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Nearly dialogue-free, the Oscar-winning, six-minute 2019 animated short “Hair Love” from Matthew A. Cherry was inspired by videos on social media of Black fathers caring for their children’s hair. With the new series “Young Love,” Cherry has expanded that premise to focus on the close-knit family at the story’s center with a 12-episode animated comedy for Max.
Mom is Angela (Issa Rae) and she’s a hair stylist who is picking her life back up after an illness. Dad is Stephen, a struggling music producer (Scott Mescudi, aka the rapper Kid Cudi) who has been holding down the fort in the meantime. They live on the West Side of Chicago and share a multifamily home with their 6-year-old daughter Zuri (Brooke Conaway), a spirited kid who isn’t afraid to assert herself, or her preferences. They’re upstairs. Downstairs are the grandparents (Loretta Devine and Harry Lennix).
The show zeros in on the kinds of small details that make up a life. Hoping that a working parent will be able to carve out time to show up at a school event. Or the way a child sleeping in your bed can roll over and inadvertently slap you in the face. Or a brief but lovely scene when Angela is driving Zuri to school and glances back at her in the rearview mirror. The little girl is staring out the window and happily nodding her head to the music, but senses her mother looking at her and turns to make eye contact. It’s just a wonderful moment of connection that makes these two characters seem less like cartoon constructs, more like human beings.
Unlike Disney’s “The Proud Family,” which is more gag-based and with a zanier pacing and energy, “Young Love” is in line with something like “Bob’s Burgers,” but it’s also gentler in many respects. And it’s not aiming to be quite that funny.
Zuri is smart and confident and, as a result, can be the bane of her teacher’s existence. Holding up a storybook for children about an athlete named Tisha Turtle, she says: “Who cares if Tisha can run fast? Tisha should be teaching us kids how to grow into healthy, competent adults who are able to support themselves financially and contribute to society.”
Do 6-year-olds speak this way? Not many! Doesn’t matter, though. Zuri is a gas and she feels like a real person, even if some of her antics, including some early stabs at teenage-style rebellion, seem a little aged up for a first grader.
Mom and Dad are the kind of likable people who are not immune to making bad decisions, like when Angela opens their home to a family in need, only to use them for social media clout. It’s pretty awful! And she knows it! Both parents are working through professional frustrations, including Stephen’s misadventures working with a ridiculous rapper named Lil Ankh, which becomes a running gag throughout the season. Money is tight and it feels like, finally, a fictional depiction of the financial realities so many of us are facing at the moment, but they’re a happy family for the most part. And here’s the rare animated show to put Black millennial parents at its center.“Young Love” is a worthy entry into the pantheon of animated family comedies.
‘YOUNG LOVE’
Rated TV-PG, on Max. Grade: B+
Tribune News Service
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