Since its premiere last weekend, audiences have been watching and talking about “OutKast,” the third episode of Lanterns. Written by Vanessa Baden Kelly, the flashback-heavy story digs into what makes Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart tick, and we’re early into the show’s run, but it already feels like it’ll be a season standout.
In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, Baden Kelly highlighted the team writing “what rings true to us” throughout the season. In her case, John being groomed as a Lantern from age five parallels her time as a child star on Nickelodeon’s All That, but only to a point. She didn’t grow up with stage parents, but she said sports parents are considerably more overbearing, and that’s what helped them figure out how the Stewarts see their son.
Tiger Woods’ father, Earl, and Venus and Serena Williams’ father, Richard—as well as musical patriarch Joe Jackson—were all “talked ad nauseam about,” as was the mindset of embracing that parenting method.
“Is there a necessity for it when you’re growing up in a certain environment? If you’re growing up in Gary, Indiana, if you’re growing up in Compton, is this the smartest way to do it?” asked Baden Kelly. “Does it fuck you up so bad that you’re not able to ever come back from it? And could they have done this in something else? […] The discourse raging online, watching people have the same debates we had in the room about whether this is abuse or whether they did what needed to be done, is reminiscent of what we talked about for six months.”
When it came to making Bernadette Stewart be a more active player in John’s upbringing, Baden Kelly cited Sonya Curry, Steph Curry’s mother, as inspiration for the mother-son dynamic in the episode. “These are not women coddling their children,” she said of sports moms. “I think the [writers] room agreed, it’s tough love when dads do it, but when a mom does, people are like, ‘She’s terrible!’ I wanted to play with that a little bit because it’s like, ‘Is she?’” (And yes, she did acknowledge things get pushed “a little bit in a different direction” when said parenting involves shooting apples off your child’s head.)
You can read the full interview for Baden Kelly’s additional thoughts on the writers room and making this new version of John. Equally gratified for the opportunity and “really sad” at the harsher reactions, she hopes “OutKast” doesn’t lead to people writing off the rest of Lanterns. “I hope people stick it out with John. He goes through the very human experience of what it feels like to make your own decisions about the life you’ve been given,” she said. “I would caution anybody who feels like they know where [his] story ends, based on episode three, to really make it through to the end.”
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