. The myths and rumors of their world are identical to the ones Beyoncé fans pass around. Also, each episode opens with the following onscreen text: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or events, is intentional.”
In what Glover and Nabers have described as a pointed response to sanitized depictions of Black women in popular entertainment—one that makes the show both compelling and, to my mind, ultimately unsuccessful—’s protagonist couldn’t be more different from Beyoncé. Awkward, immature, and obsessively devoted to her idol Ni’Jah,’s Dre is a young woman with the twitchy bearing of a feral child.
For roughly half of the seven-episode season, it seems as though the creators are making a simplistic horror comedy about the psychopathic undertones of stan culture. While that term—and a social-media landscape that fosters stans’ scariest attacks—are contemporary, the obsessed-fan horror trope dates back decades, to movies like