by Aja Dorsey Jackson
Viewers wanted it back after it was cancelled two years ago. BET picked it up and fans everywhere counted down to its premiere Tuesday night. But despite all the promotion, excitement and fanfare, when the show was over The Game was not the same.
Keeping with the true timeline, Season Four picks up two years after the end of Season Three, which wrapped up with Derwin Davis (Pooch Hall) and Melanie’s (Tia Mowry) wedding and the birth of Davis’ son D.J. with the other woman. The now married Derwin has shot to football superstardom taking Melanie along for the ride. She has abandoned her dream of becoming a doctor to be a supportive football wife all while questioning the paternity of the baby on the side.
Jason (Coby Bell) and Kelli Pitts’ (Britney Daniel) marriage is officially over and we follow Kelli as a bitter divorcee with her own reality show and a burning desire to beat former friend Tasha Mack (Wendy Raquel Robinson) down in the streets for sabotaging her marriage. Jason Pitts is no longer playing for the Sabers and holding out for a better contract.
Tasha Mack is inexplicably no longer dating boyfriend Rick Fox and is getting hot and heavy with a younger man played by Terrence J (of BET’s 106 and Park) while managing Derwin’s football career. Malik Wright (Hosea Chanchez) has used his football earnings to start a successful chain of chicken trucks run by his cousin/flunkie TeeTee. In his spare time he is messing around with the Saber’s owners’ wife (Megan Goode).
If it sounds like there is a whole lot going on, there is. And now for the good, the bad and the ugly:
The Good: BET gets an “A” for production quality on this one. One of my biggest gripes with the network is that their programming occasionally looks like something I recorded with my camera phone. BET stepped its game way up for this one and cranked out a show that was visually attractive.
The Bad: The new season felt a lot less like The Game and a lot more like the Young and The Restless. With Jason no longer playing for the Sabers, he and Kelli’s divorce, Kelli and Tasha feuding with each other and Malik’s return as the evil town villain, the characters on the show have become segmented with each character wrapped up in his or her own individual plot line.
The rare moments when the characters do interact with each other are forced and awkward. Melanie randomly running into Kelli while she’s picking up her residency application? Kelli calling a sports television show to berate her ex husband on national TV? The characters’ lives have little overlap and when they do it doesn’t make much sense.
The mother/son dynamic between Tasha and Malik was always a driving factor behind the show and in this season premiere I don’t think we saw the two speak the whole episode when in previous seasons there is no way that Mama Mack would stand by and watch Malik participate in such foolishness.
What made The Game so good before was the camaraderie and the chemistry between the ensemble cast, and it’s pretty hard to capture that with each character off doing his or her own thing. Instead writers have to rely on hijinks like the Maury induced “You are the father, You are not the father” storyline. They took the game out of The Game, and the show is suffering for it.
The Ugly: Who was responsible for the two horrible casting failures of Season 4? Brit Brat, who we last saw as a realistic combination of Kelli and Jason at age maybe 10, re-emerges looking absolutely nothing like the original Brit Brat and looks a lot more like a 17-year-old than the 12-year-old she should be. It was almost like the old Aunt Viv/new Aunt Viv switcheroo. Baby DJ, who keeps getting problematically referred to as yellow with silky hair, has neither one of those characteristics.
And why were all the characters so evil? Malik was always a bit of an egotistical jerk, but his eagerness to stomp Tee Tee’s character into the ground with no reasoning behind it wasn’t in line with the original character. Sure Kelli is bitter over her divorce, but her sudden transformation into Cruella Deville just doesn’t seem realistic. The characters seem to be polarized versions of themselves and have gone from slightly annoying yet endearing to not the least bit likeable in many cases.
But this was just episode one. Maybe things will become clear as the season progresses, but the show’s definitely got some explaining to do. I’m not ready to tune out”...yet. Now the show that came on after it? That’s another story (and another review)!
What did you think of The Game’s season premiere?
Aja Dorsey Jackson is a freelance writer and public relations consultant in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more about her at www.ajadorseyjackson.com or follow her on twitter @ajajackson.