This confident, funny show from Adjani Salmon is ‘whimsically quirky’
“Dreaming Whilst Black”, a new BBC comedy “about a man who quits his corporate career to try to cut it as a filmmaker”, is itself the product of creator and star Adjani Salmon’s decision to leave a steady job to pursue his dream, said Dan Einav in the Financial Times. Salmon’s fictional counterpart is British Jamaican Kwabena, who walks out of a job in recruitment in order to work full-time on his film, a Windrush-era drama. Alas, he finds “a dearth of opportunities for someone with no experience, few connections and dark skin”.
The series sends up the film industry’s “troubling relationship” with race, skewering the superficial application of words such as “diversity” and “inclusivity”, and showing how minority storytellers are compelled to lean into reductive stereotypes to get their work noticed. But it’s often “more breezy than biting, and as whimsically quirky as it is wryly observed”.
