Yep - the show whose title and existence launched a white supremacy backlash to Netflix that was far more absurd and damning than any of the things the satirical white people did in the very same show. Oh boy.
I intentionally put this one off for a while. For one thing, who needs to jump into any TV show while the controversy about it is hot and fresh and capable of slanting or jading an otherwise honest reaction to the show itself? For another thing, I hadn't seen the movie that the series is a sequel to. Well, I still haven't seen the movie, and I watched and followed and enjoyed the show just fine. (As a white person, even!) The title - #problematic though it may or may not be - is a misnomer, and one of the main characters explains this, verbatim, in the first episode.
What you have here is a show that takes place on a fictional Ivy League school's campus, primarily the black part of that campus, fraught with racial tension in the aftermath of a blackface party. (This is, I assume, what the movie was about.) It's disturbingly, depressingly relatable; it came out like three months before Charlottesville and one gets the impression that it was not even written and filmed with the realities of the Trump presidency in mind - just the ongoing Black Lives Matter-style protests and angst. It is thus, shockingly and sadly, tamer than reality. The most malicious white people it depicts are so, so far from the current actual far right movements going on among young dumb white people.
But enough about our depressing new status quo - let's talk about the show on its own merits. In short - it's good! Each episode is told from the perspective of a different character - all of them black except for one - in a mostly linear but often chronologically overlapping fashion. It's genuinely funny and it feels very realistic with regard to the way young people actually talk and communicate and joke with each other. It also contains the single best "holy shit" level African on African-American burn I've ever heard, but that's neither here nor there.
Plenty of issues are brought up and discussed meaningfully but without much cheese or ham or after school special soap. One of the most vocal protesting black students is very light-skinned; one dates a white guy; one's got a very important father and a lot of money and huge expectations on his shoulders, and struggles to keep himself clean and career-focused without just coming across as a big old Uncle Tom. One thing the show almost entirely lacks is any actual outrage against white people, whether specifically or individually. I mean, the worst any single white character gets it is this earnest "white ally" who's genuinely confused about his place in any and all of the BLM-ish movement.
The show isn't perfect. (Few are, obviously.) The season never really built toward much of anything, if that matters to you, other than the idea of a second season, and - again, depressingly - it never feels like the show's got any solutions; when the black students argue with each other over how best to handle, say, a police officer pulling a gun on a student, they can't seem to agree on anything and the show makes no efforts to suggest that any of them are more "right" about what to do than the others. "Geez, this is a great big mess, isn't it?" the show seems to ask. And, again, that's before Trump and Charlottesville! Ugh. Now I'm sad again. There's just not enough sheetcake in the world...
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