Gabrielle Union’s I’ll Have Another Productions along with Katie and Mauricio Mota via their Wise Entertainment are teaming up for The Sisters Are Alright dramedy.
The aforementioned are adapting Tamara Winfrey-Harris’ award-winning book The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women In America into a half-hour dramedy series.
Sonja Perryman will pen the series that follows the real lives of three childhood best friends whose worlds are turned upside down after they agree to be part of a reality series called Sistas In the City. The idea is to explore the duality of the women striving to make their dreams come true while surviving the brutal world of reality TV. It is too early to say whether Union might also act in the project.
“I have always been a fan of Tamara’s book and Sonja has taken the genius of that book and created a juicy world with such rich, multi-faceted Black women. This is a series that says something loudly but through such a fun lens. This is a world that offers endless story opportunities and we can’t wait to tell them,” Union said. “I’ll Have Another and Wise Entertainment share similar mandates when it comes to their dedication to creating content for underserved and underrepresented audiences. Both are committed to growing creatives of color and developing meaningful stories that connect to today’s audience.”
The foreword of The Sisters Are Alright reads:
What’s wrong with black women? Not a damned thing!
The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves.
When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the ’60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won’t let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures.
Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”
The Sisters Are Alright is just one of the many series Union’s I’ll Have Another currently has in development. No casting or production news has been provided as of yet.