‘Run the World’ Shows Black Women as Leigh Davenport Never Saw Them
As a kid growing up in Chicago, when Leigh Davenport was seeking out a TV show about the lives of Black Americans, there was ‘The Cosby Show’ — and that was it.
“I was like, ‘Where’s the rest of us? Where’s the rest of our experiences? Where are we?’” Davenport says.
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It’s a question that would nag at her for decades to come, finally driving her to create “Run the World,” a new series on Starz that follows a friend group of four Black women living, dating and thriving in New York City. One could draw a comparison to “Sex and the City,” but Davenport set out to create a show that shows women on TV in the positive light she has always known in her own friend group: powerful, smart, successful Black women who are worthy of representation, she says.
Davenport is the daughter of a doctor and an attorney who raised three very creative children: one brother is a jazz musician, the other is a yoga instructor, she a writer. She says they were encouraged from a young age to explore creativity, something her parents hadn’t been able to do when they were going to school and finding careers.
“I think that my parents are of a certain age at a certain time, and so when they were going to school, it was affirmative action, and for Black people, it was like, ‘Go to school, be a doctor, be a lawyer. Those are your options,’” she says. “And so my dad loves being a doctor, but my mom never really loved being a lawyer. I just think that they wanted us to consider what careers could be beyond following a specific path.”
She was originally set on being a ballerina, before a growth spurt ruled that out of the question. Her mom, without her knowledge, enrolled her into an oratorical competition with two days to go before a three-minute speech was to be read.
“I wrote a speech and I went and I won and then I won the regionals and then I won the next year — and so writing became something that I was good at, that seemed like a path forward,” Davenport says.
She explored poetry and the spoken word, and upon arrival at Spelman College joined the school paper, where she became editor in chief.
“I loved the idea of telling stories about people and places that I felt like I didn’t see,” she says. “I think for journalism, I felt smarter and more intellectual and I was like, ‘I’m going to tell these really hard-hitting stories about people in underserved communities,’ and very lofty and righteous. I got my first internship and they placed me at People Magazine. I was like, ‘I don’t want to write about celebrities.’ I was so offended, but it was funny. Everything happens for a reason.”
She aspired to be a magazine editor, but her first job out of college found her in unscripted TV: the year was 2005, and magazines were collapsing around her right and left. She started at VH1 — she made a magazine as a proposal for why she should get the job — and it marked the start of five-plus years she would work in the unscripted realm.
After the 2008 stock market crash and a return to school, for a master’s from The New School, Davenport ended up running the site HelloBeautiful.com, where she again struggled with the questions of how to tell stories that matter and leave an impact on people’s lives. It was grappling with that that led her to the world of scripted television writing.
“One night I was leaving my girlfriend’s house for Friday night wine and gossip, and the conversation had turned into dating. But also it was weird, because now it was 2009 and Barack and Michelle [Obama] were in the White House and we had this beautiful Black first lady and this beautiful couple and it just felt like there was reverse hysteria of, ‘How are you going to get your Barack’ and ‘How are you going to be Michelle?’” Davenport explains. “But then it was also when Steve Harvey’s book, ‘Think Like a Man’ came out, and it was all this messaging of ‘You successful Black women are never going to get a man and don’t know what you’re doing.’ And also reality TV really kicked off and so all of these Black women on television in the reality realm were throwing drinks on each other and fighting. I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ I felt like the images that I was seeing of what it meant to be a Black woman were just completely convoluted and upside down and backwards.”
She recalls sitting at her friend’s house that Friday night and looking around her, struck by how successful and happy they all were.
“There was an epidemiologist, and two worked in finance and I was in media. Just beautiful, smart women who are sisters and friends supporting each other and whatever. I was just like, ‘How come no one sees this? Someone should see this,’” she says.
On top of that, they also knew how to have fun: clubbing, dating, shopping, etc. Davenport was living in Harlem, which she says felt like a “mecca of young Black culture melding with old Black culture.” Piecing this all together in her head, she couldn’t shake the notion that she had a TV show on her hands.
She went home and wrote 30 pages, having never written a script before in her life. That was December 2009, and “Run the World” has been in development more or less since then. In the meantime, the landscape has changed drastically – shows like “Insecure” have come out and become massively successful, with calls for more diversity and representation in Hollywood louder now than ever.
“Every time something would come out, I’d feel like, ‘Oh no, someone’s going to take my idea’ — and it just never happened,” Davenport says. “I think there’s been a ton of scripted progress, there’s been way more portrayals of us on screen in the last 10 years and that’s amazing. But I still just never felt like I turned something on and felt like this is the version of friendship and ambition and female support and funny and cool that I wanted to see. I’ve felt like I’m like a collector of dope Black women, and so it was kind of like, ‘OK, I have this opportunity to show us.’”
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