Finally, Issa Rae Is Getting an HBO Pilot

Issa Rae’s awkward-black-girl comedy Insecure has landed a pilot order at HBO. The project has been sitting with the network since 2013, when I first got my Champagne glass ready.

Insecure will be conceptually similar to Rae’s wonderfully odd and relatable web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Moreover, Larry Wilmore is an executive producer and co-writer on the show, which tells me enough. Deadline reports:

Insecure focuses on the awkward experiences and racy tribulations of a modern day African-American woman. These are also themes Rae has tackled in her successful webseries, The Misadventures Of Awkward Black Girl, which won a Shorty Award.

Maybe the current winning slate of non-lily-white programs (Black-ish, Jane the Virgin, Empire) convinced HBO to push the button on this? Either way, I’ve been dying for a more diverse alternative to Girls (which is a show about white women in which nothing ever happens), especially since Rae has previously talked about having meetings with tone-deaf execs who wanted to take control of her story. She told Vulture in 2011:

“After meeting with a couple different executives in television, and seeing our visions don’t really align, I don’t want to sell my life to it now. In one meeting, during the first ten seconds, this guy said, ‘The show is pretty funny. This is about a typical black woman with her black women problems.’ And then said big names were necessary to make it to television. Everything we were against, he was for.”

Wilmore’s attachment makes this HBO news extra hype-worthy, though Deadline says “the extent of his future involvement in Insecure is still being figured out.”