Stream It Or Skip It?
The Smiley family from Beacon, New York began documenting their move to Zambia in 2021, and now they join two other families as subjects for the new Max unscripted series Coming From America.
Opening Shot: Striking images of wildlife and people in traditional African garb take over the screen, as a man wistfully opines about returning to his home continent.
The Gist: Three Black and mixed race families living in America decide to uproot their lives and move to Africa to give their families different opportunities and a more international way of life. This docuseries follows the families as they readjust to life in an entirely different culture.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This plot echoes the recent scripted Prime Video series Classified, which follows a young girl who moves from Oakland to South Africa and must find a way to adapt to her new life.
Our Take: America is the land of opportunity. This is the line that has been fed to people all around the globe, immigrants and natives alike. But in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, Americans began questioning the notion that everyone had the same opportunities. Black Americans were disproportionately incarcerated, stopped by police, and had less generational wealth than their white counterparts.
In Max’s Coming From America, three American families flip the script on the American Dream and leave America to find better opportunities for their families in Africa, the “homeland” to some of the people moving back. The reasons for going back vary: for the Kelly family, they are pursuing comedy careers in what they view as an untapped market, while the Smiley family sees the ways that the American system is prejudiced against darker skin and want to both shield their kids from that and also expose them to an entirely different way of life.
If you’re going to uproot your lives and transplant yourself into a new continent, you should do some homework. The featured families are varied on this as well — some arrive in Ghana with absolutely no idea what to expect, while the family moving to Zambia has done some small research and found a job to help them get situated. The Max series leans into the cultural differences and the stereotypical American mindset with the Kellys especially. In one particularly cringe scene, the couple goes to a supermarket catered to foreigners and still has trouble finding what they need; a worker there says they’re the only ones who have had such a difficulty.
I imagine future episodes will feature more overt conversation about the process of fitting into a new culture, especially as all of these families come from places where their skin color is typically a conversation starting point and a basis upon which many judge them. This feeling of “otherness” could be perpetuated as Ghanaians and Zambians may have preconceived notions about what Americans are like. I hope the show goes there and embraces some hard conversations about adapting to new cultures.
PHOTO: Max
Sex and Skin: Nothing sexual in this series.
Parting Shot: Elaine Smiley is informed that her overbearing mother-in-law is already coming to visit, and it’s safe to say she isn’t thrilled.
Sleeper Star: Elaine and Gabe Smiley are the most grounded of the couples on the show, and you can sense that this decision was something that they decided upon together. In reality TV, people often throw around the idea of “doing it for the right reasons,” but the Smileys truly feel like they are experiencing this adventure for the right reasons.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Do you remember Coming to America? This is the opposite of that,” comedian and subject of the docuseries Gerald Kelly says, explaining the title.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite some of the subjects seemingly making this choice on a whim, the experiment is a fascinating one.
Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, Vulture and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.
