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[This story contains spoilers from the series finale of The Chi, “The Last Dance.”]
After eight seasons, The Chi has aired its last episode. And for creator Lena Waithe, the series has been a hyper-personal journey. When the show premiered on Showtime back on Jan. 18 in 2018, Chicago’s national reputation was less than stellar. Even as Obama served two terms as POTUS, the city was dogged by gun violence, with 20 or more people being shot or even killed over a weekend.
Just three years before, New Yorker Spike Lee made the city’s gang violence the focal point of his film Chi-Raq. Waithe — fresh off becoming the first Black woman writer to win the comedy Emmy for Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None (in which she also starred on) — decided to put on her Olivia Pope cape to address how the city’s Black community has been represented on screen in the last several decades, most memorably with the 1970s series Good Times.
The Chi debuted amid a slew of diverse Black shows: Insecure, Snowfall, Dear White People, Atlanta, Queen Sugar, black-ish, Power and She’s Gotta Have It. Few maybe would have picked The Chi to still be standing eight seasons later as the longest-running Black ensemble drama in premium cable history, and one of the longest-running shows in Showtime’s history. And there was a lot of reason to doubt if it could continue.
