Erika Alexander’s Monica comes back to NBC on November 2 with something she did not have in the first season: a business of her own and a life outside her ex-husband’s mess.
“Monica’s finally got a life outside of Reggie’s mess,” Alexander said of the second season of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, the comedy created by Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, Sam Means and Tracy Morgan. “Let’s just say Reggie notices that.”
Alexander, who played Maxine Shaw on Living Single, plays Monica, Reggie’s ex-wife and business manager. She was direct about what the part is for. “A Black woman in midlife running a business is still something you don’t see enough of,” she said.
She did not leave that as an observation about the industry. She put it on the people who decide what gets made, naming Pearlena Igbokwe, an NBCUniversal television executive. “Who’s at the top matters,” Alexander said. She then refused the label the business uses on shows like this one: “This is not a niche show. That’s mainstream. That’s big time.”
The other thing both women refused is the shape the audience keeps reaching for. Precious Way plays Brina, Reggie’s younger fiancée, and the show has declined to write the two women as enemies. “I think people want it to be a catfight,” Alexander said.
“She can’t replace Monica, and she doesn’t want to,” Way said of her own character. Brina’s closest tie on the show is not to Monica as a rival but to Reggie as somebody who does not let him off. “She doesn’t let him slide and get away with things,” Way said. Of another relationship on the show, she said simply, “That’s her friend, her shady friend.”
Season two adds Boris Kodjoe as Leslie LP Pervis, a former college classmate of both Monica and Reggie. Alexander and Kodjoe worked together before, on Street Time. The cast also includes Daniel Radcliffe as a documentary filmmaker, Arthur Tobin, and Bobby Moynihan as Rusty Boyd.
On Morgan, who created the show about a version of himself and whose recovery from a 2014 car accident runs underneath it, Alexander was plain. “Tracy is so achingly honest, and you can’t fake that. You can’t teach it,” she said. On the company he keeps in comedy, she offered a measure: “You’ve got Eddie Murphy, who’s a comet.”
Season one is streaming on Peacock.
