Twenty-five years ago, Girlfriends walked onto our screens and redefined what it meant to see ourselves messy, stylish complicated, brilliant and flawed on primetime television. Housed on UPN, the same channel that gave us Moesha and One on One, it was the crown jewel in a lineup that made Black primetime feel like home. Mara Brock Akil gave us Joan, Toni, Maya and Lynn, four women whose lives mirrored the complexities of Black womanhood in all its shades.

This wasn’t just sitcom banter and laugh tracks. Girlfriends was a cultural reset. It dared to tackle postpartum depression at a time when that conversation was nearly invisible, it reminded us that emotional cheating is still cheating, and it did not shy away from the devastating realities of the AIDS epidemic in Black communities. Joa

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