Dear White People Creator On Season 2, Twitter Trolls, And That Cliffhanger

Justin Simien gets bored easily. As such, he's not interested in the obvious, which is what makes his critically acclaimed, criminally bingeable series Dear White People so thrilling. The sharp comedy never takes the easy route as it unpacks the lives of a group of diverse black students at the fictional Winchester University.

In its second season, Dear White People continues to surprise through honest, self-aware discourse on everything from Twitter trolls and black love to the racial history of Winchester. MTV News talked to Simien about his approach to Season 2, his self-imposed rules for responding to internet dissenters, and what the finale's big cliffhanger means for Season 3.

MTV News: I wanted to start this by telling you that I really missed Defamation this season.

Justin Simien: We have too much good stuff we want to do! Prince O’ Pal-ities was something we tried to do last season, and we didn't get a chance to, so I had to do it this season. We're an equal opportunity shader, so I wanted to expand the universe.

MTV News: And it's just great satire.

Simien: It's fun to make them, too. It's really not even a dig on these shows because it's so fun to pretend like I'm writing and directing for them.

MTV News: So does that mean we can expect a new show-within-a-show in Season 3?

Simien: Maybe! At this point it's become expected of us, but I'm always looking for a way to push it. It also is that we're in this world where we're creating stories for the culture, and we're obviously watching what's out there and are informed by it. It's all about how culture tells us who we are and who we aren't. I don't know how to do it without that. It's part of the DNA of the show.

Simien on the set of Dear White People Season 2 with actress Ashley Blaine Featherson.

MTV News: Coming off the success of the first season, what was your approach to Season 2?

Simien: I just really wanted to outdo ourselves. I felt like the reception for Season 1 was so great, and it would have been really easy for us to rest on our laurels and churn out the same thing. But I get bored easily. I think I have ADD or something. Also, I felt like there was a sense of urgency to all these conversations that was unique to the time we were making the show. I just wanted to kick it up a notch on every level, from the title cards to the makeup to the kinds of stories we were telling. And also because we introduced everybody in Season 1 it gave us the opportunity to dive deeper into them.

With several characters, like Lionel and Reggie, they had these moments last season that in most shows would have been the end of it. When a character comes out, they usually are suddenly fine. They're gay and excited and have a boyfriend. And if someone undergoes the kind of trauma that Reggie experiences in Season 1, they just kind of bounce back. But the truth of it is that you don't just move on. These are the beginnings of a complicated, messy journey that the two of them have to continue.

MTV News: Was it a subconscious decision to have Sam get into fights with Twitter trolls in the first episode, or did that come from a very personal place on your part? It seemed like a very meta way to address the controversy of the first season.

Simien: A little bit of both. With the troll thing, it felt like such an opportunity to unpack in a way that a lot of people can understand because we're all dealing with trolls. It's part of the zeitgeist and the culture right now. It's difficult to be active online and not deal with this idea of fake people and bots and fake news. So it felt like not only was it something that was happening to me and happening to the staff that was interesting, but it felt vital to talk about it.

It was also something that we could literally study first-hand. Everyone is going through a version of that right now, and part of what this show tries to do is connect what we're all going through to these bigger issues and these deeper meanings.

MTV News: Do you have a line? Like, if somebody crosses it, you have to call them out.

Simien: If I feel like somebody's purpose is to instigate or to try and get a reaction, then I just block them. If it's a conversation that I'm not particularly interested in, I'll mute them. If it's somebody who's genuinely asking questions — like there was a kid the other day who was new to the cultural conversation around the show and was like same old same old, "What if there was a Dear Black People? There would be riots in the streets." And I felt the need to respond to him, not as a clap-back but as a genuine point of discussion, because I felt like this person was genuine. I like engaging with fans and people watching the show, no matter what their opinions are.

I certainly have learned to get out of clap-back mode. Once you start, it's really hard to stop. You get that dopamine rush from posting something and getting all the likes and retweets, but it ends up being a big waste of time. Nobody's convinced of anything new. You feel a little bit better, maybe a little more popular, but nothing was accomplished and maybe hours if not days of your life were spent arguing with someone who may or may not be a person. It's a trap!

MTV News: Speaking of Sam, her arc really bookends this season in a really surprising way, which made me curious: Do you know what the endgame is for all of these characters, or are you figuring it out along the way?

Simien: I definitely know where they're going. Whether or not they end up there in the series, that's up for debate. But I certainly have a sense of what each of the characters is becoming and what they're capable of being — and the show is an exploration of all the things that get in the way of that. But I also try to keep things a little loose because you never know where you might find some inspiration. At the end of the first season, when I had finished writing the show, I had an idea of where I wanted to go plot-wise, but the whole troll thing opened up this whole new avenue of study that I couldn't have predicted. You have to be very prepared, but you can't be so sure that you're not open to more interesting ideas.

MTV News: The episode in which Sam goes home with Joelle and Coco for her father's funeral was really touching and also a frank exploration of Sam's own guilt. It was so emotionally raw. What inspired that?

Simien: So many of us in the room have lost parents, and this really began as a very personal story for Yvette Lee Bowser, who wrote the episode and is our brilliant showrunner. Yvette, who's the product of a white mother and a black father, had a lot to say about the ways in which this idea of race can cut between family ties and how death brings all of that into clarity and focus. It felt like an interesting thing for Sam to go through, but more importantly, it felt like something that we as the room, but especially Yvette, could bring some personal stuff that hadn't had an outlet yet. That's the first thing I ask the writers: "What stories haven't you told yet?" That's a big part of our process.

MTV News: There were a lot of bold filmmaking choices this season. For example, "Chapter VIII" was an entire episode dedicated to one scene between Gabe and Sam. It was really intimate, almost like theater. What was it like directing that episode?

Simien: It was one of my favorite experiences as a director so far. There's no plot to distract you from the conversation and from the story. It was such a pleasure. We shot it over three days, which is very short for us, but these actors are real actors. They love the craft, and I'm a director who loves to work with actors. I also come from a theater background, just like the writer Jack Moore. We grew up on plays and finding ways to tell human stories in a single setting.

So I thought it was an important episode, but also on a personal level, it was a welcome challenge. I really admire directors like Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols, who didn't need to be anywhere but in a room with some really great actors to do some really great filmmaking. This was my chance to try that.

MTV News: It reaffirmed for me that Logan Browning is the best crier on TV.

Simien: She's a beautiful person and a great actor and, man, we're so frickin' honored to have her.

MTV News: At what point did you know that Joelle and Reggie were going to be an item in Season 2?

Simien: From the beginning. I thought that in a world where we have different kinds of relationships on the show, there really wasn't a positive black couple that you wanted to root for. I won't say that they're the Dwayne and Whitley — because that was a really slow burn — but they're just two people you want to see together. It was an itch that the audience really needed to scratch.

MTV News: The season ends on a very interesting note, as Sam and Lionel uncover the Order of X, or as Sam called it, "some Harry Potter shit." It seems like Season 3 will dive into more of the mythology of Armstrong-Parker House. What can you say about that?

Simien: It's sort of an American tradition to go underground and to try to manipulate and motivate the culture through anonymity. There are so many secret societies that date back to the founding of the country that live on in Ivy League tradition. I don't know if it's the Illuminati, but the idea that these people are connected through a network underneath this so-called hierarchy of America is a common theme, and I thought it would be interesting to explore the history of that for black folks.

We're in this moment where it's all about resistance, but it's really the persisters who have moved the needle. I'm certainly very interested in seeing a what an actual civil rights organization that is moving the needle would look like in the 21st century. You think of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, but nobody every really gets into the weeds of how those movements work, and I think it would be interesting to see a modern-day model of what civil rights might look like. So I'll say that, but that's all I'll say.

MTV News: Giancarlo Esposito showing up at the end as the narrator in the flesh was a perfect way to end it.

Simien: In a lot of ways, that moment is asking us to consider the source. We're always being narrated to through imagery and commercials and pop culture, and we very rarely stop to think about where these messages are coming from, who's saying them, and what their motivations might be. Bringing the narrator into the narrative is a way of saying that. This voice that you were thinking was the voice of God is actually just a human being who may have motivations and things on his mind that he hasn't told you. And, like I said, I get bored easily, so there was no way we were going to have a device like a narrator and not find a way to subvert it.

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