MLK Jr. Day Special Episode: Black History TV Pitch Reel

Mattathias Reads The World

Hello, listeners, and thank you for joining us for the first MRtW episode of 2021. For this special holiday episode, I'm joined here on the air by my good friend Mido so that we can discuss Martin Luther King's legacy, the contradiction of being both non-white and non-black in a race-driven country, and then we take a break from our regularly scheduled sobering reality to share quick pitches for 3 television dramas for a better world:

1. 40 Acres and a Mule: This alternate history drama features Territorial Governor Bass Reeves in an 1884 the United States offered freed slaves land... in the same fraught territory where indigenous nations already faced exile. And with restive ex-Confederate states resisting martial law, another bloody Presidential election looming, and white land speculators looking West once more, the citizens of Exodus Territory must decide whether what they seek is statehood... or independence.

2. BLM (Black Les Mis): an audacious multi-season intensive adaptation of the classic French novel which inspired one of America's favorite Broadway musicals, BLM will place Hugo's drama of police brutality, mass incarceration, unplanned parenthood, workplace sexual harassment, student activism, and persistent destructive wealth gaps among black Americans in and around Minneapolis from 1964 to 2020.

3. Back to Africa: Based on 100% true black American and transatlantic history, this smash biopic miniseries features Civil Rights legends John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and many more as young SNCC activists immediately following 1964's Freedom Summer, as Harry Belafonte offers them a reprieve from America's racial nightmare with an all-expenses paid trip to meet their peers in the newly independent African nations of Senegal and Guinea. Revitalized by the experience, Lewis and others decide to continue the journey by traveling onwards to Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya and more. Outside of American racial lines, they can for a time enjoy a new world where black is the default and whiteness truly a foreign concept.

We hope you enjoy these pitches, and look forward to seeing these shows greenlit, cast, produced, and released for streaming worldwide soon!