Suburban dad Andre (Anthony Anderson) is determined that his family be “not black-ish, but black.”
(Photo: Adam Taylor, ABC)

Great-ish.

As is almost always the case, there are some good shows arriving this fall. Few, however, seem special — and fewer still appear to have the potential to change the TV landscape.

Black-ish (ABC, Wednesday, 9:30 ET/PT; * * * ½ out of four) is one of those few.

A throwback to the All in the Family days when sitcoms linked saying something funny with saying something meaningful, Black-ish explores what it means to be black in America today — including whether it does (or should) mean anything at all. As others have discovered, that’s a risky area to enter, ringed by barbed wire, surrounded by a moat, and laden with land mines. But where others fear (or in some cases, should have feared) to tread, Anthony Anderson and creator Kenya Baris are stomping with glee.

Anderson stars as Andre Johnson, a successful advertising executive with a beautiful, equally successful wife (Tracee Ellis Ross) and three children — the oldest of whom (Marcus Scribner) is named for him. With a promotion and a raise on the way, Andre is living the American dream. Except, as he says, “whatever American had this dream, probably wasn’t from where I’m from.”

Like many patriarchs before him, Andre is afraid his family is losing its connections to its roots — a fear compounded when his son announces he wants to change his name and have a bar mitzvah. And when that happens, like many sitcom patriarchs before him, Andre has a meltdown, to the horror of his wife and children and the amusement of his father (Laurence Fishburne, in a nice, change-of-pace comic turn).

A dad overreacting on TV is nothing new. What is new is the twist added by Andre’s determination that his family be “not black-ish, but black.” Without offering any simple answers, the show amusingly questions racial issues and assumptions that other shows ignore, from whether it’s bad that his children don’t identify their classmates by race to whether it’s good that strangers in parking lots aren’t afraid of him.

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SOURCE: USA Today – Robert Bianco