At left: Mara Brock Akil at TV critics' tour this summer.
Like Joan Clayton, the flawed, ambitious TV heroine she created, Mara Brock Akil knows about wanting something so badly that you risk making a fool of yourself.
It was 1992 and the Raytown South graduate had a journalism
degree in hand from one of the nation’s finest schools. She could go to any
newspaper and soon have a comfortable life. Instead, she took a job as a
manager at the Gap.
“I chose not to go pursue journalism because I thought it
was more important for me to stay hungry,” Akil said this summer while
promoting “Girlfriends,” the show she created for UPN. It begins its seventh
season Sunday on a new network, the CW (
To non-fans, “Girlfriends” may sound like just another of
those “urban” sitcoms that were staples of the old UPN and WB networks, better
known for the stars whose careers they launched (Jamie Foxx, Steve Harvey) than
for producing moments of memorable TV.
But that’s never been the case with “Girlfriends,” a show that — long before “Grey’s Anatomy” was a twinkling in Shonda Rhimes’s eye — dared to depict the turbulent love lives of hard-working, intelligent women living in America today.
At the center of it is Joan, played by Tracee Ellis Ross. Unlike other female role models on TV, Joan and her three best friends (two this season, after Jill Marie Jones chose not to return) have never acted as though career and companionship were incompatible. Difficult, but not incompatible. Same goes for sexuality and spirituality. Though they’ve been through their share of heartaches and disagreements, the “Girlfriends” have stayed true to each other and themselves.
“It was very important for Mara to represent women of color authentically and show us not just as single-faceted but as multi-faceted people who had a lot of vulnerability,” said Ross, who also is one of Akil’s close friends.
“Girlfriends” will be followed by “The Game,” airing at 7:30 CT, a “Girlfriends” spin-off from Akil, that depicts the lives of professional athletes and the women who support them. “The Game” stars Tia Mowry as the brainy girlfriend of a rising football prospect played by Pooch Hall. They are, in other words, two people hungry for success — the way Akil was in 1991.
“That was the moment I think I woke up,” she said, referring to a course she wangled her way into during her senior year at Northwestern University. It was a screenwriting class, and Mara Brock plunged into her homework with a zeal she didn’t know she had.
After college she took a job at the Howard Street Gap in Chicago and began looking for opportunities in that city’s vibrant acting community. A few months later her big break came to town in the form of the movie “With Honors,” which was shooting interior scenes in Chicago.
She landed a speaking part and soon ingratiated herself with the crew. Already she knew she wanted to be in production, or as Akil put it, “more in the background than the foreground.” She also found that, in an industry where few young black women held few positions of power, she could be one of them.
Within a year she was in L.A., writing for the Fox series “South Central,” which daringly (if unsuccessfully) tried to dramatize the goings-on in the urban core. In 1996 she moved on to “Moesha,” a sitcom airing on the new UPN network starring the singer Brandy, and “The Jamie Foxx Show” on the WB.
Three years of pitching show ideas later, UPN bit on “Girlfriends,” a show about Joan, a successful attorney, friends Toni (Jones) and Lynn (Persia White), and Joan’s assistant, Maya (Golden Brooks).
Akil was not yet 30 when the show began casting. When Ross saw her for the first time, she assumed it was another actor competing for her part.
“It’s crazy,” Ross said this summer. “We look a lot alike. We have a lot of similar tastes. We’re both very bubbly. We both have a really strong work ethic and care a lot about our jobs. And so in the beginning it was very difficult because we’re both very controlling.”
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Ross’s mother is the incomparable Diana Ross, and Akil’s mother, Joan Demeter, is, in her daughter’s words, “incredible.” After moving her family from L.A. to Kansas City when Mara was eight, Demeter soon divorced, took an entry level position at Marion Labs and worked her way into the computer industry as a programmer.
“She raised three kids on her own, is smart — brilliant — but she got pregnant when she was young,” Akil said. “To see my mom go from secretary to running her own company clearly instilled in me that I could do this.” (Demeter moved back to L.A. last year, where she lives in Akil's old house, or as her daughter calls it, “the house that ‘Moesha’ built.”)
Demeter, for whom Ross’s character is named, also instilled in Akil a respect for people’s faith that has worked its way into countless “Girlfriends” storylines. “My mom introduced us to all religions,” Akil said. “I was born in the Nation of Islam. Then we became Methodist” — they attended Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s church, St. James — “then we became A.M.E.” Now she and her husband, Salim Akil, are practicing Sufi Muslims.
Other loyalties, though, don’t change: She’s still partial to Gates Bar-B-Q. And she’s still a Chiefs fan, going back to when her best friend in high school, Laurie Ealom, took her to her first game at Arrowhead.
“My husband is a Raiders fan,” she said about Salim Akil, who directs episodes of “Girlfriends” and “The Game” when not working on films of his own. “People ask me how do I deal with that. I say I don’t have to, because the Chiefs deal with that,” she added with a laugh.
“The Game” will deal with the temptations of being idolized athletes in American society. It also will explore the frustrations of women trying to provide them with love and support.
“Imagine if you were a professional football player and every time you land in a city, even if you get through the hotel lobby, you can go in your room and two women are naked on your bed,” said Akil. “That goes on all the time.”
With her second show, Akil is trying new things, like using a bobbing-and-weaving Steadicam for some scenes. She’s also taking the cameras outside to the exterior spaces around the CBS lot, where “The Game” and “Girlfriends” are filmed side-by-side. (Ross refers jokingly to the vast expanse of studio space as “Mara-land.”)
With the attendant publicity for the new CW network, and the placement of her two shows next to ones produced by some of Hollywood’s highest fliers — “Everybody Hates Chris” from Chris Rock (6 p.m. CT Sunday, CW) and “All of Us” from Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith (6:30) — this Raytown girl is looking forward to stepping out of the background.
“To use a football analogy, I love having the ball,” said Akil. “I want to show people their eyes should’ve been on me all along.”
