FX's Hip Hop Uncovered is an intermediate course that maybe assumes you've taken the 101 intro

The Hollywood Reporter

The six-part docuseries telling the story of hip-hop is a little self-serving, but offers some great storytelling, says Daniel Fienberg. "Hip Hop Uncovered is like going to a bookshelf, seeing a multi-volume history of a pivotal genre and grabbing a book from somewhere in the middle," he says. "That's not a criticism in any way. It's just a way of explaining that a series that FX has given a title of head-scratching nebulousness is a chapter within a much bigger conversation, and not the conversation itself. It's an intermediate course that maybe assumes you've taken the 101 intro — but if you've indeed taken that intro course, Hip Hop Uncovered has intriguing characters, a provocative throughline and a rich approach to culture that I mostly appreciated."

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• Hip Hop Uncovered executive producer Malcolm Spellman says he found resistance shopping the docuseries around because of lack of diversity: "The documentary space has been much whiter than the scripted space," he says. "The diversity push that began in scripted years ago, is just starting in documentary. I don’t think it’s a fluke that FX was the one company that we went to and the (non-scripted) execs are the same ones who work on scripted."
• Hip Hop Uncovered tells the story of the feared "Haitian Jack"