Dear White People creator on making the final season a 1990s musical event: “I just really wanted to"

TVLine

“We found out that the show was coming back and that it was ending all in the same moment, and so I wanted [to do] something that was going to feel worthy of an ending that we also couldn’t have had the benefit of building to because we never knew we were coming back every time the show came out,” Justin Simien tells TVLine. “It was one of two things that we had never quite gotten to do but wanted to do since Season 1. When we got to the final season, it was like, ‘Well, you know, make an event of the end of Dear White People. Let’s just do it for the whole season altogether.'” Simien adds, in a separate interview with Entertainment Tonight: "Part of it is, that's what was in my soul. That's what I needed to do at the time...But the intellectual smarty-pants answer is that the '90s is such a clear flashpoint for Black culture, particularly with music. You see it in film, too. We were coming out of the post-Do the Right Thing moment of Black film and, suddenly, there were three Black filmmakers working in Hollywood at the same time. And it feels like this big cultural renaissance, but at the same time, once you get to the end of the '90s, what was the renaissance has now become a bit of a trap."

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• Ranking Dear White People's final season musical moments