Yahoo News How ‘The Ms. Pat Show’ Heals Lingering Wounds in Season 4
Ms. Pat could never be June Cleaver. Nor does she have to be. That point is made in the very first episode of The Ms. Pat Show’s recently released eight-episode fourth season. During her signature stand-up routine kicking off each episode of the BET+ series (the comedy is based on its star’s stand-up material), Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams offers poignant and biting commentary on television’s yesteryear.
Styled from head to toe in the look of the time, punctuated by a circle skirt, the episode fades to black and white as the fictional Ms. Pat and her TV family — sons Brandon (Vince Swann) and Junebug (Theodore Barnes), daughters Janelle (Briyana Guadalupe) and Ashley (Brittany Inge), husband Terry (J. Bernard Calloway), and sister Denise (Tami Roman) — try to adapt to that era. But as both pregnancy and race, two topics Leave It to Beaver and its ilk never addressed, come into play, the episode snaps into full color, with Ms. Pat back in irreverent cursing, N-word dropping form.
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“They felt like moms like me didn’t exist,” Ms. Pat recently explained. While speaking at a season four event covered by The Hollywood Reporter, the star recalled the show’s multiple rejections prior to landing on BET+ to an intimate crowd gathered to preview and celebrate the show in her native Atlanta.
In all fairness, most moms haven’t faced Ms. Pat’s very bleak beginnings. Impregnated by a married man, she was a mother of two by age 15, was shot multiple times, incarcerated for selling drugs and was once on welfare. It was her caseworker who suggested she try comedy. Fortunately, she also met and married a good man, with whom she had two more children. His job relocation landed them in Plainfield, Indiana, where the show is set.
Unlike the many others with whom she tried to bring her show to life, she found the right fit with a 20-ish Jordan E. Cooper. The Ms. Pat Show co-creator and showrunner knew from the start that not only did comedy gold rest with Ms. Pat’s personal testimony, but also social responsibility. A huge Norman Lear fan who still beams that he was able to meet and get his idol’s stamp of approval prior to his passing at age 101, Cooper has infused the show with a wide range of heavy-hitting topics like abortion within marriage, drug addiction and sobriety, the lingering effects of childhood sexual abuse, and parental acceptance of a queer child, just to name a few.
“There are things in this season I wanted to do in season one,” he tells THR. “We’re just now getting to a point where I could actually do them because we know these characters now. But I wanted to explore themes of forgiveness and healing and this idea of generational curses that become latent and not the very big ones that that we know, like getting into drugs, or getting involved with crime and going to prison or any of that stuff, but the little bitty things like how we talk to our kids and how a lot of times that’s connected to how our parents talked to us and that’s [related] to how their parents talked to them.”
The real-life illustration of this is episode three (“Boo, Bitch!”), where only Pat and Denise see the ghost of their mother Mildred thanks to Denise’s psychic hair client Veronica (Mad TV’s Debra Wilson). Egged on by her ghostly mother, Pat perpetuates the very cycle of verbal and physical abuse she endured with her daughter Janelle right before the audience’s eyes.
These types of episodes rattle Ms. Pat deeply. “I literally told Jordan how I never wanted to be famous because my mom always said I wasn’t shit,” she recalls. “This lady always told me I was ugly and beat me down. I can still hear that. So, I’m still healing from that. And when Jordan takes those stories I tell him and turns them into episodes, and I have to act them out, I swear I heal each time. That baby daddy episode (season one’s ‘Baby Daddy Groundhog Day,’ which earned director Mary Lou Belli an Emmy nomination) I cried all the way home.”
But not all episodes of The Ms. Pat Show come from the comedian’s life. Some of them like Cooper’s bold swing with episode four (“The Guilt Trip”) spring from other sources of inspiration. Sometimes they’re so bold that even Ms. Pat is surprised. “You’re really gonna make white people slaves?” she asked him in response.
But Cooper’s concept of the reparations resort that centers the episode is far from revenge fantasy, and actually ties back to the episode with the ghost of Ms. Pat’s mom. “It’s a satire on white guilt in a way while also wrapping up this generational curse storyline with Pat,” explains the Texas native.
“I visited the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. It’s the only museum on a plantation that’s from the perspective of the slaves. Usually, you have these antebellum South Airbnbs, where they want people to come and stay and look how the grand Old South is. That’s something that’s so relevant. That’s happening right now today; people are walking on these kind of graveyards and don’t even respect them,” Cooper expounds.
Continuing, “I wanted to make a satire of that while also tipping the hat to this white man who considers himself to be an ally. And because critical race theory has been taken out of school, he feels it’s his duty to educate white people about Black history and educate them about enslavement. So he decides to create this reparations hotel where white people see themselves as slaves so they can then empathize with the Black experience. But the problem is he’s doing this without actually consulting Black people.”
Other storylines include Janelle hiding not getting into her top college from her family; Ms. Pat reuniting with her recently released cousin Tanya (Girlfriends’ Golden Brooks) and having to confront her drug dealing past, along with her survivor’s remorse; Denise bumping into her past love Kareem (Khalil Kain from Juice and Girlfriends), now a bestselling self-help author, and revisiting the hard decision she made during their addiction that still haunts them; as well as the bitter battle between Pat’s older kids Ashley, a licensed therapist and out lesbian, and the unambitious Brandon stemming from Brandon wanting to save their abusive biological father’s life, among others.
Throwing hijinks into the mix from time to time never deters Cooper from fulfilling his core mission and purpose. “The biggest rewards of this show for me are two things: I’m creating the show I’ve always wanted to see, and I get to watch my friend heal. That is such a gift to me. She’s not the type to sit down and talk stuff out, but, if I put it in the script, she kinda has to face it differently,” he says.
“I had so many doors closed. That damn Jordan would knock on that motherfucker and open that door; let’s tell that story,” Ms. Pat says through laughter before getting serious. “With the episode with my mama, he pushed me so far that day. He knew I was holding back. But it was feelings I hadn’t dealt with in years.”
“That day it just poured out of me,” she reflects. “I didn’t know I was hurting like that on the inside until that episode.”
Cooper insists, “There’s a healing that’s going on in front of the lens. And, hopefully, people can feel that at home and field the invitation to heal themselves.”
All four seasons of The Ms. Pat Show are currently streaming on BET+.
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