We need to talk about THEM (2021). You’ve probably seen promos during your standard stroll through streaming television, or maybe heard friends and family applause or pan the infant anthology series.
First the premise: THEM (Amazon Prime) tells the story of one 1950s Black Family’s migration West to Compton, California to escape Jim Crow South, racial trauma and tragedy. When they pull into their new home, their white neighbors stare at them, and they realize that they are the only black family in a ‘no-blacks allowed’ neighborhood. With each episode, the viewers will harrow through the WORST TEN DAYS of the families’ lives.
My Review and Critique follows. And there will be spoilers.
What I Liked: The acting is emotional. Everyone delivers. Our main cast The Emory Family (Deborah Ayorinde, Ashley Thomas, Shahadi Wright Joseph [no relations], and Melody Hurd) stand out. They are in all 10 episodes and they chew through their scenes. And the cinematography and the art behind every image has been clearly thought about and designed for maximum storytelling effort. It all should work BUT….
LET’S TALK (What I Didn’t Like): I recognize the growth in art now attempting to capture the Black American experience. It’s a monolith of cultures, colors, regions, and statuses, but I look forward to the reinvestment in our stories, especially when that art is witnessed through the horror lens. The trailer of this series intrigued me, because of what it appeared to promise. What I thought I was going to get was a delve into the trials and mental anguish that result from racism and the early integration efforts (and the resistance/opposition to that effort). There was and is so much area to mine that the horror nuggets could’ve reaped gold. What I watched instead was torture porn (at best) and a body horror series of a kind I never thought I would see.
The first half of the season ratchets up the tension between the Emorys and their overtly racist neighbors. Scene after scene is crafted beautifully and leaves a sense of dread and unease. Are the figures the Emorys see figments of their inner desires and fears? Are they a bit more complex than that? The scares are typical of horror of this kind and certainly attempts to tackle the personal impacts of Blackness and racism in the workplace, schools, and within our own homes and selves. They touch on issues of Black veteran soldiers and redlining to name a few. It was a courageous effort, but something so large is bound to struggle under the weight of what it needs to do.
Where Them goes off the rails and where it frustrates me is how the Emory family is constantly the targets of never ending micro and macro aggression. Violence of all kinds seem to befell this family and the other black and brown bodies we meet in the series. And there never appears to be any justice or consequences for these actions. Which begs me to ask, who the hell was all this for? How was this violence meant to be viewed and understood? Where is the escapism we rely on television to give us?
There are fictional and (sadly) very real examples where the black body is mutilated on film. So as I watched Them I never understood why the viewers needed to be constantly reminded of this history or constantly see the Emorys as victims. As if that’s all the Emorys were: a vessel of black trauma, not black love or black dreams. Or at least black dreams juxtaposed to white gazes. Father Emory’s ghost is a black face slave, because that’s what he feels like inside? It would’ve been good to truly explore that, but we didn’t get into the psyche enough. In another scene, Ruby Emory (Shahadi) paints herself white (which I personally think was the most intimately shot scene and therefore the most horrifying), but her anguish to be white was nearly glossed over up until then.
By the end of the series, the racism the family has experienced is blamed on supernaturalism which almost cheapens everything the viewer has witnessed our protagonists endure. And the final episode tries to be our catharsis, but it feels too little too late. So few are these moments of bravery that the series drags. It’s exhausting watching racism play out like this, and I got so frustrated I need to take breaks several times. (Huh…what a metaphor that turned out to be.)
Them tries to capture the wave of interest in these Black Horror stories. Even hiring Shahadi, who many will remember from Jordan Peele’s US. But its so hard to tell if characters evolved from their traumas because it was often at the expense of the white gaze.
I can’t recommend this series (as it stands) to any fan of horror or black stories. However, I will always respect the effort it took us to get here. We still have a long way to go though.