Spike Lee’s Netflix TV remake of She’s Gotta Have It showcases his greatness and shortcomings

UPROXX

Parts of the TV series based on Lee’s debut 1986 film are “well-meaning but didactic and sledgehammer-y,” says Alan Sepinwall. Other parts are “so jarring.” “And a lot of it is utterly stunning in how it combines words and music and pictures to create what feels like a new audiovisual language. In other words… it’s a Spike Lee Joint. The creative disasters and triumphs come from the same emotional place, and you have to accept one to get the other. Even the direct address from Nola (or other characters) to the audience is a mixed bag: intimate and bewitching sometimes, stilted and distancing at others. But when it works… man oh man.”

ALSO:

• Like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, this series feels partly like a career retrospective for Lee
• Lee is able to truly offer complex depictions of modern blackness thanks to sharing the writing with a staff that includes female writers
• She’s Gotta Have It finds Lee operating in an entranced, scattered, digressive mode reminiscent of his movies like Bamboozled, Girl 6 and Jungle Fever
• This is “full-on Spike Lee,” which requires taking his excesses for better and for worse
• The remake was Lee’s wife's idea: “She watches a lot of television. I don't watch television”
• Lee credits “three black women at Netflix” for making the show happen: “At the other places, there were no black people in the room”