Two Black producer/actresses announced TV production deals Monday, a day after #blackexcellence was displayed at the Golden Globes Sunday.
Regina King and Lena Waithe both signed deals with ABC Studios and Showtime, respectively. King, the Emmy-winning actress of American Crime, has a two-year deal with ABC for her production company Royal Ties, which will develop and produce new projects.
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King has recently been producing as well as directing episodic television shows like Scandal and Greenleaf, Deadline reports.
Waithe, on the other hand, has created a new show titled The Chi that was picked up by Showtime. And some big names––like Common and Dope writer/director Rick Famuyiwa––have been attached to the project. Straight Outta Compton star Jason Mitchell will be part of the coming-of-age series that follows half a dozen characters navigating the South Side of Chicago, where growing up can be a matter of life and death.
“I was born and raised in Chicago, and my city is really under duress at this moment. It has become a war zone,” Chicago-native Waithe told Vogue.com about the show last year. She is a regular on Netflix’s Master of None. “It was not that violent when I grew up there. It was never a peaceful place, mind you, but it was not this bad. And my family still lives there. It’s something I think about often—those headlines aren’t just background noise to me. And I thought, I want to write about this…It’s a mixture of Fruitvale Station and Crash.”
Congrats, ladies. We’ll be watching.