Prentice Penny was one of the first to take the spirit of the writers room online. With credits on Girlfriends, Scrubs, and Happy Endings, Penny had already worked his way up the industry ranks when he started trading barbs on Twitter about film, TV, and the BBQ Beckys and Permit Pattys who went viral. His own time on the platform coincided with the phenomenon known as Black Twitter, the loose confederation of African American users whose advanced grasp on the platform helped it consolidate its standing as the place for tastemakers and media types to watch the hours pass.
After Penny’s job as an executive producer on Insecure, Issa Rae’s beloved HBO show, came to an end in 2021, he began looking for another project to sink his teeth into. That’s when he came upon Wired writer Jason Parham’s epic reconstruction of the history of Black users’ hold on the platform. Penny saw Parham’s work identifying the regular people whose posts inspired memes and Urban Dictionary entries, and thought it laid the foundation for a documentary that would be as funny as it was definitive. Penny’s raucous and informative series adaptation, Black Twitter: A People’s History—produced with support from Disney’s Onyx Collective and Wired Studios (which is owned by Condé Nast)—premieres May 9 on Hulu.
“We’re just beginning to see the ways in which it’s impacted the world, and I think there’s so much more that it will continue to do,” Penny said of the Black Twitter community. “But [with the documentary], I hope people can see how dope we were—how dope we still are—and just how creative we could be.”
Now that Twitter’s government name is X and new-ish owner Elon Musk has tried to radically change the site’s mood, it feels a bit like the moment the docuseries catalogs—from the cultural in-jokes of #UKnowUrBlackWhen to the industry-changing humor of #OscarsSoWhite—has passed. But Black Americans are still fueling the site’s trending topics and helping steer internet culture. Besides, as Penny explained to Vanity Fair last month, Black Twitter is more than the platform or a series of tweets—it’s the latest in a long line of collective efforts by the Black community to shift the larger society.
“Black culture in America is going to always reflect America back to itself,” he said. “Black Twitter was just another way that the community activated itself…. It reminded me of the way my mom talks about the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s.”
Vanity Fair: The series is really a celebration of Black life and Black culture on the internet. At the same time, you end the series with the 2022 sale to Elon Musk, which gives it an elegiac mood. How did you balance those two emotions when putting the series together?
Prentice Penny: I think that’s the line that Black culture is always toeing in America. It’s a line going through our lives—things happening, us needing to be serious, but also then needing to undercut that with humor to deal with it all. One of the things we talked about early on was how Black Twitter is toeing that same line. Black Twitter would highlight what happened, and then people will weigh in on it. Then people will give the historical take. When the Karen stuff was happening, it [would start with], “Hey, here’s this woman calling the cops on Black people having a barbecue.” Then it became, “Oh, historically this is how this always happens, calling the police to monitor us.” Then it was getting jokes off about it. Then putting her in memes and GIFs of historical events—putting her in the March on Washington or putting her in the TLC “Waterfalls” video. Then it’s saying, “Who is this crazy woman?” And saying, “Oh, this is Karen’s name and she works at this place.” Those are all the jobs Black Twitter is doing at the same time.
That’s the line that I felt we also had to have in the doc too, especially when getting to the Elon stuff. It’s like, here’s the way it’s serious, then here’s the comedy around it, and here’s what we’re trying to get to at the heart of it—what we’re really trying to say. That was always the line we were having in the editing room as we were telling it: How do we balance all those things that Black Twitter is always doing?
You couldn’t tell the story of Black Twitter without talking about Barack Obama’s campaign and election. But in the first episode, you made an unexpected connection by playing the footage of Kanye West saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” That moment—and the shock it inspired—really was a distillation of the type of Black political anger that just wasn’t being addressed by the mainstream media before Twitter. What went into including that clip? Did you think about addressing Kanye’s later internet-documented downfall, or was that out of the scope?
