Source: Courtesy FOX / Fox
In case you missed the premiere episode of FOX network’s new hit series, Our Kind Of People, MADAMENOIRE has got you covered. First things first, let it be known that writer and executive producer Karin Gist did not come to play. Gist offers up a full cast of Black folks and a whole lot of drama against the backdrop of the wealthy Black community of Oak Bluffs in Martha Vineyard.
In this first episode, “Reparations,” we meet the headstrong business woman Angela Vaughn (Yaya DaCosta), her aunt Piggy (Debbie Morgan) and her daughter Nikki (Alana Bright). They’re all excited to get a fresh start in the town among the elites. Angela is banking on wealthy connections to catapult her status and drive her natural hair care business. We learn early that Angela’s mother has passed away, and in her honor, she will have a pop-up shop where her mother once worked as a domestic.
The Dupont family enters the storyline straight off the jetway–a straight flex. There’s Leah Franklin and Raymond DuPont and their teenaged children Lauren and Quincy. We get a few hints the couple’s marriage is in repair and that they are all about their business and their benjamins.
Both families come together at a charity event. Angela and Nikki are not used to being in the company of so much wealth but are trying to blend in to not be awkward. When Angela meets Raymond and Leah she tries to offer a paper check as a donation to the charity as a means to fit it. That goes sideways because—well—you gotta see it for yourself.
The drama among the youngins is building quickly, too. Nikki is very much an outsider and Lauren, the Dupont’s daughter, is very much a snob. She comes for Nikki, but Nikki ain’t having it–at all. She gets props for her clapback when Lauren gets beside herself. The plot thickens when Taylor, mysteriously falls into a body of water at the event. Nikki let’s Lauren know she knows about her and Taylor’s entanglement. Lauren and Nikki’s fight turns into Leah and Angela’s fight. The drama continues to turn up when Angela shows interest in the Sisterhood. Leah is very much a gatekeeper who wants to keep Angela in her “place.”
Leah wastes no time exposing Angela’s mothers secrets. Angela is humiliated but still tries to defend her mother. In the final scene, we learn about a strain between Leah and her father Teddy Franklin, and Angela finds an old video tape of her mother being hushed by Teddy and now, she is determined to find out the truth about her mother and herself. She puts two and two together and believes Teddy Franklin is her father–and now she has to prove it.
She does so in episode two, “My mother, myself,” by getting a DNA test on strands of hair from the wig she designed for Leah for the Sisterhood’s fashion show. She goes to church and runs into handsome ass Ty, played by Lance Gross, who showered her with shoes and saliva in the last episode. Angela and Leah talk about their argument and try to find a middle ground, however, they don’t.
Angela’s family starts to feel like she’s losing focus of her goal being stuck on the past and getting revenge. Leah discovers Lauren’s secret relationship with her best friend, Taylor.
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Angela pulls a fast one and takes flowers to Leah’s mother Rose Franklin. Rose ends up thinking Angela is Leah and finds out Leah never visits her mother. Teddy and Leah helped put Rose in an old folks home. Angela learns more disturbing things about her deceased mother and that Piggy knew a little more than she led on. Angela decides to get to the bottom of the lies.
This episode starts with a bunch of mess and has the audacity to end with a Maya Angelou poem and Angela and her family pouring her mother’s ashes across a lake screaming “I rise.”
