ABC has renewed acclaimed comedy Black-ish for a fourth season, bringing it past the minimum number of episodes required for stripped syndication. A renewal for Black-ish was never in doubt given its good ratings standing, award/critic clout, and recent sale into syndication, not to mention the fact that it’s the most tenured ABC comedy produced in-house. In lieu of a mass renewal like last season, though, ABC decided to hold even the most obvious renewals to the last minute.
Black-ish has spent the past three seasons tucked behind ABC cornerstone Modern Family, which is one of the best time slots on television. However, with Modern looking to be in the home stretch of its immensely successful run and Black-ish successfully reaching syndication numbers, now might be the time for ABC to use the latter’s strength elsewhere and give the former a chance to launch one more comedy before it reaches its natural conclusion.
Created by Kenya Barris (The Game), Black-ish tells the story of the Johnson family, an upper-middle-class African-American family whose patriarch Dre (Anthony Anderson) struggles with giving his children a strong cultural identity while raising them in a predominantly white neighborhood. Making matters more difficult is that his wife, father, and children all have different definitions of and connections to blackness and none of them seem to intersect with his own.
In addition to Anderson, Black-ish stars Tracee Ellis Ross (Girlfriends), Yara Shahidi (The First Family), Marcus Scribner (The Good Dinosaur), Miles Brown (How to Catch a Ghost), Marsai Martin (Goldie and Bear), and Jenifer Lewis (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air).
Black-ish airs Wednesdays at 9:30 on ABC. The network will be unveiling its fall 2017 schedule on Tuesday, May 16th.
