'Emperor of Ocean Park' Creator And Stars On New Series And The Costs Of Black Excellence: 'Have I Really Earned It?'

What is Black Excellence if it comes at a price?

Set in the worlds of politics, elite academia and the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, Emperor of Ocean Park is centered around Talcott Garland (Grantham Coleman), also referred to as Tal by his loved ones, as he and his family grapple with grief and the effects of what it means to have expectations placed on you at an early age.

“There’s so much expectations for these characters,” show creator Sherman Payne told Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “Some of the expectations are self-imposed, but some of those expectations come from their father, who is this larger-than-life figure looming over all of their careers and their romantic choices, so they’re all struggling with that.”

“On a deeper level, one of the things that we talk about in the Black community and in other communities as well is imposter syndrome,” he continued. “Like struggling with the idea of ‘Am I where I’m supposed to be? Have I really earned it? Do I feel welcomed in these environments?’ And we have all of these characters who are high achievers. Talcott Garland is a tenured lawyer at one of the best law schools. Mariah Garland (Tiffany Mack) has formally won a Pulitzer Prize as a journalist, but there’s still a sense of doubt; there’s still a sense of peril in those life choices, their careers, and their lives and the choices that they make. So, really balancing expectations with self-doubt and all of those things mixing together to put pressure on the characters, that was something that I really wanted to explore throughout the course of this series.”

Based on the best-selling novel by Stephen L. Carter, the shape of the central mystery within Emperor of Ocean Park is one of the things that creator Sherman Payne was adamant about staying true to for the story’s television adaptation.

“The shape of the central mystery is something that we wanted to keep intact, we wanted to, you know — spoiler alert: it’s happened within the first 30 seconds — Oliver Garland, the judge played by Forrest Whitaker, is dead when we meet him,” Payne explained. “And the central mystery of trying to figure out what was going on in his life before he died, all of the things that might have contributed to his death potentially, or contributed to the mystery surrounding his life. We wanted to keep that intact. It’s something we all loved about the book. And we wanted to make sure that that mystery was something that readers of the book could really hang on to when they saw the show. Other than that, I think everything was, you know, game. With that said, I liked a lot of these characters; I liked a lot of the way the story was constructed. So it just so happened that I ended up keeping a lot of it, you know, a big change that we made was really elevating the character of Mariah. In the book, Mariah Garland, who is Talcott’s sister and daughter of Judge Oliver Garland, didn’t have quite as big a role as we gave her the show. But I thought that we have an opportunity to have a really fun tag-team dynamic with talent, and I also thought it was really important that we elevate a Black woman character to sort of take a co-equal lead of the story.”

Each of the characters, specifically the Garland siblings, deals with themes of belonging while simultaneously grieving the loss of their father and working to pinpoint the moments leading to his death. Coleman explained his approach to loss through Tal’s lens.

“There was a poem that I read a long time ago, like 15 years ago,” Coleman recalled. “The poem essentially says that grief is like a box you carry, but it’s a box you never put down; you just find ways of carrying it. So, at first, you hold it in front of you, and then, sometimes, when your arms get tired, you hold it on the side of you. And then, if the hip starts to hurt, you hold it on your shoulder. You never put the box down; it just shifts and goes away around where you hold it. I thought about that a lot for Tal because at a young age, he lost not only his sibling; he lost a mother, and now he’s lost a father. And in the family, where family is literally the portrait on the wall, I think he’s someone who’s always managing where he holds this grief and how he connects to it on a daily basis. And like, when does he miss his sister? And when does he miss his mom? And now that he’s lost a father, how does that affect his own relationship with his son? So I’ve thought a lot about how he manages his grief.”

On the contrary, for Tal’s sister, Mariah, it is all about pinpointing her uncertainty and how it impacts how she shows up in the world.

“I think we meet her in a really cloudy place,” Tiffany Mack shared. “In a place where in so many ways, she is unsure of everything, like, what her life has come to. In her personal life, her professional life, certainly in her family life and, I think, by the end, I don’t want to spoil anything, but yeah, by the end, I think she’s in a different place.”

Emperor of Ocean Park is available on MGM+ with new episodes at 10 p.m. on Sundays.