Yahoo News Malcolm D. Lee and Dayna Lynne North Tease the ‘Midlife Metamorphosis’ at the Heart of ‘The Best Man: The Final Chapters’
Filmmaker Malcolm D. Lee has long considered how he’d wrap up the stories of “The Best Man” crew — Lance (Morris Chestnut), Shelby (Melissa De Sousa), Harper (Taye Diggs), Candace (Regina Hall), Quentin (Terrence Howard), Robyn (Sanaa Lathan), Jordan (Nia Long) and Murch (Harold Perrineau). And after two box-office blockbuster movies, the franchise creator/co-developer/writer/director/executive producer confirms that “The Best Man: The Final Chapters” is really the end.
“I don’t have any other story to tell with this friend group. I want to finish what I started,” Lee told Variety, as he prepared to debut the first footage from the limited series during the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival earlier this month.
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“When the first ‘Best Man’ [came out in 1999], I definitely had no intention of doing a sequel, but if I did it was gonna be 10 years later, when they had a chance to live some life,” he says, recounting how it took nearly 15 years instead.
When “The Best Man Holiday” debuted in 2013, the sequel netted more than $71 million at the box office. Lee was prepared to finish out the series with two more films, but as the world turns, and with the advent of streaming and a boom of limited series, “The Final Chapters” landed on Peacock for an eight-episode run.
“I really want to close these stories out for the fans, but I figure let’s let it end there. If I were to do more, that’d be me pushing it,” Lee says. “These actors have other roles to play; let’s end in a good place. By the way, we could have ended it with ‘Best Man Holiday,’ but we ended with a cliffhanger, and I felt like ‘Hey, let’s at least answer this question of ‘Is Quentin getting married?’”
So, in order to fill in those blanks for the fans, Lee teamed up with TV veteran Dayna Lynne North to craft the Peacock series, working with a virtual room of writers to mark out the story beats and infuse them with movies’ trademark blend of humor, drama and emotion.
“Having essentially twice as much as [the length of two films] allowed us to dive deeper into the characters — into their own journeys and give them season arcs over the course of eight hours of storytelling time,” Lee says of transitioning to the new format. “It’s definitely more expansive.”
“The Final Chapters” is also Lee’s first real foray into television, and the process required a little adjustment. After flying solo as writer-director on the films, he enjoyed the process of working with others.
“It was a different dynamic because it was all just me doing it before,” Lee says. “I had very solid ideas about what I wanted to do in these eight episodes, but having these really smart, engaged writers who love the characters and cared about them, it’s a great sounding board — more than a sounding board, they were fully engaged with who these characters were and what they wanted to see them do.”
North was already a big fan of the franchise when she signed on as co-developer, writer and executive producer, telling Lee that she and her group of college friends had found the films deeply relatable.
“I remember when we went to see ‘The Best Man’ in our knock-off versions of the designers [the characters were wearing], and to see ‘The Best Man Holiday’ in slightly better versions of their designers,” North remembers telling him, explaining to Lee her connection to this world. “You go through those phases as friends — some get married, some stay single, and even friendships evolve into that place where you’re like, ‘Are we gonna get a friendship divorce? Are we going to be able to make it through these different phases of our lives?’”
Ultimately, the new project represents a meeting of the minds between the films’ creator and the franchise fan-turned-writer and executive producer, as the pair worked with a team of writers, the majority of whom were women. Together, they’ve crafted a fitting ending to the story of this beloved friend group, whose friendship is like a living organism, growing and changing, with sparks set to fly at any moment.
“’Midlife Metamorphosis’ was a phrase that really resonated with me,” North says. “They’re all going through that individually, and they’re going through that as friends, and some of them are going to that as couples — so we wanted to explore that.”
The series is about the growing pains the friend group is experiencing as they hit middle age, navigating the single life — and, in some cases, single parenthood, career pivots and more. “When you’re in college, it’s a different kind of mess than when you’re in your 40s, and you’ve got homes and you’ve got kids. It’s a different kind of metamorphosis,” she adds.
Lee and North also explained why they chose to debut the first footage as part of the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival lineup. While Lee comes to the Massachusetts island every year with his family, North was a first timer. But the creatives couldn’t think of a better place to launch.
“There was no question; giving our first taste and our first tease, it feels like being home, being with our people and saying, ‘Here we are,’” North says, comparing the feeling to getting a quick peek at your presents on Christmas Eve. “Everything about it feels right.”
Getty Images for MVAAFF
The clip that made its debut at the festival showed the men back around the card table playing poker, while updating each other on the latest developments in their lives.
“A lot of growth that happens with all these men — as husbands, as fathers, as friends, and, not just in their personal lives, in their careers as well. They’re finding their purpose in life,” Lee said, breaking down the storylines.
For Lance, that means exploring his post-football career and how he’s managing his family after the death of his wife Mia (Monica Calhoun), “Is he gonna find love again?” Lee recalls the writers discussing. “What are the new challenges he has to face in his faith? He’s always been this faith-driven character, and it’s always been challenged, so how are we going to challenge his faith in this series?”
The big question about Quentin is that aforementioned marriage cliffhanger, but the series will also explore how the character grapples with having been born into money, but, Lee says, fans will also see Quentin realizing that he’s done nothing with it “other than flashy stuff — what are his responsibilities now as an adult, post-40s?”
As Murch lives up to his reputation as the “supportive feminist type of husband,” he’s serving as headmaster of the charter schools founded with wife Candace, while Harper — the titular “Best Man” — has journeyed from fledgling writer to successful author over the course of the franchise. But what are his career aspirations after writing Lance’s best-selling biography?
“What kind of things is he writing? And how does that affect his relationship with his wife, with his daughter, with his friends,” Lee says, teasing Harper’s persistent desire to “reach for more,” often at the risk of his personal relationships.
The short snippet was played only for those in the room, because, as Howard’s Quentin quips during the clip, “A brotha’s gotta keep some mysteries.”
“We wanted to make sure we gave a full breadth of what we were planning on doing in the series, so we decided on this teaser,” Lee says. “It was hard to pick the right footage, because there are some spoilers and some things that we don’t want to reveal.”
Lee shared that they selected the card game scene as the preview for two reasons: first, showing the group of men playing cards has become one of the franchise’s lasting images, aside from the musical moments (dancing the electric slide to Cameo’s “Candy” at the end of “The Best Man” and the guys doing their best New Edition impression in the “Can You Stand the Rain” dance sequence for “The Best Man Holiday”); second, the scene “gives you a sense of where each guy is in the story and what could possibly be happening,” he notes. It’s a moment from the third episode of the series, but a relatively spoiler-free introduction to the story Lee and North aimed to tell.
“It was probably the safest thing we could choose,” he says of trying to maintain some suspense throughout the promotional rollout. “This is the 20th anniversary of the film festival and it’s the 23rd anniversary of ‘The Best Man,’ people have lived with these characters for a long time, so you just want to set a tone and make sure people find them engaging, fun and relatable.”
And as part fan and part creative, those were the kind of iconic moments that North was tickled to witness. “Coming in with that appreciation, I’m excited to see the guys at the card table,” she remembers. “Playing the dozens and throwing insults around is a love language in Black culture, and that’s one of the things that I think resonated so much in the ‘Best Man’ films. The guys around the table, playing the dozens, talking shit and cracking on each other, it’s a form of love.”
But it was also important for North, Lee and the writers to create a version of that for the women in the group as well. “You’ll see that the women have a book club; the women have their moments of connection like that,” she adds.
Another non-spoilery tidbit revealed in the clip is that “The Final Chapters” is set post-pandemic, with the effects of COVID-19 quarantine on all aspects of these friends’ lives referenced in the show.
“It was important to acknowledge the world that we are in, in all the ways, so acknowledging the things that have affected these characters lives: the pandemic revolution that has happened, the evolution that that Black masculinity and femininity are undergoing right now,” North explains. “Even though we’re in a world right now where everyone is not currently in a mask everywhere you go, it affected our collective psyches. For us to tell grounded, dramatic stories of these characters right now, that meant acknowledging that we all went through a thing, and that thing affected our collective psyche.”
Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for MVAAFF
Following their conversations with Variety, Lee and North were joined onstage by Chestnut, who represented the cast during the conversation dubbed “Black Excellence Through Legacy,” which unpacked the lasting impact of “The Best Man” and “Bel-Air” franchises on the culture and on the entertainment industry at large, with more than 800 people in the sold-out crowd at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center.
During the panel, Lee recounted why he’d set out to write “The Best Man” movies in the first place — to represent a different view of Black men in media. “I didn’t see educated, affluent people. They were perceived as stiff and as nerdy. And that wasn’t my experience,” he said. “I wanted to tell the story of Black men, sort of like the male version of ‘Waiting to Exhale.’”
North had heard that backstory before, telling Variety that while Lee had written the movie about and for the fellas, it was a “joyful surprise” that so many Black women (like her) had responded to both the male and female characters. Now, thanks to the expanded runtime of a series, the duo have more runway to tell stories about the women of “The Best Man” franchise.
“We’ve got eight hours, so we have enough time for the book club,” North notes. “That’s why I love television, honestly, because you have enough time for those arcs. You have enough time to really settle into it. It’s like a slow cooker; you’ve got enough time for everybody and everything in the crock pot.”
Giving the women meatier storylines also allowed the writing team to explore the sexual politics among the friends and the gender roles in their relationships with greater depth.
“It’s interesting to see what has evolved between 1999 and 2022,” she remarks. “When it comes to that that dynamic of Black masculinity and femininity, we’re in a dance right now in terms of the roles in relationship and marriage; the traditional roles are evolving. Men and women are like ‘OK, if we don’t necessarily need to play the traditional roles that we did, what are the roles that we play to each other? And how does all of that work?’”
As the conversation winds down, North explains that while she most closely identifies with Jordan’s journey — “a single woman who’s a godparent to multiple amazing kids who is on that constant quest to find work-life balance” — she was somewhat surprised at how much joy she got out of working on the scenes between the married couples (Harper and Robyn, and Murch and Candace). The storylines certainly tapped into North’s inner romantic, but watching the actors work infused the scenes with an extra sprinkle of magic.
“We’re talking about people who’ve been scene partners for 20 years,” North says, praising the actors’ talent and connection. “Watching Harold and Regina, and Taye and Sanaa embody these characters that they’ve been embodying for so long, and they have such a deep love for each other as scene partners, sometimes there’s things that you just can’t know until you’re in it, so being in it was a really joyful, wonderful thing to experience.”
In fact, North often found herself sitting on set — wide-eyed — as she watched the actors rehearse and during take after take, relishing this invitation into their inner circle. She sums up the unique nature of this opportunity using with a metaphor that could double as dialogue for Lance: “We don’t often get to step from in the stands onto the field.”
“The Best Man: The Final Chapters” launches Dec. 22 on Peacock.
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