Home » Bronzeville: A Black Historical Crime Thriller

Bronzeville: A Black Historical Crime Thriller

The Jazz Age or Civil Rights Era Chicago

Bronzeville separates itself from other shows focused on black and African American culture by dealing with the past. Luke Cage and Black Panther may deal with more modern concerns like the Black Lives Matter movement or racism in America, but Bronzeville takes a different approach and comes off as an almost homage and worthy successor to Hamilton: An American Musical.

Bronzeville tackles all the same issues that more contemporary shows like Black Lightning or the aforementioned shows and movies above deals within an entire story arc. However, unlike these other visual media, Bronzeville is set in the past. An ambiguous past if memory serves. As an armchair historian, I could never quite tell what decade Bronzeville belonged in: the post-war era midwest or the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. In the end, the time period didn’t so much matter as the location was key, second only to the characters. The narrator may give a date at the beginning of each scene change, but it’s so brief it borders on unnecessary but doesn’t detract from the enjoyment either. In fact, it somehow added to it.

Balancing Accuracy with Good Storytelling

There’s a phrase in storytelling that sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Nowhere is this truer than in Hollywood, where we’ve been conditioned to hear the sound of crunching cabbage as bones breaking. That’s just one example of a type of fiction becoming the reality rather than the other way around, but there are more. Bronzeville is a case study on how to take weighted issues like race and politics, go back to their nineteenth-century roots, and treat these fictional characters as real people in a time period full of racism stemming all the way back to the founding of the United States and before.

It may seem counterintuitive for a show tackling such deep-seated issues to try and confront both the historical aspect and the modern day hindsight we bring to the past when looking back at it. Bronzeville manages to play it fast and loose by having the world act as it would have without being offensive to someone living today.

Chronicling and Serialization: The Best of Both Worlds?

The last sentence of the show’s logline stood out as familiar yet strange. It piqued curiosity despite having already listened to the bulk of the first season before ever visiting the official website.

… BRONZEVILLE chronicles the lives of players in the lottery games while illuminating the self-sustainability of the community’s African American residents.

The term “chronicles” stood out as an interesting way to describe the story. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word (verb) means: [to] “Record (a series of events) in a factual and detailed way.” Looking back at the season as a whole, the show fits the definition in the broadest sense of the word but goes for something better than effect to effect with no cause linking the two. In other words: “this happened, then this happened.” Instead of: “this happened which caused that to happen” and so on. The latter is a story, the other a series of events. The famous example is the Queen died and the King died of grief, which illustrates both conflict and ultimately storytelling.

If there’s a drawback in telling a serialized story by “chronicling,” it’s these two plotting methods don’t mesh well with each other. Chronicling, by its definition, has no inherent conflict. Yes, there may be tension, but that’s not always a guarantee. Plenty of uneventful things happen to people all the time. In the case of Bronzeville, the content gets good around the third episode, when we stop introducing characters and get to know them in the Bronzeville environment.

Despite this dichotomy between serialization and chronicling, Bronzeville’s creative team manages to engage the listener as the series progresses and end with a relatively big, yet unexpected, bang in the season one finale.

4.5/5 Stars

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