You’ve most likely heard about shows like Friends or Sex and the City, with their iconic jokes, plot lines, and aesthetics cemented into pop culture. Everyone knows “We were on a break,” or Carrie Bradshaw’s disastrous dating life. It wasn’t until I got older and more culturally aware that I heard of shows like Living Single and Girlfriends.
When I finally watched these shows, I realized something that felt both validating and frustrating. They followed many of the same tropes as the more popularized “white” series and, in many ways, they did it better. They tackled racism, colorism, and social and political issues within the Black community, while shows like Friends or Sex and the City often included people of color only as background characters, rarely developing them with any real complexity.
Friends is often considered the blueprint for modern sitcoms – a group of twenty-somethings navigating careers, love, and adulthood while living in a big city. Yet Living Single, which premiered in 1993, a full year before Friends, had already created that formula. Centered on six Black professionals living in New York City, the show blended humor with social commentary through a distinctly Black lens. Show creator Yvette Lee Bowser once noted that fans told her the characters remind them of themselves, their friends, or their relatives,” a testament to the show’s authenticity and cultural reach.
A year later, Friends premiered and became a mainstream phenomenon. While both shows followed the same basic archetype of young adults figuring out life together, Friends received far more promotion and is now considered one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time. Queen Latifah, who played Khadijah James on Living Single, said on The Drew Barrymore Show, “A bunch of kids found it during COVID, and then after that, now it’s on HBO.”
That disparity raises an uncomfortable question. Why do white-led shows receive credit for ideas Black creators introduced first or did just as well?
A similar comparison can be made between Sex and the City and Girlfriends. Sex and the City aired in 1998 and followed four women navigating love, friendship, and independence in New York City. Based on Candace Bushnell’s novel of the same name, the show gained massive cultural traction due to HBO’s marketing power. Two years later, Girlfriends premiered, featuring similar themes but centering on four Black women living in Los Angeles. While the shows differ in cultural perspective, both explored womanhood, intimacy, and friendship in ways that were rare for television at the time.
Girlfriends portrayed Black women’s experiences with nuance and depth, something many viewers felt was missing from mainstream media. Creator Mara Brock Akil has said that she did not see herself represented in Sex and the City and wanted to place Black women “at the table,” telling stories about work, love, and friendship that reflected their real lives.
There is an important distinction between Living Single and Girlfriends. Living Single is often considered the blueprint that was never fully credited as such. Girlfriends, on the other hand, came after Sex and the City, a show that underrepresented Black characters and rarely included them in meaningful ways.
I started Sex and the City after it began trending on TikTok and immediately fell in love with the characters. Still, I couldn’t ignore the lack of representation. Toward the end of the series, Miranda, the strong, independent lawyer, dates the Black love interest, Dr. Robert Leeds, played by Blair Underwood. Despite being intelligent, emotionally available, and genuinely compatible with her., Miranda ultimately doesn’t choose him. Instead, she returns to her original love interest.
For many fans, myself included, that ending didn’t sit right. It felt like yet another example of mainstream shows introducing “perfect” Black characters who lack depth or flaws, only to discard them when it’s time for a happy ending.
Reflecting on Sex and the City further, the show’s whiteness, both in front of and behind the camera, is part of its charm but also its blind spot. If Carrie Bradshaw had written about it in her column, she might have asked, “Four women, a big city, bigger dreams, but whose New York is it, really?” That voice captures the glamour and chicness of the show while also revealing the cultural landscape it showed, one that rarely acknowledges the Black perspective unfolding in the same city.
The legacy gap becomes even more apparent in the age of streaming. Friends continues to dominate platforms like Max, while Living Single and Girlfriends have only recently found renewed audiences through streaming services, like Netflix and Hulu. Social media has played a huge role in this resurgence, with TikTok clips and Twitter threads highlighting just how influential these Black shows truly were.
For me and my peers, discovering Living Single or Girlfriends for the first time felt almost magical. Even though mainstream shows were shoved down my throat from the moment I became conscious, something always felt off. Probably the lack of representation and characters who looked like me. Watching Girlfriends, I finally felt seen. I could imagine myself as Joan Clayton, played by Tracee Ellis Ross, a driven career woman navigating love, friendship, and the specific struggles that come with being a Black woman.
None of this diminishes the impact of Friends or Sex and the City. They have massive fan bases and remain culturally relevant more than twenty years later. But it does challenge audiences to reconsider whose creativity is elevated and whose is erased. Giving credit where it’s due doesn’t take anything away from these beloved shows. Instead, it expands the narrative to include the Black voices that shaped television long before they were recognized.
If you’re anything like me and had never watched Living Single or Girlfriends growing up, I suggest you start immediately. They offer lessons about friendship, love, careers, and life through a Black perspective that feels both refreshing and necessary. Once you see these shows for what they are, it’s hard not to wonder how different television history might look if they had been given the credit they deserved.
https://www.etonline.com/how-living-single-influenced-everything-from-friends-to-insecure-151597
