(ThyBlackMan.com) I’ll say the quiet part first. Tyler Perry drives me crazy. He also amazes me. And I gave up a while ago trying to pick one, because watching his stuff feels like arguing with a cousin you love who keeps making the same mistake at every cookout.
My auntie had the plays before they were anywhere. Bootleg DVDs, the camera shaking in the back of some theater, the audio half blown out. Didn’t matter. We watched anyway. A grown man in a wig and a housecoat waving a pistol around, quoting scripture two seconds later, and the whole room losing its mind. That living room was church. It was comedy. It was cheaper than therapy and probably did more. So when somebody who never sat in a space like that wants to lecture me about Madea, I tend to tune out fast. They missed who he was talking to. Missed it completely.
Now. The hustle.
You know the story by now but it still knocks me sideways. Slept in his car. Put up a play that flopped so hard he should’ve folded right there, and nobody would’ve said a word. He kept going. Small church circuits, the kind Hollywood didn’t know existed and wouldn’t have respected if they did. Understood one audience better than every executive in Los Angeles combined. Black folks, churchgoing folks, women who never once got to be the main character of anything. He bet the whole thing on them. Showed up. They kept showing up, in numbers that made the suits nervous, and every time the doubters had to go invent a fresh excuse.
Then the man bought the land.
His studio in Atlanta sits on an old Confederate army base. Sit with that for a second. A son of the South, a brother who survived a childhood I won’t even get into here, now holds the deed to ground where men once bled to keep his people in chains. His name is on the gate. He financed his own pictures so no studio could ever take the scissors to his final cut. I can fuss about any one movie all day long, but the bones of what he built, that independence, that is the genuinely radical move. A whole generation of young creators is eating because he kicked the door in first.
And he paid out. Real talk. Crews, electricians, caterers, actors who couldn’t get a callback on either coast, all of them getting steady checks off his operation. He handed Cicely Tyson roles with weight when she was a legend the industry treated like furniture. Pulled up faces nobody was looking at. In a business that loves telling Black talent to wait its turn forever, that means something. It means a lot.
So that’s real. All of it. I’m not walking any of it back.
But I watch movies for a living, which means I have to put on the other hat eventually. The one that actually listens to the dialogue. And loving the man does not require me to lie about the scripts.
The writing. Lord, the writing.
It’s been the same problem for twenty years and he seems almost proud of not fixing it. No writers room. He bangs the scripts out himself, fast, way too fast, and you can feel that loneliness in the finished thing. Nobody pushed back. Not once. So people don’t talk like people. They stand there and announce their feelings out loud. Your villain walks in already dripping evil, so the twist is dead before you get to it. Plots jerk from a sermon to a pratfall to a deathbed in a single breath, no bridges built between any of it, and then somebody staples a tidy little lesson on the end whether the story earned it or not.
I’ve seen a woman in one of these find out her man is cheating, catch a terrible diagnosis, get saved, and meet her brand new soulmate, all inside what felt like fifteen minutes. Come on. Life don’t move like that. Grief doesn’t run on a clock. And what kills me, what actually hurts, is the talent flickering underneath the mess. He knows rhythm. Knows exactly what makes a packed house gasp and clap and grab the person next to them. He’s got a gift for the big release that a patient writer would spend a whole hour building toward. Just keeps grabbing for it on page two. And the cheap version smothers the great one that was right there.
There’s the woman thing too, and I’m not gonna dance around it. A shape repeats. That successful, educated sister gets punished by the story for her ambition, then a humble down to earth man shows up to rescue her and remind her what she forgot. Sometimes it plays warm. Other times it reads like a finger wagging at her to get back in her place, and plenty of folks who love him have been saying so for years. His work can adore Black women with its whole chest and still keep shoving them into five approved poses. Both of those things are sitting in one body of work.
Critics haven’t been kind, and some of the sharpest cuts came from family. Spike took his shots a while ago. That whole fight over whether Madea is selling the same coonery our grandparents bled to bury, that’s a real argument. A serious one. I’m not waving it off. But I’ll also tell you I clocked how cozy a certain crowd got roasting a populist Black artist while never once asking why the studios get a pass for the soulless garbage they shovel at everybody. That double standard is loud. You can hold a man’s feet to the fire over lazy writing and still refuse to act like his audience is too simple to know what it wants.
And they know. That’s the part the snobs never get. Those viewers aren’t being fooled. They’re choosing it. Choosing comfort, recognition, a world where their faith and their kin and their hurt get treated like they belong on a screen. He held up a mirror nobody else would bother holding, even when the glass came out a little warped. A bent reflection still beats not existing at all. Millions will look you dead in the eye and tell you that themselves.
So where’s that leave me, sitting in the dark scribbling notes.
Torn. Honestly torn, which is the only spot that feels true. I want the brother to slow all the way down. Let an editor bruise his ego. Bring in some folks who’ll argue with him and make him sweat a second draft for once. What he built is too important to keep packing with first drafts. He’s got nothing left to prove about selling a ticket, hasn’t for years. The only mountain still standing is craft. I’d pay good money to watch him try to climb it.
Because the genius is real. It’s just not always sitting where folk go looking. It’s in the vision. The nerve. That flat refusal to wait on a gatekeeper who was never gonna pick up the phone. It’s in a man who turned his worst days into a fortune and then handed the keys to people who looked like him. His pen is the part still trying to catch the empire, and maybe it never does. But I’m not about to bet against somebody who already pulled off the impossible once. I’ve been wrong about him before. Part of me is praying I get to be wrong again, the good way, in a dark room, blindsided by a script that finally lives up to the man who wrote it.
This brother loves poetry, music, and the culture that raised him… His words come from somewhere honest, and they speak to everyday Black folks just living their lives… Reach him at JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.
