Twenties

It’s a cutesy, sometimes insightful, and humorous comedy-drama about navigating maybe the most exciting and terrifying decade of adulthood, all while trying to make it in showbiz. It’s a series that clearly wants to set itself apart with its visual style and rhythm, and, for the most part, it succeeds in that regard. Holding it all together are the natural comedic talents of Gibbs as Hattie.

The playful, immediately winsome BET comedy (which shares its title with Waithe's 2013 webseries) is a dishy showbiz tale that's eager to reveal some ugly truths about an outwardly glamorous business.

Newcomer Gibbs is good, but it's a shame Waithe doesn't appear in her own story — a sharply written, often amusing one.

Twenties palpably comes from a real place. And while autobiography isn’t always a storytelling virtue unto itself, it’s clear that Lena Waithe learned a lot of smart lessons in her journey from being someone with Hattie’s job to being someone with Ida B’s.

For the moment, Waithe’s Twenties is fine, it gets by, but here’s hoping it exceeds that to become the Black excellence Waithe believes she can deliver—and that her viewers deserve.

Twenties is definitely light on character development, but Gibbs shines as Hattie and the perspective the show presents is unique.

While the dialogue sometimes veers into cliché, Twenties is sharpest when its characters work through issues rooted in Waithe’s own path to Hollywood power.