One of Them Days is worth every bit of hype it received after it hit theaters in January. Produced by Issa Rae, written by Syreeta Singleton, and starring the Black Hollywood princess Keke Palmer and the R&B superstar SZA, the film is a hilarious, feminine take on the 1995 cult classic Friday. The outlandish events take place over a single day and follow the main characters Dreux (Palmer) and her best friend and roommate Alyssa (SZA) as they attempt to secure their rent money by 6 p.m. In the process they encounter all kinds of shenanigans, including a messy accident at a blood bank, electrocution, getting laughed out of a payday loan spot, and Alyssa’s hoopty being towed, to name a few. Beautiful cinematography, sharp editing, and an all-star cast that includes Katt Williams, Janelle James, and Lil Rel Howery balance out the absurdity of the plot, perfecting the recipe for an all-around feel-good flick.

Like its ’90s predecessor, One of Them Days explores the kaleidoscope of personalities, practices, and institutions that make the hood a home for the people who live there. Dreux is practical and ambitious but a few credits short of a bachelor’s degree, and making do as the star waitress at a diner chain. Alyssa, whimsical and eccentric, is a talented artist, too distracted by her deadbeat boyfriend and waiting for spiritual signs to formulate a plan to sell any of her pieces. Their nurturing neighbor Mama Ruth (Vanessa Bell Calloway) runs a candy store out of her apartment while Jameel (Dewayne Perkins) braids hair and cracks phones in the courtyard outside of his. Their shrewd landlord, Uche (Rizi Timane), won’t make repairs in their rundown apartment or offer them the grace and courtesy he’s extended to Bethany (Maude Apatow), the clueless white tenant who just moved in. Everyone knows not to fuck with Big Booty Berniece (Aziza Scott), a hot-tempered siren; to fear the local ganglord King Lolo (Amin Joseph); and that the local payday loan spot is predatory. Viewers watch One of Them Days for the laughs it delivers in abundance, but they will find it rich with layers about the class struggles of poor and working-class people of color. If you loved it as much as I did, enjoy those vibes while you can, because I’m not sure when we’ll have another Black, female-led commercial feature like it.

The authentic storytelling of One of Them Days has become a rarity in today’s Hollywood landscape. I’m a cultural critic who’s been covering the entertainment industry for almost a decade from an unapologetically Black perspective, and what I’ve noticed in the past five years is that the potency of bespoke Black stories is wearing off. Titles made by Black people to intentionally showcase the intricacies of the Black American experience — from frivolous joy to our deepest cultural fears — have been replaced by diverse casting. Black actors and directors are on the top of call sheets for plenty of major projects. But fewer of those projects reflect the complexities and nuances of Blackness itself. There’s a palatableness to recent stories that feels regressive. Perhaps this shift foreshadowed what was to come in our government and corporate policies?

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to the 2010s, when Girls Trip (2017) — the last Black-female-led comedy that saw similar box-office and critical success before One of Them Days — was released. It was one title among a wave of films in the era that zoomed in on an aspect, current or historical, of Black life and received widespread acclaim and viewership. Moonlight (2016) followed in the footsteps of Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011) to illuminate a Black, queer coming-of-age story. It won an Oscar for Best Picture for its efforts. After leaving Sundance with a grand jury prize and the largest distribution deal the festival had seen to date, The Birth of a Nation (2016) grossed $16 million at the box office. It told the story of Nat Turner’s rebellion and intentionally called back to the racist 1915 film of the same title. Hidden Figures, starring Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer, ignited a public conversation about introducing Black girls to STEM fields and was one of the most profitable releases of 2017, according to Deadline. Shortly after came Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a socio-psychological horror film that managed to transform the genre with its biting critique of white liberalism and won Peele an Oscar for best original screenplay. Barry Jenkins followed up Moonlight with a tender adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk in 2018, the same year that Spike Lee told the biographical story of the Black cop who infiltrated a KKK chapter in Colorado with BlacKkKlansman and Boots Riley tackled the battle between labor rights and capitalist greed in Sorry to Bother You.

On the silver screen, major cable networks found crown jewels in textured Black stories. Insecure premiered on HBO in 2016, starring and created by Issa Rae, lauded for its honest depictions of Black women’s unique friendship, dating, and career journeys. Every episode of FX’s Atlanta, created by multi-hyphenate Donald Glover and debuting the same year, was an unpredictable surprise, laced with dry but politically charged humor about Black America. Showtime introduced The Chi, created by the Emmy winner Lena Waithe, in 2018. It humanized the inhabitants of a violent neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Experimental content like Random Acts of Flyness (2018) and A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019) showed the infinite capacity of Black creativity. There was a revival of Black family sitcoms like Jerrod Carmichael’s The Carmichael Show (2015); Marlon (2017), created by one of the legendary Wayans brothers; and The Neighborhood (2018), starring Tichina Arnold and Cedric the Entertainer.

I like to think of this period as a golden age for Black storytelling, offering a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of reality TV and social media content that often lacked artistic depth. All of these shows and films were heralded for going beyond representation and offering layered stories, characters, and perspectives that reflected the fullness of Black culture. Black women were often at the helm, and were allowed to publicly claim their seat at the epicenter of American culture. Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Shonda Rhimes, and Lena Waithe became household names for their many groundbreaking projects. The virality of #SayHerName following the 2015 death of Sandra Bland, widely reported stats about the 94 percent of Black women voters who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and the female rap renaissance that mushroomed after Cardi B dropped “Bodak Yellow” in 2017 only helped to confirm their status. The white imagination was no longer the sole guiding force in Hollywood.

In some ways, these were the immediate cultural fruits of Barack Obama’s America. Not only was he the first Black president — an emblem of racial representation at the highest order — Obama understood the importance of Black creativity and put his own passion for Black art on display, booking Beyoncé to sing at his first inaugural ball in 2009. It’s no surprise that in his post-presidency he and former first lady Michelle Obama launched their own production company, Higher Ground. The racial justice movement that gained momentum after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 also primed audiences for content that uplifted Black experiences in America.

This momentum carried into the new decade with titles like The Photograph (2020), starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield, and Beyoncé’s masterful musical film Black Is King (2020), created in support of the Lion King remake from the year before. Also in 2020, Netflix offered audiences Radha Blank’s The Forty-Year-Old Version and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, with Viola Davis in the titular role. All of these had been in the works in prior years. But then came the racial justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which carried on through a global pandemic that brought the entire world, including the film and television industries, to a stop. Companies, including those in Hollywood, made grand commitments to support Black communities and voices. But as time passed, it became clear that these promises were performative.

The racial justice protests fizzled out in the fall of 2020 and Covid-19 delayed production plans for months, even years. Then the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild labor strikes lasted for several months in 2023, demanding Hollywood executives implement fairer wages, benefits, pensions, and protections for workers. Years of unrest put financial strain on the industry, and among the first shows and incentives to be cut were those that supported the diversity initiatives companies had so passionately endorsed in 2020. Those promises now seemed like mere cover for the true intentions of studios: to capitalize on Black consumers who were ready to keep investing in stories that reflected their lives.

In the past four years, Insecure concluded as planned, but Rae’s follow-ups, Rap Sh!t and Sweet Life, were canceled by the HBO offshoot Max, marking the end of her vibrant reign at the network. At Hulu, both Natasha Rothwell’s How to Die Alone and Kerry Washington’s UnPrisoned were canceled, after one and two seasons, respectively, despite being released under the Onyx Collective, an initiative launched by Disney, Hulu’s parent company, to support creators of color. Amazon Prime released the third and final season of Harlem in January 2025. None of these studios offered meaningful rationales for the cancellations.

On the big screen, inventive stories, characters, and histories have been set aside in favor of more palatable, sure things. Franchise hits with universal appeal, like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) and The Little Mermaid (2023) — which faced racist backlash for casting Halle Bailey as the titular character — and music-driven films like the Oprah-backed The Color Purple (2023) reboot and the historical biopics The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) and Respect (2021) got big press runs, marketing pushes, and awards nods. The few notable exceptions include King Richard (2021), The Woman King (2022), and most recently, One of Them Days. Zooming out, we can draw certain inferences and conclusions.

In 2023, there was an exodus of entertainment executives, many of them women of color. Disney’s chief diversity officer, Latondra Newton, and Vernā Myers, Netflix’s head of inclusion strategy, both stepped down from their roles after six and five years, respectively. Karen Horne, senior vice president of Warner Bros. Discovery’s diversity, equity, and inclusion for North America, left the company during its restructuring. Jeanell English left the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after nearly three years, less than a year after being named the inaugural executive vice president of impact and inclusion.

But even before that, a wave of right-wing sentiment (steeped in barely obscured white supremacy) had swept the cultural and political landscape, culminating in the recent re-election of Donald Trump. The attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that the government has launched since Trump’s second inauguration in January have explicitly sanctioned the continuing erasure of diverse perspectives, whether onscreen, in the government, in academia, or in corporate America. Many companies and organizations that once sought to fill the gaps in representation and opportunities by uplifting these perspectives are now being labeled as discriminatory and contrary to merit-based ideals.

We find ourselves now in a political climate that actively denies the realities of systemic racism. Opposition to any rigorous discussion of race or honest grappling with Black history has helped lead to the weakening of anti-discrimination policies that once helped Black creatives gain visibility in Hollywood. The institutional biases responsible for Black lives left dead in the streets and their beds are the same ones that create barriers to access in the entertainment industry and other sectors. A refusal to acknowledge the damaging effects of this racism now fuels the narrative that Black people benefit unfairly from diversity initiatives. New executive orders opposing DEI have emboldened companies to abandon these efforts without consequence. The underlying message is clear: Why should we specify that Black lives, Black education, and Black stories matter? Culture plays a huge role in influencing ideas, opinions, and — if the message is powerful enough — policies and protections. When Black families on TV, Black women in theaters, and Black friendships onscreen become scarce, it helps to foster a culture where Blackness can be easily undermined in real life.

While Black-led stories are far from extinct, it seems like they have certainly been put on a shelf. If history has taught us anything, it’s that the erasure of Black narratives is cyclical and linked to our sociopolitical realities. We’ve had our golden ages before, and we will have them again. It’s up to us to make sure that the lulls don’t claim the progress we’ve made for justice and equality. It’s also on us to remain vigilant and intentional about supporting Black art — because if we don’t, no one else will. But for now, I guess we’re just having another one of them days.