When the teen drama “Euphoria” premièred, on HBO, in the summer of 2019, it was a cultural event. Its themes of drug abuse, mental health, and ecstasy, and its packaging and presentation of queer aesthetics, came Instagram-ready. No matter how bleak things got at East Highland High, you still wanted to dress like Rue and Jules, characters who, given the show’s interest in appearances, were necessarily fetish princesses of the genre. Later that summer, another teen drama, “David Makes Man,” débuted, on OWN. It is the metabolic opposite of “Euphoria.” The remarkably humane melodrama is not trying to influence you, or make you buy something; nor is it trying to ride on pop-cultural rhythms. “David Makes Man” is the rare successful portrait of a teen life that privileges narrative over contemporary critique.
I came late to “David Makes Man,” which is now in its second season. (The first season can be streamed on HBO Max.) I’d been turned off by the loglines and some of the reviews, which tended to use “lyrical” and its variants when discussing the journey of David, the protagonist, a fourteen-year-old Black boy living in grinding poverty in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t the plot, which can edge close to the ponderous, that converted me but the groundbreaking work of the lead actor, Akili McDowell, who seems to invent Black boyhood onscreen. Barely older than his character at the time of filming, McDowell suffuses his portrayal of David with the intelligence of a child who is approaching the realm of adulthood with wonder and panic. It’s a full-body performance, with a suppressed smile and darting eyes and a crooked, nervous posture. Even at rest, David always seems prepared to take flight.
Tarell Alvin McCraney created the series, and, of his explorations of Black adolescence, “David Makes Man” is among the strongest, after the 2016 film “Moonlight,” which he co-wrote with Barry Jenkins. We meet David in the city of Homestead, where he lives in a faded-pink housing project called the Ville with his doting mother, Gloria (Alana Arenas), who is a recovering addict, and his impish younger brother, J.G. (Cayden K. Williams). The Ville is one labyrinth that David must navigate; the other is Galvin Magnet Middle School, a prim school for gifted students. The schism of David’s existence, framed by class and underscored by a distance both geographical and psychological, is clear even in how he is addressed: at Galvin, he is D.J., and at the Ville he is Dai.
Neither place is a simple refuge. David is just as likely to encounter hostility in his school uniform as he is to encounter compassion in his plain white T-shirt. The two worlds exist on either side of an interstitial space bridged by the city bus. In the pilot, we watch David as he scrambles to catch it; he is running late because he had to clean up after his brother, a bed-wetter. When he boards the bus, he is covered in a film of sweat. Another passenger, an older Black man, gets his attention. “You ain’t regular, are you?” the man observes. David doesn’t respond in words, but his face tightens in boyish annoyance. The strange, teasing man, in his dark sunglasses, reminds us of Baron Samedi, the vodou god of death.
David has seen this man before—he has even adored him. We learn that the man, whose name is Sky, is no longer alive; he is a phantom. He was once the neighborhood drug dealer, a charismatic man who was also a complicated father figure to David. This haunting is David’s manner of coping with the loss of his mentor, and it surges with knowingness, fear, and love. Sky apparates into the human drama of David’s life to dole out bits of advice, from encouragement in school to playful ribbings and warnings, such as “pussy will get you stuck.” The scenes of David, in public, thrashing at Sky are like religious evocations of Jacob and the angel.
Sky had hoped for a different path for David than the gruelling life of a hustler. But David, wanting to support his cash-strapped mother, feels reality constricting his options. At Galvin, David strives to please the faculty, to outshine the white students, and to prove his worth. At the Ville, he struggles to resist the dope boys, who want a little brother as much as they want a lookout. Sky’s biological son, Raynan (Ade Chike Torbert), who has taken over running the Ville’s drug deals, alternately preys on David and protects him, as if role-playing as his own father.
The first season of “David Makes Man” is a spiritual meditation on found family, a surreal exploration of a community that is not built around the nuclear unit. The Ville is a shelter from mainstream society; it is also the target of government intrusion and heterosexual anxiety. One of David’s neighbors, Mx. Elijah, played by Travis Coles, who is nonbinary, serves as a nurturer to the community. In her home, runaways, such as Star Child, a young trans man, can be both seen and not seen. The show has a pulsating interest in the capriciousness of masculinity and the frailty of gender lines, how a chest puffs one minute and collapses the next. “It’s what men do. We like to show off for each other,” a sinister character says, and his evilness does not detract from the fact that he is speaking the truth.
Although David himself is characterized as straight, intimacy with other Black boys takes all his energy. Shadowed by death, he is propelled by a desire to save others, particularly his friend and competitor Seren (Nathaniel Logan McIntyre), the only other Black boy in his class at Galvin. Seren is comparatively wealthy, and lighter-skinned, and his pretty-seeming home life obscures a secret violence. McIntyre’s performance is, like McDowell’s, ingeniously physical. In school, where Seren experiences a modicum of freedom, his eyes are wide and his shoulders relaxed; at home, where he endures abuse from his white mother and his Black stepfather, he is cowed, fidgety. The boys bond over the futility of communication, expressing their affection for each other in sentences that trail off, in notes, and even in telepathic messages, rendered onscreen as thought bubbles.
What orients us throughout the first season are the moments of trance, of silence, the camera’s resting on an anguished adolescent’s face. In a daydream, David imagines himself serenading a paramour with a love song by New Edition. Our empathy for David is fuelled by our desire to know him, to penetrate the opacity of this boy whose existence is so split that it seems he might break. The other characters note that David tends to half-answer questions, to speak “around things.” At times, he feels less like a person than like a manifestation of the concept of consciousness.
So it is disappointing to report that the first three episodes of Season 2, which premièred in June, denature much of what made Season 1 a non-normative surprise. I’m not bothered by the “This Is Us” time jump, to a couple of decades into the future—it’s the general decline in quality. The dialogue, which had been so poetic and fascinatingly oblique, now seems insecure and utilitarian. The show is becoming overly conscious of its status as issues television, and, possibly, newly invested in garnering more widespread cultural attention. Why else open with a scene of David, now a businessman, being tailed by an aggressive Black police officer, who turns out to be J.G., still a prankster?
Paradoxically, the decision to fast-forward to adulthood has slowed things down. The show has ended up in the position of having to pause and answer background questions about how we got to where we are now, with David made man. Kwame Patterson plays the adult David as an overgrown child, emotionally stunted, still shouldering a backpack, still with the same nervous mannerisms he had as a teen. He’s excellent and yet terminally imitative of McDowell. David is now conspiring with a Miami businessman to raze the Ville, in a gambit to “revitalize” South Florida. The idea that David might want to destroy the totem of his childhood is somehow both infinitely compelling and acutely didactic. With the child performances muted to flashbacks, the show will have to find its magic elsewhere. ♦
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