The comedy sitcom “Black-ish” on ABC premiered in 2014, and its eighth and final season concluded in April 2022. Overall, the show was a success, maintaining its popularity with viewers and reviewers over the course of its eight-season run, garnering audience approval ratings of up to 71% on Rotten Tomatoes and 100% from critics. The show also received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations.
Comedy and drama were successfully combined in “Black-ish.” The Johnsons, an eccentric Black upper-middle-class family, and their four kids were the main subject of the show. Through these characters, the programme developed complex, perceptive humour that addressed and parodied the current political and social landscape. When Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross) marries Dre (Anthony Anderson), she does not have to decide whether or not to change her last name because both of their last names are Johnson. Dre feels Rainbow would have changed her name to match his if it had been something different to begin with, which causes a conflict years later. But the programme also covered more sombre contemporary issues like racism and police violence.
Many viewers are perplexed as to why the show was cancelled after Season 8 given how popular it was. The show actually terminated due to a number of reasons, it turns out.
Black-ish may have ended in part because of disagreements among the creative team, but mostly because the team felt it had run its course
The first element that contributed to the cancellation of “Black-ish” was that Kenya Barris, the show’s creator, had persistent creative disagreements with ABC Studios. The Hollywood Reporter claims that ABC made this decision when they decided not to run the Season 4 episode “Please, Baby, Please” in 2018.
Barris wrote and directed the episode, which touched on current issues like the Charlottesville demonstrations and the NFL’s kneeling protests. According to Barris, “ABC and I were not satisfied with the direction of the episode due to our artistic differences and mutually opted not to run it.” Barris departed ABC as the co-showrunner of “Black-ish” a month after this dispute with the network, but he continued to serve as executive producer of both “Black-ish” and the spin-off series “Grown-ish,” according to Variety. This conflict did not result in the immediate cancellation of “Black-ish,” and it does not appear to be the reason why it did.
Years later, the production crew, however, seems to concur that it was a good idea to end “Black-ish” while it was still in good shape. “In this day and age it is rare to get to choose when your show should come to an end, and we are grateful along with ABC to be able to make this final season exactly what we’d hoped for — and to do it with the entire and AMAZINGLY STELLAR cast coming back to close this chapter out with us the right way,” Barris wrote on Instagram. After a strong eight-season run, “Black-ish” seems to have ended naturally.
