This summer, Netflix announced that it would add seven Black sitcoms from the late nineties and early two-thousands to its streaming catalogue: “Moesha,” “The Game,” “Sister, Sister,” “Girlfriends,” “The Parkers,” “Half & Half,” and “One on One.” Most of these shows originally aired on UPN, a now defunct network that launched in 1995 and produced all manner of Black televisual entertainment, from beloved teen sitcoms to some less well-conceived projects. The announcement came as part of Netflix’s Strong Black Lead programming block, an initiative started in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite debacle to amplify the work of Black creators and to address the shortage of major film and television projects made for, by, and about Black people. Netflix’s acquisition of these shows, and the company’s apparent push to brand itself as the preëminent streaming home for Black content, is a notable stage in the long, complicated history of Blackness, representation, and authorship in popular American media.
Melissa Haizlip’s documentary “Mr. Soul!”, from 2018, examines an earlier, similarly fraught period of this history. In the late sixties, the federal government sought to redress the grievances of Black communities by giving Black people a louder voice (or simply a voice at all) in public media. It was in this atmosphere that an unusual show was born. Premièring in the fall of 1968, on the New York public-television station WNDT/Channel 13, “Soul!” was one of a cadre of Black public-affairs shows that popped up in major markets around the country. Like its Channel 13 sister program, “Black Journal,” the hour-long variety show was nominally meant to showcase an intrinsically Black perspective on art and politics. In practice, it proved to be something far more radical.
As the film illustrates, “Soul!,” from its inception, was uniquely daring in its mission to present a panoramic display of Black artistic sensibilities and political expression. In a pre-“Soul Train” time, the show was an unrivalled destination for Black music performance, hosting an alchemical mix of the era’s icons (Stevie Wonder, Tito Puente, Bill Withers), nascent stars (Earth, Wind & Fire; Al Green; Ashford & Simpson), and stalwarts of the Black avant-garde (Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Last Poets, and Pharoah Sanders). It was also perhaps one of the only places on television where one could see the writer and leader of the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka, perform a thunderous rendition of his poem “It’s Nation Time” over a darting Sanders improvisation, or watch contemporary Black dance, such as the delicate number choreographed by George Faison for the hour-long Stevie Wonder episode, in 1972.
Most pivotally, “Soul!” was a hub of candid, ranging, and often radical Black social and political discourse. Melissa Haizlip explained to me that the show’s producer, host, and creative architect—her uncle Ellis Haizlip—had “an expansive approach toward Black culture.” At a time when a burgeoning Black nationalist movement called upon Black Americans to coalesce under a single ideology of liberation, Haizlip said that her uncle saw to it that “Soul!” presented the true “fluidity of Black thought and Black identity.”
As “Mr. Soul!” documents, to Ellis, an openly gay Black man, this commitment could mean hosting the anti-Semitic and notoriously homophobic Nation of Islam representative Louis Farrakhan, interviewing the mother of the late Black radical George Jackson, or producing a two-hour conversation between the young poet Nikki Giovanni and her exiled idol James Baldwin. The latter segment, which was shot in London and aired as a two-part special, is one of the more astonishing artifacts in the show’s archive. Quite unlike the sensationalized and overproduced appointment-viewing events of the modern era, the Giovanni-Baldwin conversation is quiet, humming with the kind of casual intensity that only people who have dedicated long, solitary thought to the ideas they’re expressing tend to convey. Two of the most important artist-intellectuals of the twentieth century were engaged in intimate communion on national television.
Magic moments like these, and the show’s pioneering vision, were, in large part, a by-product of its ambitious host. Through extensive archival footage, recitations from Ellis’s personal journals, and testimonials from an exhaustive who’s who of friends, collaborators, and admirers, “Mr. Soul!” paints a picture of a figure every bit as well versed, well connected, and well respected as any of the era’s important entertainment figures, but whose legacy and immense contributions have largely been left out of the annals of popular memory. Ellis was a beacon of the New York art and entertainment world, known for his convivial air, penchant for playful fibbing, and teeming black book. He was a stage manager for plays that helped give James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson exposure early in their careers. He enlisted the help of the famed Beatles manager Brian Epstein to bring a dance show choreographed by Donald McKayle called “Black New World” on a tour across Europe. And, even after his tenure at “Soul!” ended, he continued to be a patron of Black arts in New York and beyond: he served as a friend and mentor to future legends such as Luther Vandross and Michael Jackson (Ellis produced Jackon’s twenty-first birthday celebration at Studio 54) and was the director of special programs at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture until his death, in 1991.
In making the film, Melissa Haizlip hoped to work in the spirit of her uncle’s pioneering television program. “It’s interesting to me to create a film as a way to convey the interiority of Blackness and what that means in terms of the social conditions that people find themselves in,” she said. It is also not lost on her that, as the documentary’s Black female writer, director, and producer, she is a living embodiment of the legacy of “Soul!” “Ellis pushed forward the role of the Black woman creative,” she explained. Her uncle, she said, recognized the way that the stories and contributions of Black women had routinely been erased throughout history, and he wielded “Soul!” as a “cultural corrective.” Episodes such as the special Season 4 première, titled “Salute to Black Women,” championed the visionary work of artists and thinkers like the poet Sonia Sanchez; the dancer Carmen De Lavallade; and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first Black female conductor, Margaret Rosezarian Harris, as most deserving of the national spotlight.
Today, the power and appeal of putting Black and nonwhite, non-normative faces of any kind onscreen is self-evident. What is only starting to become clear to the gatekeepers and green-lighters of media and entertainment is that the presence of those faces is merely one important step in an incomplete process. With “Soul!,” Ellis exemplified the power of Black authorship. He understood, as he told Ebony, in 1972, how “entertainment can be a deep business,” and that putting Black people in charge of making Black images and telling Black stories can have a deep effect.
“Soul!” aired for five seasons: locally for one season on WNDT, and, later, nationally on partnering PBS stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Detroit, and Boston. In New York alone, a Harris Poll from 1969 found that sixty-four per cent of the Black households that it surveyed reported watching “Soul!” every week. The scholar Gayle Wald, in her book “It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television,” from 2015, writes that a similar poll from 1972 “found the show competing favorably with commercial network fare” among Black audiences in at least six major cities, and that it was “unique among nationally broadcast programs in being watched by black viewers across age groups.” The ornate set design, artful directing, and unrivalled music, dance, and poetry programming weren’t being deployed just in the service of making good television. Week by week, show by show, segment by segment, Ellis knew that he was helping shape notions of what being Black in America could even mean for hundreds of thousands of people.
Quite a bit has changed in film and television since “Soul!” left the air, in 1973. Two years later, a white-helmed sitcom about a Black family uprooting from their native Queens and moving to Manhattan’s Upper East Side would première in prime time on CBS and go on to be one of the most successful network-television shows of all time. The eighties would bring MTV and, with it, Black music and culture into the living rooms of every American household. By the mid-nineties, there was virtually a run on “Black stuff” in film and television. After witnessing Fox’s early success with shows such as “In Living Color” and “Martin,” fledgling networks like UPN doubled down on their investment in Blackness, creating the shows that now find themselves trickling onto Netflix.
And yet, despite all this, watching the clip of the Last Poets performing their biting polemic “Die Nigger” on the fifth episode of the very first season of “Soul!” feels like stumbling upon a projection from an alternate universe. “ ‘Soul!’ was so ahead of its time that it was in time,” the former Last Poets member Felipe Luciano reflects at one point in the film. So attuned are we to popular media’s narrow-sighted, slow-adapting churn that when something comes along that speaks artfully, colloquially, and directly to the moment, it can be surprising. It can shock the soul.
