If we were to tell you that your favorite show, one of the smartest and most timely streaming comedies of the past few years, was returning for its final season as a full-on jukebox musical framed by flash-forwards to a not-too-distant post-COVID future, you’d probably have some concerns. Like, it sounds bonkers, right?
Well, have a look at the trailer for the fourth and final season of Netflix’s Dear White People and tell us it doesn’t look like an unbridled delight.
Dear White People: Vol. 4 finds Sam (Logan Browning) and Lionel (DeRon Horton) meeting up some indeterminate number of years after graduating from Winchester U and reminiscing about their senior year. Which just happened to be the year they took over the school’s varsity show, turning it into a celebration of ’90s Black music with Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “None of Your Business” and En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind”!!! That celebration seeps out into their lives as well, with characters bursting into song and, as Sam recalls, pretending their lives were a musical.
As series creator Justin Simien said back in January 2020, he wanted Dear White People to go out with a bang. “It being our last season of the show, it sort of gave me a little more ounce of ambition and purpose for really doing something special with the final season,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “We try to do this every season, but really there’s a lot on the line with the final season to do something ambitious and special and sort of unexpected.”
Based on the trailer, it looks like Simien and co. have created a farewell party that can’t be missed. The season drops September 22.
