Entertainment NOW

Entertainment Now | February 19 - 25, 2022 By Sarah Passingham TV Media S o many lost or forgotten chapters of history tell the stories behind the every- day functions of society. One such lesser-told chronicle is that of the world's first Black-led union, the Brotherhood of Sleep- ing Car Porters, founded in 1925. A new, joint CBC/BET+ drama se- ries begins exploring the founda- tion of that union when "The Por- ter" premieres Monday, Feb. 21, on BET+. For those who may need a quick history lesson on the sub- ject of "The Porter," the series de- tails the lives of Pullman porters in the 1920s. Porters were Cana- dian and American railway atten- dants hired to work on sleeper cars. George Pullman, the found- er of the Pullman Company, only hired Black men as porters, and their duties included delivering food and drinks to passengers, shining shoes and keeping the cars clean. Women, meanwhile, were hired as maids to wait on female passengers' needs, such as manicures, washing, mending clothes and child care. Porters and maids were re- sponsible for giving middle-class passengers the experience of be- ing waited on like the wealthy. As a tough job with tremendously long hours and very little pay, porters were also subjected to discrimination on the job from passengers and their employers. A demeaning practice across many Pullman cars was calling porters "George," regardless of their actual names, effectively re- ferring to them as an extension of George Pullman himself. After the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Por- ters, wages and working condi- tions slowly improved until the Pullman Company folded in 1969. Ronnie Rowe Jr. ("Star Trek: Discovery") and Aml Ameen ("I May Destroy You") star as sol- diers-turned-porters Zeke Garrett and Junior Massey, men striving to organize their fellow railway attendants. Mouna Traoré ("Mur- doch Mysteries") is Marlene Massey, Junior's wife and a sing- er in Montreal's Little Burgundy jazz scene, while Loren Lott ("The Young and the Restless") plays Lucy Conrad, an aspiring singer trying to break into Marlene's scene despite facing racism and colorism every step of the way. Rounding out the cast are Stephanie Sy ("Nobody" 2021), Adrian Walters ("In the Dark") and "Crooklyn's" (1994) legend- ary actress, Alfre Woodard, as brothel owner Fay. Pulling double duty as series creators and stars of "The Porter" are Arnold Pin- nock ("The Listener") and Bruce Ramsay ("19-2"). Set mostly between Montre- al's St. Antoine neighborhood (known at the time as "The Har- lem of the North"), Chicago and Detroit, "The Porter" brings to- gether stories from both sides of the border, each of which con- tributed to the formation of the union. A series description from CBC's website boasts that the characters of "The Porter" are, "young, gifted and Black, from Canada, the Caribbean, and the U.S. via the Underground Rail- road and through the Great Mi- gration." While the cast of characters in "The Porter" may come from di- verse backgrounds, it was not difficult to find the perfect actors for each part, according to series director Charles Officer. The "Akilla's Escape" (2020) director told Radheyan Simonpil- lai for NOW Magazine that in or- der to find their cast, he and fel- low series director R.T. Thorne ("Utopia Falls") simply travelled across Canada, noting, "there's unbelievable talent here." Officer went on to say that "anyone who is looking for Black actors and saying they can't find somebody, well, here you have it." In that same interview, Thorne also shared the importance of porters in Black communities that were just a few generations removed from slavery by the time they were unionizing in the 1920s. He noted they "were able to utilize that network and spread some of their ideas and learn, and take that information back into their communities" for added benefit. Annmarie Morais ("Killjoys"), Marsha Greene ("Coroner") and Aubrey Nealon ("Snowpiercer") all write for "The Porter," with Morais and Greene also wearing producer hats for the series. Mo- rais shared with NOW Magazine the broader mission behind the show: "The struggles within our- selves, the struggles beyond our- selves and the struggles of the world at large." Like a lot of passion projects, "The Porter" has been many years in the making. It started over a decade ago in 2010 when Pinnock and Ramsay began pitching the project as a movie. When it was eventually picked up by CBC as a series, it was soon dropped when additional fund- ing fell through. Through its ever- developing lifetime, Morais and Greene moved from writers to showrunners while original cre- ators resisted suggestions from executives to bring on white showrunners. In the same NOW Magazine interview, Greene said of the long road to the premiere of "The Porter": "It's taken a lot of time for Black creators to break through and get to the level where we're allowed to tell our stories." Morais added, "we all spent a lot of years working and doing our own thing separately to get to this moment where we're all poised and ready to be showrunners and executive pro- ducers. … We really feel like we are the people to tell this story." Get ready to travel back in time and experience history when "The Porter" premieres Monday, Feb. 21, on BET+. Aml Ameen as seen in "The Porter" Band together: Premiering drama explores founding of world's first Black-led union 2 | Cover story A/Grindstone Charlie's B/Norris Insurance 1 x 4" Moore's Home Health 5 x 2"

• Cover