The late Baltimore rapper Tupac Shakur’s complicated relationship with his mother, Afeni, is explored in a new five-part television miniseries starting Friday.
“Dear Mama,” the title of one of Shakur’s most famous songs, also is the name of the miniseries debuting at 10 p.m. ET on FX network, and streaming on the subscription service Hulu on Saturday.
The first two episodes will be released simultaneously, and the series will wrap up May 12, two days before Mother’s Day.
Director Allen Hughes was given access to the late rapper’s estate, according to the online website Deadline. Hughes reportedly told members of the Television Critics Association that the miniseries will feature never-before-seen audio and video footage of mother and son.
The documentary slides back and forth in time between the 1970s, when the rapper was a 17-year-old high school student living in California, and the 1990s, when he was gunned down during a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas.
Afeni Shakur was a Black Panther activist, brilliant and self-taught. She also suffered from a crack addiction that resulted in a long estrangement from her son, though the two later reconciled. She died in 2016 at age 69 after going into cardiac arrest.
“My mama was a crack addict,” Tupac says in the trailer. “I ended up in Baltimore on welfare with no lights on in high school.”
The documentary begins after Tupac left the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he was making a name for himself as a gifted actor. But the trailer shows a young man who must have been much like the Tupac his Baltimore classmates knew — open-faced, and with a big, unselfconscious smile.
“It was my responsibility to teach Tupac how to survive his reality,” Afeni Shakur says in the trailer. “It was very difficult for me to be a mom. But I knew very well how to protect my children.”
The documentary includes appearances by the rappers Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Eminem and the boxer Mike Tyson.
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