KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

movie-132 The complaints about the show not "reflecting black life" miss the point. It was intended a light-hearted entertainment with a strong dose of moral uplift.At a time when white folks across the country were seeing cities torn apart by riots, Jewish TV and movie producers in Hollywood wanted to do their duty to heal the world (Hebrew: "tikkun olam") by persuading white gentiles that black folks were "just like them".So they presented this squeaky clean high achieving black woman, who was married not to a black radical, but to a Great American Hero, who sacrifices his life for his country (and therefore we white folks really owe his widow and orphan son a lot, don't we?). It was a brilliant move. A complete lie (as black folks recognized at the time) but very, very effective is swaying white gentile attitudes in the USA.

momohund This show wasn't done in poor taste, but it gave the impression that black America in the late sixties was just like regular America and they had all the equalities and opportunities as everyone else. This show was just off base and not realistic. Black society was fighting tooth and nail for equality back then, and this show never represented that. Instead we see a patriotic black woman and her nice son living the American dream. This just wasn't a reality for black folks then. It painted the picture of the sweet and innocent Julia the way white America wanted to see black society. It wouldn't be until shows like All in the Family, Good Times, and The Jeffersons did reality TV come to life.

TooShortforThatGesture Just for the record, no one seems to have commented on the social importance of this show. It was the first television series to star a black woman. (And one of the few of its time to star any black actor or actress.) It was also important in that it did not play to stereotypes of of the role of black women, let alone single black mothers. Julia was a successful single parent with a career as a nurse at a major hospital where she was respected.As I recall, while her race was not ignored, it was not the crux of the program. The content of the show was not terribly exciting, but the matter-of-fact way in which Julia's middle-class life was portrayed was a major step forward for television. In a sense, the somewhat bland quality of many of the episodes was a de facto recognition of the fact that the day-to-day lives and concerns of most people (even fictional TV people) don't really differ based on external factors like race.

Douglas_Holmes Typical Hollywood "family" programming, this one is about a Black single working mom who raises a son, works full-time, and imparts those family values!It doesn't take a genius to see this for the irrelevant, feel-good nonsense it is. It had practically nothing to do with real single-parent life then, and is even more dated now.