After years of launching important cultural conversations (and heated arguments) on the timeline, HBO original series Insecure is set to officially end after its upcoming fifth season. I’ve got just one question — what the hell are we going to watch after it's over?
On January 13, creator and star Issa Rae revealed that the adult dramedy would wrap for good following the last episode of the upcoming season.
“Prentice [Penny] and I are so grateful that HBO believed in our show from the beginning and kept faith in us to see our vision through the end,” Rae shared with Deadline. “We always planned to tell this story through five seasons, but we couldn’t have made it this far without the tremendous support of our audience.”
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Insecure follows the ups and downs of Issa Dee (played by Rae), a Los Angeles-based millennial who’s just trying to navigate the complexities of life. She hasn’t been the luckiest in work or in love, but at least Issa has a crew of (mostly) loyal friends to keep her going. Over the last few seasons, Insecure has expanded its plot to include the personal journeys of Issa’s close ones; many episodes have focused on her on-again, off-again boyfriend Lawrence (Jay Ellis) and her best frenemy Molly (Yvonne Orji).
The show, which early fans of Rae’s know was inspired by her popular YouTube web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, grew to critical acclaim over the years; it has earned Golden Globes and Primetime Emmy nominations as well as NAACP Image Awards throughout its four-year run. But more importantly, Insecure is highly esteemed by the fans tuning in every Sunday to see what kind of trouble Issa might find herself in.
In a landscape where it’s damn near impossible to find a Black story across any genre, Insecure expertly highlights the Black American experience by grounding its characters in a reality that so many of us live in today. From workplace microaggressions to the nuances of interracial relationships to awkward casual sex, the show gave Black people the one thing that we've been too often robbed of: genuine representation.
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With just one season left in this beloved series, Rae and Penny are now faced with the herculean task of wrapping up this story as realistically as possible. It would be an understatement to say that the end of season four was messy. We still have to deal with the rift in Issa and Molly's friendship, as well as with the fact that Lawrence has once again let us down, this time because he got another woman pregnant right before giving his relationship with Issa another try. (Truthfully, I don't know how Team Lawrence can ever recover from this.) There are still a lot of strings that need to be tied together, but if anyone can do give this story the ending it deserves, it's the creative partners behind Insecure. All you need to know now is that, unlike a lot of current programming, season five won't be pandemic-themed. Thank God.
The show is definitely coming back in this year, but we're not exactly sure when the final season will hit HBO. Rae and the rest of the cast held their first table reads virtually in September, and the original plan was to begin filming by December. Unfortunately, the ongoing nature of the coronavirus pandemic likely stalled those plans, so there's no official premiere date for Insecure just yet.