"If you would have asked me whether or not I'd seen the show Girlfriends before 2020, my answer would have been, "Uh, duh." I had lines memorized, a favorite character (Maya Wilkes), and I sang the ad-libs from the theme song like I wrote it myself. But that "duh" would have actually been a lie. When Netflix released the show for streaming 20 years after its original airing, I realized that Girlfriends was for grown-ass Black women, and I was not a grown-ass Black woman in the year 2000; I was 12. I can now say that I have officially watched Girlfriends, as a grown-ass Black woman, which was the salve I needed in a year when it was particularly hard to be one." — Iyana Robertson, entertainment and trending news content director
