Showrunner Courtney A. Kemp Continues her Power Series for A Third SeasonBy Brad Balfour
July 15, 2016
Tall, stately Courtney A. Kemp poses a triple threat: she is a successful African American female show runner. It’s almost unheard of in established television circles. She’s achieved such a lofty position through first writing for the 2001 comedy The Bernie Mac Show which became a hit. Then she went on to write for other television shows such as Eli Stone, Justice, and Beauty and the Beast (the 2012 remake of the 1987 series) before becoming known for her work of on the wry CBS political drama, The Good Wife — receiving an Emmy nom along the way.
After this 40-something met 50 Cent in a coffeehouse with producer Mark Caton, she pitched a story line that would become Power. Once she formed an alliance with the rap star — one who had a notorious reputation (and who still challenges the orthodox way of doing things), they fashioned a show about a group of people who were not only renegades but, in fact, criminals.
Kemp Agboh took established formulas and turned them on their head. Her lead character, James Ghost St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick), is a major drug dealer trying to clean up his act by becoming a successful club owner while his white buddy Tommy Egan (Joe Sikora) is the hardcore bad guy, continuing the drug business and killing those who gets in his way.
Entering the third season, they further expand on the challenges and expectations as her characters’ lives become more complicated. Employing nudity, sexy scenes, violence and New York’s boroughs as the backdrop, the show has become a success and has established a serious following.
At the Langham Hotel, Courtney Kemp Agboh spoke with a small group of journalists about her continuing plans for the series.
You’re a driving force [in the media world] and have done so much stuff. How does it feel to have succeeded as far as being a female in the television world?
Courtney A. Kemp: Tired. Trying to be a mom and a showrunner is exceptionally difficult. Most of the people I know that are showrunners have a stay-at-home spouse if they have children. I don’t.
How old is your child?
CK: She’s young, a little person. She doesn’t understand why Mommy has to go away so much. It’s very difficult. When I got pregnant with her, Michelle, who I worked for on The Good Wife came and said, “Now you’ll never be in the right place. From this point forward you’ll never be in the right place.”
What I say to young women who want to do this job isn’t very popular, but I say you can’t have it all. You have to decide what it is you want for your life, what is your ideal life and then drive in that direction. How it feels is that I am so fortunate to be able to help other women. I am so fortunate to provide an environment that is safe where they’ll be promoted and taken seriously, but at the same time there’s a price and I pay that price.
It is challenging, it is harder, but for showrunning you really need that stay at-home spouse, it’s actually part of it. And if you have to pay for that person, then ok. I think there is something to be said for how much work it is.
Still, to this day, there are showrunner meetings [put on by] the WGA [Writer’s Guild of America], and, say, there are 60 people there. There are five women, two people of color. And I’m counting myself in both of those. I’ve been in meetings where I was the only woman. A lot of meetings at the network I’m the only woman. That happens a lot.
And it happens [more often than not] that I’m the only person of color. With this show specifically, I will be in rooms where there are people of color and no women. That happens a lot and it’s tiresome. I get sleepy. I’m tired in the sense that I’m physically tired and tired in the sense that I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the fact that there are so few of “me” anywhere.
I write about that on the show a lot. A lot of the time Angela goes to the restroom she’s alone. One of the things we constructed in Season Two was that the only way she could get to Holly was that Holly went to the restroom because the men wouldn’t let her participate. They elbowed her out of the thing that was happening — and it was her idea. They elbowed her out of it and then she was, “Ok, let me seize my moment.”
And she seized it, but she heard something she really didn’t want to hear. But at the same time that was carefully cultivated because there is no such thing as a female space and that was the one female space. That was on purpose.
Do you see the series as going on for a defined amount of time, or indefinite if the powers that be will allow it?
CK: It’s not up to me. It’s super not up to me because it’s about Starz, their programing and their schedule — there are elements I can’t control like someone having a great idea that’s cheaper than mine. Right now we’re a very expensive television program and we’re only going to get more expensive.
I walked in and pitched it for five years…. Well, I didn’t pitch them like that, but you go in with a five-year plan; that’s classic. It’s not about me or Power, that’s just what you do as a showrunner, that’s the old school way of doing it.
You had a five-year idea.
CK: You have to. That’s not specific to me or Power, it’s generic. There’s a generic way everyone pitches a show. Could the show go longer than five years? Absolutely. Could the show the show be shorter than five years? If nobody watches Season Three, guess what? It’s going to be shorter than five years. It’s just a question of do I have enough story? Absolutely.
You envisioned the characters with enough arcs in mind that you wanted to see them all develop — not just because of the plan.
CK: I wanted to see them. I know what the end of the series is and that can be communicated. There are certain characters that have to meet their end in order for the thing that I want at the very end of the season to happen.
Those people could die Season Four; others could die Season Five; there are people who could die in Season Six. It depends. There are certain kinds of characters and a certain kind of ascension that needs to happen.
Are your plans such that storylines could be moved around in a modular fashion?
CK: I think of a lot of our stories as an algebraic equation, so you can pop out values and move them around. I look at it in a way where part of it’s emotional and part of it is the science of writing. When you go into my writer’s room, our index cards are on the board by color, it’s all very multicolored because it’s all the different threads.
For example, Dre is green. Sometimes Dre and Kanan have stories together and sometimes they split off. So there’s green over here and a different color over there and this year we got two different greens because we have so many things to do. Just like you can move a card for a scene, you can move a storyline.
There was a storyline I had planned for Season Two and we had to kill it, which totally sucked because I really wanted to do it. I want to do it eventually. Maybe it will be a Season Four story if we get that far.
Are there times you ever feel stuck or weary where you’re working on a season and want to change how the arc evolves…
CK: No, not really. Because the way Starz forces me to pitch, I have to do a season arc pitch at the beginning of the season. So for the whole month of May into June we come up with an arc for the entire season. We pitch that already, so it doesn’t really change that much. I’m a highly specific and meticulous showrunner. I’m not one of those people that go, “This is great, we can make this up on the fly!”
If we’re doing that then it means we haven’t done a thorough enough job. Sometimes, I’ll get a script and realize it’s missing something, and that’ll be a couple of scenes and a re-break. But I try not to do that. It’s never good to do something at two in the morning that you should have done in a week with a group of people.
How did you get into this story with you trying to tell your Dad’s story and 50 Cent wanting to do a musical show?
CK: 50 and I are fans of the 48 Laws of Power, because of that and he wrote the 50th Law of Power with Robert Greene, but I think because he and I wanted to tell a story about power, those things came together really well.
So we merged his story and my Dad’s story into the Ghost character in order to tell a little bit through the 48 Laws of Power and how it works. 50 and I share a similar outlook on the world, [but] not similar life experience, so that was the other piece of it. I took some of my life experience and his as well.
That’s why couldn’t see where you were going with Tasha.
CK: When we conceived of her, he understood that immaturity, but he wouldn’t know what it’s like to go from a girl to a woman any more than I would know what it’s like going from a boy to a man. So we have to work together to make those things work and be believable.
In episode 204 when she’s got the gun, he came at it from that Kanan perspective of “what was I fantasizing about in jail? What did I want to take from Ghost?” His whole life, including her.”
For me it was about her cooking that gun and saying, “Kids, it’s time for the movie!” I’m a parent and a mommy so I got to do a lot of different things at the same time.
You started the series with Tasha and now we’re getting back to her in this season. Why did it begin with her — and, will it end with her?
CK: I wanted to establish that relationship very quickly. Her first line was, “Tell me I look beautiful.” That established her immaturity and part of this story is her growing maturity — you’re going to see a lot of that in Season Three.
Even that reaction last year to the affair was about immaturity. Her reaction to taking Sean as her lover was about being immature and being able to be satisfied by someone who was not 20. It’s about that feeling of being rejected. But she’ll grow as a character. I definitely wanted to highlight that. I think her journey is one of the most interesting in the series.
50 Cent said in an interview, “I didn’t think she was going to be that interesting.” That’s because he’s not a woman, so he didn’t know how I was going to construct her.
How much influence does 50 Cent have in the writing process?
CK: I get this question a lot, it’s sort of a stock question. 50 and I talk a lot at the beginning of the season and we talk about arcs and things we want to do. He and I have talked about so many different aspects of the show. Sometimes things he talked to me about in 2013 [come up later] so I’ll put [them] into the show and he’ll be like, “Oh wow, you remembered that?”
My first career was as a journalist, so when you think about it I have been profiling him for the last four years. We’ve been in this constant conversation about what that’s like, about what the drug life’s like, those little experiences. Really it’s about detail. He’s an inspiration, a muse, and a collaborator in all those different ways.
When do you move away from technical information and move towards the mythology in your own head?
CK: It’s all mythology. There’s nothing in the show that’s deliberately biographical because no one wants to get sued. Sometimes 50 will tell me a story about him and it will end up going through the motions and that is part of Holly’s story.
Is there a part when you want to go completely mythic?
CK: Most of it is made up. You know when you write a story and you need to get your quotes> Think of it that way. We write a story and then maybe, it’s like, “How do I get the little details?” Detail comes from reality. You know how we say God is in the details? God is really in those details.
We’re creating a story always. It’s not like we’re starting with the biographical and working backwards. It’s that we start with the story we need to tell and what the characters are requiring, and then if there’s detail we need we go there.
Do you find yourself wandering the streets to provide inspiration?
CK: Nope.
It’s all in the head… So are there literary or cinematic inspirations?
CK: Absolutely. Last year for Season Three, everyone in my writer’s room read King Lear and Richard III, and Season Two we watched I Claudius. The original reference points for the show were Out of Sight, Shame, and The French Connection.
We loved anything that was filmed here in the ’70s. We’re doing a lot of cars; people in the ’70s did a lot of free driving. Take Shaft, [that film was an influence] certainly. Some black-sploitation. There are a lot of references.
In Season Three there’s a scene that’s deeply influenced by Dangerous Liaisons. It depends on what we’re watching and thinking about at the time.
Season 2 Recap
Season 3 trailer
Season 3 Overview
