Good Fences (TV)

A black family’s move into a privileged world of white 1970s suburbia triggers provocative results in this eye-opening tale about being true to yourself and showing your true colors. Tom Spader (Emmy nominee Danny Glover) is an African American attorney who is determined to “end the colored man’s losing streak.” With a burning ambition to succeed in a white man’s world, he gets his chance by winning a high-profile case—the defense of a white man accused of a shocking hate crime. Thrust into the limelight as a hot-shot lawyer, he moves his wife Mabel (Emmy, Golden Globe, and Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg), and their two kids out of their lower middle class town and into the posh, white enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, which at first, seems like paradise. The Spaders believe they have single-handedly knocked down the fences between themselves and the white American dream. But while Tom has a sense of pride for “making it,” Mabel struggles to discover her identity within their newfound, white-washed society. When Ruth Crisp (Mo’Nique Imes-Jackson, The Parkers), an African American lottery winner, moves in next door to the Spaders, Tom fears that he and Mabel will be blamed for this “black invasion” and that his anticipated appointment to the State Supreme Court will be put in jeopardized. Isolated from the world they came from, and strangers in their new one, Tom and Mabel must quickly discover who they are, what they really want, and decide once and for all whose dream they’re living. Executive produced by Emmy nominee Spike Lee and reuniting acclaimed actors Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover for the first time on screen since The Color Purple, Good Fences packs a spiky, satiric punch. It’s a bitterly funny and a bracingly honest look behind the barriers of class, racism, and success in America.