Writer and actress Natasha Rothwell, who rose to fame for her supporting role as Kelli on Issa Rae’s HBO series, steps into the lead role of her latest series on Friday, debuts on Hulu. It’s the first show she’s created, produced and starred in along with her latest production company, Big Hattie Production.

Rothwell told Andscape that working on the series “confirmed that I was following my destiny. It solidified my drive, my existence, my passion, and my voice.”

In the film, Rothwell plays Melissa, nicknamed Mel, a lonely, underpaid, debt-ridden airport trolley driver who’s petrified of flying, love and her potential. After spending her lonely thirty fifth birthday eating crab rangoon and assembling IKEA furniture, Mel has a near-death experience.

Mel wakes up alone in the hospital, with no emergency contact to choose her up, and finds a lonely older black woman in the hospital bed next to her, who gives her some sage advice. “Stop caring what other people think and start doing something that scares you.”

Mel takes the advice, decides to imagine she deserves good things and changes her life. She makes more friends, tries to get a promotion at work and tries to seek out love and herself. “(The show) is an invitation to start living now. Ordinary can be extraordinary. Your adventure can start now,” Rothwell said.

As a black woman, Rothwell finds it radical to seek out herself. “There are days when I do it really well. And there are days when I do it really badly, but I think there’s glory in trying.” One of her inspirations is a book by Sonya Renee Taylor “Sonya is incredible. She’s about the act of radical self-acceptance and dismantling the systems of oppression that have kept us from accepting ourselves fully.”

Mel’s body isn’t the focus of the show’s plot. “Mel’s body isn’t a topic of conversation. It’s just there,” Rothwell said. She embraces body neutrality, which “encourages us to understand ourselves and others as whole human beings, and to frame our concept of worth, value, and identity around a person’s inner self, rather than their outer self.” — Jessi Kneelandwrote for the magazine in 2023.

Rothwell said that is why she chooses her words fastidiously in the context of the show. “That’s why I use the word fat. She’s a fat, black employee at JFK Airport who can’t fly. That’s in the logline. Putting the word fat there is to disabuse people of the idea that it’s a pejorative. It’s a description. It’s a fact. So welcome. Meet Mel. That’s who she is. Let’s keep it going.”

The show’s concentrate on body neutrality gives Mel a platform to shine. Fat black women are sometimes relegated to the role of funny best friend, comic relief, and therapist on sitcoms. But Rothwell puts herself and Mel at the center of all the characters’ messy, nuanced, imperfect selves—in other words, whole people. We all have to see someone who looks like us attempting to determine life.

She’s a large number, she wants to enhance, but she shows that she’ll do some morally gray things to get there. The whole show is not an inspiring montage of a heroine changing her life in the best way possible, but of a girl growing up, doing it systematically, if not all the time neatly.

In the past, coming-of-age stories have focused on teenagers and people in their 20s and 25s. But those stories don’t reflect the reality of so many millennials who’re in their late 40s or early 40s and still fighting funds, family, and love. Financial stability is elusive, dating is harder than ever, and the world seems bleak. With Melissa Rothwell, she brings to life the experiences of so many in this generation.

And for romance lovers, the series incorporates a tender, juicy, and realistic love triangle. But romantic love isn’t Mel’s only goal. Above all, she desires to live a life that, like all of our lives, might be satisfying to her after it ends.

“Societally, we often put romantic love on the line,” Rothwell said. “I grew up on romantic comedies and anything Disney princess-related. In a heteronormative sense, I was supposed to find my knight in shining armor on a white horse.”

It wasn’t until Rothwell began therapy in her early 20s that she began to unlearn the concept that happiness was only possible through romance. “For me, there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely.”

“I spent most of my 20s afraid of bad things. Because dying alone isn’t scary. It’s dying alone,” Rothwell said. In order to avoid being alone, Rothwell needed to learn to just accept love from the places she found it in her life. “I’m a person who recovers from being a people pleaser, and the result of that was being this unnecessary weirdo who didn’t want to ask for help or even feel like I needed it,” she said. “Luckily, I moved away from that POV, and my friends were there for me when I needed them. I love the connection, people just checking in on me and not wanting anything. It’s a really beautiful thing.”

Rothwell’s acceptance of platonic love into her life, her thrust back on romantic love, and her journey of self-discovery has been healing. “That’s not to say I don’t want romantic love, but I know my happiness doesn’t depend on it.”

can also be a workplace comedy, nevertheless it’s unique in that it’s set in an airport, which is all the time a spot of change, forks in the road, decisions, paths taken and roads not taken. The setting allows us to know Mel’s journey in limbo. She’s trapped, but additionally — literally and figuratively — one flight away from changing her life. All she has to do is gather the courage to get on board.

Rothwell selected the location because “I wanted to follow the fear and explore something that was really terrifying to me at the time, which was the idea of ​​dying alone. This theme gave me the opportunity to pick a really interesting location where you can be in a crowd of people but still feel lonely.”

There’s also the limbo that society imposes on singles, the expectation that life doesn’t begin until you’ve a partner, a really perfect that Rothwell also needed to shatter in her own head. “When I first moved to New York in my 20s, I wanted to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I put it off because I wanted to do it for a date,” she said. “I thought it would be so cool, so romantic, to walk across the bridge and then go to Grimaldi’s Pizzeria. I was holding my breath for that.”

But after starting therapy, she realized she didn’t should freeze herself for anyone. “I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t want to leave these experiences for someone who’s not here. Here. I can live, I can have these experiences.’ So I got my ass over the bridge, ate pizza by myself, and watched the sunset. It was amazing.”

In some ways, Melissa’s leap of religion right into a latest life mirrors this new edition of Rothwell’s profession, taking over her own projects and pursuing larger-scale projects. Rothwell shows her range in , along with her signature comedic genius, but she also gives us intensely emotional scenes, including moments that show a darker side of Mel, which are enjoyable to look at. Her character in Stolen Hearts , nevertheless, was often one-dimensional. Here, we see Rothwell in her entirety, the whole person, a mirrored image we desperately need.

When I asked Rothwell where she thought the art world was headed for black women, she was thoughtful. “Because having an original show directed by someone who looks like me premiering without delay is a radical act of riot.

“We tell the industry that our stories matter and that they are worthy and valuable. A lot of the industry is bound by a fiduciary responsibility. I understand that, but I think by not focusing on our voices, you’re saying that our voices aren’t valuable and that we don’t matter, when in fact we do and we do.”

Rothwell believes that for things to alter, for stories to change into more diverse, “the many white cis-straight men at the center of many of these organizations in the city need to talk openly and honestly about the homogeneity of their content.”

Rothwell has made it his business to dismantle that homogeneity. “All the directors on my show were women because I intended to be women. There was a 50-50 gender split on set—in a binary sense—because I intentionally decided to do that. None of this just happens by magic. It’s not like sand eroding away on a beach over time. You have to bulldoze in and build what you need.”
is a show that so many individuals can relate to. Sometimes it takes the most terrifying thing we will imagine—like dying alone—to push us to beat our fear and at last live. What if we modify and hate it? What if we try to alter and fail? And perhaps the biggest, most unspoken fear of all… what if we succeed?