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BET’s Being Mary Jane (2014), now in its third season, engages its audience through Gabrielle Union’s dynamic acting, the thoughtful writing of her complex character, TV journalist Mary Jane Paul, and the interweaving of her story with the hot-button issues she encounters in both her professional and personal life. Although the show is not exclusively about racial issues, its premise and setting in Atlanta, a city with one of the highest percentages of African-American residents in the US, allows for situational opportunities to explore questions and concerns highly relevant to the African-American community in particular.

Mary Jane’s news program, Talk Back, allows the series a platform for its characters to explicitly discuss racial dynamics in current events. The protagonist has negotiated a certain amount of creative control over the show’s content with the network. When a fellow journalist writes a book on harsh prison conditions, Mary Jane invites him onto her show (“Exposed”, Season 1, Episode 6). Although questions over the journalist’s sources divert the plot line, leading to his subsequent suicide, Mary Jane uses the opportunity to report on the disproportionate amount of black males who are incarcerated, going on to critique legislation that leaves sentencing largely up to the judge’s discretion (“Blindsided”, Season 1, Episode 8). Setting Talk Back in a city where the black community makes up the majority rather than the minority of the population sets a stage where a news show would report “black stories” more consistently, for a captive target audience. Atlanta, sometimes called “Black Mecca” for its rich African-American culture, wealth of economic and political opportunities for blacks, and high concentration of historically black colleges, is the perfect fictional setting for a show aiming to debate racial issues. Mary Jane and her family discuss the finer points of her show frequently, and one can imagine that around the city her viewership is doing the same. Unfortunately, in the real world, news about the black community airs less consistently, save for the uptick in tragic deaths. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, protests racial injustice at its most extreme. However, further down on the spectrum of injustice sits the disparity between the stories reported by news networks about the black community and the more frequently occurring “mainstream (read: white) news.” Setting Talk Back in Atlanta allows for Being Mary Jane creator Mara Brock Akil to address underreported stories outside the channels of traditional reportage. By fictionalizing the news, she gives racially charged political issues the airtime they deserve.

Part of the inequality in the reporting of the news lies in the scarcity of opportunities for anchors of color, a topic on which the show also shines a light. Mary Jane has relocated to Atlanta after being fired from a position at CNN. After learning that her CNN successor is in town, Mary Jane sarcastically quips, “when I was fired, I was overjoyed to learn that another black woman got my job” (“Girls Night In”, Season 1, Episode 3). The subtext clearly expresses that, personal differences aside, hiring opportunities for anchors of color are usually singular, if available at all, at the major networks. Even in Atlanta, where African-Americans make up the majority of the population, Mary Jane has only one black counterpart on her news team.

The show also illustrates that, for those that do break through the glass ceiling, there are often costs. During a trial run on Prime Time, the network’s nighttime news program, Mary Jane pushes a guest further than the network likes during an interview, and subsequently receives, in the same breath as her promotion, a directive to tone down her all-black agenda and focus on more broad-reaching stories (“Reading the Signs”, Season 2, Episode 11). Season Three shows Mary Jane struggling with the conflicts involved in being a mainstream news anchor and voicing her perspective. In order to keep her primetime spot, she reports on hero cats, because pet stories are “skewing well” (“If the Shoe Fits”, Season 3, Episode 7). Though she is speaking to a majority-black viewership in Atlanta, the fact that Mary Jane’s focus on racism and racial injustice is still seen as “niche” by the network highlights an undervaluing of the black-viewership, even in the so-called “Black Mecca.” Where exactly Brock Akil is going with this plot line is not yet clear, but the implication is that it’s backwards to promote an anchor based on the journalism she has made a career on and then tell her to not continue it.

The show focuses not only on racially charged political and professional issues, but also on social issues, addressed through Mary Jane’s personal life. A fearless journalist who has seemingly hurdled countless professional obstacles, Mary Jane struggles to find a romantic mate who can measure up to her standards. Her frustrations in finding an eligible bachelor who is both single and emotionally available are highlighted in the show’s pilot, which includes a title stating that 42% of black women have never been married. In the same episode, a subsequent title clearly states that the show is not meant to represent all black women’s experiences. However, those real-world statistics suggest that the issue of finding a partner is a familiar subject to many black women. For Mary Jane, whether it’s her career thwarting her love life, men lying about being single, or simply a mismatch, starting a family is impossible despite all the handsome men in her life. The competition she faces rings all too true for many black women—her beaus are either married with stay-at-home spouses who raise the children, dating white women, or not interested in the traditional family values she is. The fact that these obstacles challenge a successful, beautiful woman in Atlanta, where the dating climate for African-Americans is favorable due to the high concentration and increased earning potential of black men there, paints an even starker situation for black women in other, less fertile environs. The show paints Mary Jane’s romantic troubles as a romanticized version of a national dilemma for black women.

Being Mary Jane‘s Atlanta setting and its focus on an African-American journalist’s attempts to “speak to the people whose voices and stories have been largely ignored” (“Reading the Signs”, Season 2, Episode 11) address national racial issues from an individual perspective. Setting the show in Atlanta creates an environment in which blacks are in the majority and the black community is more in control of the news stream than in cities where African-Americans are in the minority. Within this context, the protagonist works with a home-court advantage and advocates for equally representative journalism confidently and from a place of professional power, at least in Seasons One and Two. By fictionalizing the telling of racially charged political, economic, and social issues on Talk Back and Prime Time, Being Mary Jane uses a narrative framework to personalize and invigorate general conversations taking place in the media and amongst people about racism and racial inequality in America.