The Next Chapter of Girlfriends: Who Should Write the Midlife Story We’re Waiting For?

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Love for Girlfriends never faded; it matured. The women who once watched Joan, Toni, Maya, and Lynn over Sunday dinners now juggle C-suites and caregiving, perimenopause and purpose, second acts and second chances. Yet TV still rarely treats Black women’s midlife as a center, not a subplot. A new series—call it Girlfriends: The Next Chapter—is overdue. And there are seasoned Black women creators who could deliver it with wit, grace, and grown-woman complexity.

Black audiences are power users of TV. Nielsen’s 2024 Diverse Intelligence Series reported that Black adults spend ~32% more time with TV each week than the U.S. average—evidence of a loyal, influential audience that actively shows up for stories it can see itself in.

But pent-up demand isn’t just about minutes watched; it’s about meaningful representation. Nielsen’s 2023 Black Diaspora Study found Black audiences express the strongest desire for more inclusion on TV among surveyed groups, underscoring how opportunity and responsibility converge.

On the supply side, representation behind the camera still lags the audience reality. UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Reportshows that among the most-watched streaming series in 2023, creators remain disproportionately white and male—a structural gap that directly shapes whose midlife gets greenlit and how it’s portrayed.

The business case is there, too. Across multiple study years, higher on-screen diversity correlates with stronger ratings and engagement—a pattern Time highlighted when UCLA reported that shows with ≥31% minority casts drew peak audiences. In other words: inclusive stories aren’t charity; they’re strategy.

Midlife is not a genre of decline; it’s a genre of consequence. For many Black women, this stage blends ambition with accountability and tenderness with tenacity: A midlife Girlfriends would actually cover:

• Health & embodiment: navigating fibroids, menopause, hair loss or regrowth, blood-pressure meds in the purse, strength training in the calendar.
• Family dynamics: empty nest meets eldercare; grown kids boomeranging home; divorce after twenty years or a late-blooming love.
• Career pivots: from corporate plateau to entrepreneurship, board service, sabbaticals, or returning to grad school at 50.
• Money & legacy: re-writing wealth scripts, real-estate decisions, wills, and “who gets the recipes and the records.”
• Identity & faith: reckoning with intergenerational trauma, reframing beauty, and rediscovering friendship as a vital organ.

Audiences already signal an appetite for friendship ensembles with Black women at the center—see First Wives Club on BET+ (Jill Scott, Ryan Michelle Bathe, Michelle Buteau), which ran three seasons and proved grown-woman camaraderie can anchor a streamer slate. Meanwhile, Run the World delivered a glossy Harlem set piece before Starz canceled it after two seasons; its warm reception and abrupt end only sharpened the case for sustainable, thoughtfully targeted programming—especially for women 40+.

If the mandate is “grown, nuanced, and bingeable,” the following ladies, each 50+ and battle-tested, are the right shortlist.

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But Why These Creators, Specifically?

Cultural credibility
Mara Brock Akil and Yvette Lee Bowser aren’t just veterans; they’re architects of an entire viewing era. Girlfriends and Living Single taught a generation how to see Black women’s friendships as worthy of primetime narrative space. Both creators have shown they can build ensemble casts with distinct, evolving personalities rather than archetypes. Handing them a midlife story isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake—it’s continuity of authorship. They know the audience, its history, and how its rites of passage have shifted with age.

Serialized mastery
Michele Val Jean is one of daytime’s most prolific writers, credited with thousands of episodes of General Hospital and, more recently, CBS’s new daytime drama The Gates. That kind of output requires skill in pacing, character layering, and building catharsis across months without resorting to caricature. Midlife stories, where relationships stretch and contract over decades, need exactly that kind of patient, long-arc architecture.

Intergenerational fluency
Felicia D. Henderson’s résumé (Soul Food: The Series, The Quad, Moesha) shows a consistent ability to weave multiple age groups into a coherent world. She writes aunties, elders, and adult children not as side characters but as full participants in the drama. In a midlife-centered series, that skill translates to authentic portrayals of grown children, aging parents, and peers navigating different stages under the same cultural roof.

Cinematic intimacy
Gina Prince-Bythewood moves between TV and film, but her signature is consistent: close-quarters, emotionally athletic storytelling. Love & Basketball made a sports romance feel epic; The Woman King turned a historical war narrative into a study of leadership and sisterhood. She frames bodies and bonds with equal intensity, which could give a midlife series visual language beyond the flat sitcom look—graceful, luminous, and unafraid of showing physical change.

Taken together, this slate spans comedy timing, soap-level propulsion, dramatic heft, and a tender eye for everyday detail. One has built the archetype (Girlfriends), another shaped its predecessors (Living Single), a third can keep a complex story alive week to week (Val Jean), a fourth can bring multiple generations into focus (Henderson), and the fifth can elevate the whole thing visually (Prince-Bythewood). It’s a rare combination of skill sets that matches the full range of midlife itself, funny, messy, long-term, and luminous all at once.

For networks and streamers, the gap is as much a business case as a representation issue. The same audience that once tuned in to Girlfriends is still watching, and their lives now provide new story engines. With proven showrunners available, the question isn’t whether a midlife “Girlfriends” could succeed; it’s who will make it first.

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