With ‘The Chi,’ Lena Waithe Heads Home in Search of the Real Chicago

Her Showtime series aims to paint her hometown in all its complexities

and nuances, not just the unremitting violence depicted on the news.

CHICAGO — As Lena Waithe stood in front of her childhood home here on the city’s South Side last October, images very different than the ones depicted on the news these days began coming to her. Instead of gang wars and unremitting violence, Ms. Waithe, the first African-American woman to win an Emmy for comedy series writing, saw in her mind’s eye scenes of children

joyously running in the streets and parents gathering at a neighbor’s house for a game of cards.

With “The Chi,” the chi season 1 putlocker9 a new Showtime drama that debuts on Jan. 7, Ms. Waithe aims to paint her city in all its complexities and nuances. She is the creator of this kaleidoscopic series that follows the interweaving stories of several young men, most notably Jason Mitchell (“Mudbound,” “Straight Outta Compton”) as an aspiring chef and Alex R. Hibbert (“Moonlight”) as a wide-eyed preteen. “The Chi” doesn’t ignore the brutality of day-to-day life, but rather focuses on the humanity it can devastate.

“My mission is to show these young black men are not born with a gun in their hand,” Ms. Waithe said over brunch earlier that day at a downtown diner. “These are kids who come out with all the promise and hope that any other kid does.”

“I wanted to humanize them and show that their lives are valid,” she added. “But I don’t paint us in a perfect light at all. My hope is that I can show us in an honest way. That’s it. Not bad. Not perfect. Just accurate.”

Ms. Waithe, 33, has lived and worked in Los Angeles for more than a decade now, but she said her recent success — in March she makes her major-studio film debut as an actor in Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” — is the product of a grinder’s mentality first learned in Chicago. And she credits much of that tenacity to her mother, Laverne Hall, who raised her and her sister after a divorce when Ms. Waithe was 3.

the chi season 1 full episode Despite working odd jobs with night-shift hours, including as a factory worker, Ms. Waithe’s mother found time to enroll her children at Turner-Drew, an acclaimed magnet elementary school that was almost entirely African-American. “It was like this hidden gem,” Ms. Waithe said of her idyllic primary school. “I don’t know how my mom discovered it, but she was always a hustler in that way.”

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When she was 12, her family relocated 30 miles north to the more upscale and racially diverse suburb of Evanston. There Ms. Waithe became fascinated with creative writing and television shows — her favorites were “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World” — so much so that she majored in TV writing and producing at Columbia College Chicago. Moving to Los Angeles was just a matter of time.

After three years of scrapping while living in a dingy Toluca Lake apartment there, Ms. Waithe was hired in 2009 by a then-unknown filmmaker, Ava DuVernay, to be her assistant on her directorial debut, “I Will Follow.”

“She was this wonderful, funny, passionate young woman who would just do whatever it took from locking up to getting coffee to cleaning up,” said Ms. DuVernay, who would go on to direct “Selma.” When the film wrapped production, Ms. DuVernay encouraged Ms. Waithe to chart her own creative course and not wait around for opportunities to be offered.

Ms. Waithe embraced the advice, writing and directing her own short film, “Save Me,” which landed her writing and production jobs on shows like “Bones” and “Dear White People.” In 2014, she wrote the pilot script for “The Chi,” and it quickly attracted interest from several networks.

Gary Levine, Showtime’s president of programming, said he and his colleagues were entranced by the pilot script. “It was both really dramatic and really intimate,” he said. “It was about a city, and yet it was really about these characters. It felt like it shined a light on a world we don’t get to see on television and a world that was really personal to Lena. And that came through loud and clear.”

Ms. Waithe chose Showtime in part because it’s home to one of her favorite shows, “The Affair.”

“I just liked the bravery,” she said. “They’re taking chances and taking risks and are a little bit off the beaten path.”

To her collaborators, Ms. Waithe is the daring one. Aziz Ansari, the star and co-creator of “Master of None,” cast Ms. Waithe as his character Dev’s close friend, Denise. And it was after hearing her tell intimate stories about coming out to her mother as a lesbian that Mr. Ansari urged Ms. Waithe to turn it into material for the show. The resulting “Thanksgiving” episode, co-written with Mr. Ansari, won an Emmy. (Angela Bassett, who was cast as Denise’s mother, received an Emmy nomination for her guest performance.)