FEMINIST FRIDAY: Jessica Williams’ New Netflix Film & An Intergenerational LGBTQ Web Series

Welcome to another edition of Feminist Friday! Our weekly series where we get to share a handful of videos we are loving right now. This week’s offering is an intersectional one, after all, if your feminism ain’t intersectional, then what’s the point?

Since we just celebrated Pride Month during June, we wanted to share this awesome web series with you which comes from the A Plus team (the Ashton Kutcher-created digital platform devoted to positive journalism). We believe affirming messages about the LGBTQ community are important any time of the year, and this 3-part series titled ‘There’s No One Way To Be Gay’ is a great conversation starter.

In the videos, we see LGBTQ millennials and seniors sit down together to discuss everything from coming out, to dating, to calling out homophobic remarks and attempt to tackle the definition of love. We have come a long way over the past few decades in terms of rights and cultural attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, and these videos give fascinating insight into the differences as well as similarities facing many across the country even today.

The series was made in collaboration with Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) the United States’ largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender older adults. The discussions among LGBTQ elders and millennials were revelatory, with firsthand accounts of what it meant to grow up LGBTQ, the struggles faced by the community in years past, how things have improved in the decades since, and what love looks like now that same-sex marriage is legal in the U.S. Watch part 1 below:

Our second video is the trailer to a new Amazon original series called ‘Inside Edge’, the first series to come out of India for the streaming service. Launching worldwide on July 10 with 10 episodes in the first season, the show is set around a fictional cricket team called the Mumbai Mavericks, owned by actress Zarina Malik, who is played by Richa Chadha. ‘Inside Edge’ is loosely based on the real-life Indian Premier League (IPL) a favorite among cricket fans, and there have been press comparisons of Richa’s character with actress Preity Zinta, who is part owner of the Kings XI Punjab IPL cricket team, and actress Shilpa Shetty who was a former co-owner of IPL team Rajasthan Royals with her husband.

The series is produced by one of our favorite Bollywood actors Farhan Akhtar and his production company Excel Entertainment. If you’ve seen the Netflix original series ‘Club De Cuervos’, a show about a fictional Mexican soccer team owned by a brother and sister who inherited the club after their father passed away, you will definitely want to see ‘Inside Edge’. It has its own dose of sex, money, power, and high-drama set to arguably India’s favorite pastime, with a heavy dose of female empowerment against a male-dominated backdrop.

In an interview with Firstpost.com, Richa likens her new show to a different Netflix series, showing how much is riding on this series.

“When you watch something like ‘Narcos‘, which is in half English and half Spanish, the whole world is hooked on to it. Why can’t we be the ‘Narcos‘ from this country? ‘Inside Edge’ marries cricket with clever content. It’s a very well written show about a woman trying to break into man’s world and being controlled at every step,” she said.

Watch the full trailer by clicking here, and watch a sneak peek of what to expect from Richa Chhadha’s Zarina Malik in the ‘Inside Edge’ teaser below:

And finally, if you have been dying to see what comedic genius Jessica Williams will be doing since she departed ‘The Daily Show’, the wait is over! Behold the trailer to her upcoming Netflix original film, ‘The Incredible Jessica James’ (not to be confused with the Netflix/Marvel series ‘Jessica Jones’) has been released and it looks hilarious.

The film is set to be released on July 28, and of course you can catch Jessica throwing down some black girl magic in her podcast series ‘Two Dope Queens’ in the meantime. Jessica plays a 20-something playwright who’s trying to navigate Tinder and recover from a recent breakup — while working a catering job and shaming manspreaders on the subway. Eventually, she winds up on a date with a recently divorced man named Boone (Chris O’Dowd).

Elle magazine calls her “freaking hilarious”, while Variety says: “Some people are born to be movie stars, and ‘The Incredible Jessica James’ successfully makes that case for leading lady Jessica Williams.”

“I’m pretty, I’m smart, I am the cocoa queen,” says her character in the film, and we can’t argue with that!