"Yes. Jenni was kind enough to ask me if I would contribute to it. It’s not even a chapter, they wanted me to write a little something that I can’t quite get into. I don’t know when it will be released or what it’s going to be called. I was just honored to have been asked. I was a writer’s assistant for a show Jenni had on ABC. She and I go way back. I was her first Lena — which I’m not afraid to tell her. [Laughs]"“I’m in this waiting space right now with Showtime to see if they’re gonna move forward with the series. It’s an interesting place to be in, because I feel like I’m waiting to find out if I’m pregnant or not... It’ll be the only show on Showtime with a predominantly African-American cast.”“I’m dealing with the same subject matter as Spike Lee [in Chi-Raq], but it’s from a different angle. The characters are real human beings. This is no shade to Empire or Power, but no character is a drug dealer. No character is an athlete, singer, or dancer. They have regular jobs and they’re surviving in a war zone that’s also a city. There’s a lot of pressure.”“As I deal with getting this series picked up by Showtime, that’s the sort of thing when I think, Okay, I gotta run a little bit further, work a little bit harder, and do a little bit more than everyone else. Getting things made in Hollywood is difficult in itself. It’s less about the writer and more about the story being told. Dear White People was difficult to make because of the story. The big machine looks at that and the message that it’s sending and how it’s speaking to audiences. Then, that machine is like, ‘Nah.’ Movies like Pariah, Dear White People, and Fruitvale Station take a bit longer to get through the red tape.”“If you’re writing something that’s complex and layered, it’s going to be difficult to get made. [Those films] are never going to be easy to get through the system. When you look at media, Black characters are often simplified to make it easier for broader audiences to digest. So if I write a character that’s flawed in a human way, Hollywood doesn’t know how to digest it or market it. It’s a little more work. Selling complex Black characters is hard.”"Let’s put it this way, Cosby’s actions don’t take away from the fact that the episode of the Cosby Show that’s solely about Rudy wanting to wear a spring dress in the wintertime is probably one of the most pitch-perfect episodes of any show I’ve ever seen. That doesn’t make what he did right or any less wrong, absolutely not. But that doesn’t take away the feeling I got when I saw that for the first time. It’s perfect.""Annie Hall is one of the most perfect movies ever made, save that [Woody Allen] married his stepdaughter. Am I thinking about that as I watch the movie? Not particularly. It’s also the same with A Different World, it doesn’t take away the impact it had. It’s difficult and it’s sad and it’s fucked up. I want those women to have justice, because they absolutely deserve that. At the same time, me throwing away the feelings I had and still have about those shows and what they meant to me doesn’t undo what those women went through. We as a society create the heroes we require for the time. We created [Cosby], because we required that kind of hero."