss. Sanavi processes with Marlo and blames herself, even for what she wore. Marlo tells her to stop: “this shit happens all the time…it’s not your fault.” Sanavi eventually gains some courage.
Throughout the show the characters support each other in all kinds of ways, both in friendship and romance. In Damaged Goods there’s a feeling that anything can happen, from the shocking to the sweet.
There’s something healing in allowing people of color to be deeply flawed, somewhat immature, and yet still capable of having friendship and love, even if neither is simple. It’s a bittersweet tone that Martell shares with the work of his executive producers Sam Bailey and Fatimah Asghar (co-creators of Brown Girls) and continues in his next work, Finesse, which is similar in style and tone to Damaged Goods. Finesse sees Vincent in front of the camera with co-stars Jeez Loueez and Jaren Merrell a.k.a Shea Couleé (Lipstick City) in a series that more deeply emphasizes the healing power of friendship amid the precarious lives of young Black people.