How the ’90s Kinda World of <em>Living Single </em>Lives on Today
The success of Living Single may have been unanticipated, but it was no accident. Over 25 years ago, a determined 27-year-old writer named Yvette Denise Lee (now Yvette Lee Bowser) found herself with a rare, welcome opportunity: the chance to create a show around the comic legend Kim Coles and the rap phenom Queen Latifah. Having cut her teeth writing on shows like A Different World and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper, Lee Bowser was ready for the chance to create a world that revolved around the kinds of black characters she knew best.
“For me, it began with the realization that if this industry was really only going to cater to and embrace white people, and white men in particular, and have them in positions of power behind the scenes,” Lee Bowser said when we spoke earlier this summer, “I wasn't gonna be here for long. So that was my impetus for getting into the world of development and creation of shows about us.”
Over the course of its five-season run, Living Single followed the lives of six main characters, with a Brooklyn brownstone as their home and the show’s primary backdrop. Three of the women were roommates: Khadijah James (Latifah), the fearless editor of a black magazine called Flavor; Khadijah’s bubbly cousin and assistant, Synclaire James (Coles), and a spunky, projects-raised boutique saleswoman named Regine Hunter (Kim Fields). Their neighbor, the fierce lawyer Maxine Shaw (Erika Alexander), dropped in on the women often, along with two men who shared an apartment upstairs: the suave, Afrocentric stockbroker Kyle Barker (Terrence “T.C.” Carson) and the kind-hearted handyman Overton Jones (John Henton).
Together with an impressive crew of guest stars including Morris Chestnut, Gladys Knight, and Cress Williams (who played a recurring role as Khadijah’s childhood best friend turned beau), the six actors welcomed viewers into a world of Lee Bowser’s creating. That brownstone held love, loss, and laughter; the cast radiated an electric chemistry. In the decades since the first episode aired on August 22, 1993, the Living Single ecosystem has branched out beyond the showrunners’ expectations—resonating with members of the original studio audience, viewers at home, and new adoptees of the show alike.
After Living Single went off the air in 1998, a slew of shows replicated the classic big-city-livin’ ensemble formula; the show’s fingerprints are visible, however light the touch, on productions including Mara Brock Akil’s Girlfriends, Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s Friends, Lena Dunham’s Girls, and Issa Rae’s Insecure. But now, with Living Single streaming on Hulu, a generation of viewers who may not even have been alive to witness the first airing of Max and Kyle’s first kiss—or Regine’s wig changes, or Overton and Synclaire’s wedding—is learning what it was like to live in a ’90s kinda world. “We were good stewards of the opportunity that was put in front of us and we didn’t really think about how big a hit it was at the time,” Lee Bowser said. “And the fact that it’s still on people’s minds and in their hearts now is really, just, very humbling.”
Through Lee Bowser’s creative vision and the dynamic performances of its cast, Living Single put the urban sitcom—and the diversity within black experiences—on network television’s map. Twenty-five years later, The Atlantic caught up with some of the show’s cast and crew members to talk about how they did it and why that still matters. The interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Yvette Lee Bowser, creator and executive producer: I was a very frustrated writer on a show about black people where there were basically no black people in power behind the scenes, so that set the tone. That was the impetus for me becoming more determined to create something so that I could create what I felt were more well-rounded depictions of us, as well as creating a workplace that was not necessarily warm and fuzzy, but more open to us, a workplace that embraced us. And by us I mean women and people of color.
Kim Coles, “Synclaire James”: From my perspective, I had a meeting at, I think it was called Warner Bros. then, it might’ve been called Lorimar. They asked me, Well what do you think of Queen Latifah? and I was like Oh my god, I love her. And I found out that at the same time they were having meetings with her and saying, What do you think of Kim Coles? and so they put the two of us together and the impetus was, they had seen—and this is the piece I never tell people, I forget about this. Spike Lee’s movie, Jungle Fever, there was a scene where a bunch of women were sitting around talking about men and life and all of that. And that was sort of the impetus of the idea: We wanna do a show with a bunch of women, how they feel about men. And I’m like, I’m for that, but I’m not gonna diss men. I love men. I love them, and so I think that was the germ of the idea. They put the two of us together and then Latifah and I were given a list of writers to meet with, and Yvette Lee Bowser was the absolute right one.
Lee Bowser: I developed a rapport with one of the development executives at Warner Bros., a guy named David Janollari, who’s still a dear friend. Queen Latifah and Kim Coles made talent-holding deals with Warner Bros. and their mandate was for the studio network to engage a black writer to create something for them. That’s how I got into the fold. Both of them had had failed pilots that were authored by white writers prior to this experience, and so they were both on the same page this time around. They came to me and they had the idea to do a buddy comedy, basically. It wasn’t really the show I wanted to do, and I asked for some time to think about what the show could be.
I had meetings with them, with Latifah and [Coles], visually to get a better sense of who they were and what was important to them, and I decided to also take that to help create the characters for them very specifically, but in a universe that was very much inspired by my own personal life and the very close relationships
