“The Game” Season 5 Debut: Win, Lose, Or Draw?

Season 5 of “The Game” premiered last night with an hour-long reintroduction of the characters, because each one has changed drastically. Besides the hour long kick-off being 30% show and 70% commercial, the content itself was all over the place. But if you picked away all the “filler”, it actually had some good points of discussion.

Fans watched these two go back and forth from college to career lows and highs. Now they’re married and the drama has just begun. In the aftermath of revealing she had an abortion while they were apart (pregnant for another man), she now has to face the fact that she may not be able to have children. *Spoiler Alert* We all know she’s going to have a baby being that she was pregnant in “real life” and already looked big on the episode last night! But to add insult to injury, she still has to endure watching Derwin, Dj, and Jenee have “family moments”. But seeing the pain Melanie is in watching him with his “outside” family, Derwin is able to accept why she had an abortion.

But Melanie seems to be more straight forward about what she feels and wants. Melanie? Not sneaking around, suspicious, and lying? Wow! This could be good!

Ms. Tasha Mack, now vulnerable instead of all in your face, dropped Derwin as a client and picked up Malik once again citing “Family First”! Now she’s regretting it and not sure where her career is going because Malik is inlove with Jenna (played by Tika Sumpter), a supermodel who frequents rehab for drug abuse. Last night, Jenna overdosed and had to be revived by an adrenaline shot, not to mention she ran up a $60,000 tab with her “pusher” who came, toting a gun, to collect. If Jenna was white, Malik would be looking like O.J. Simpson right about now. But his character has changed from a cynical jerk to a stand up guy.

Last season, Brittany Daniels aka Kelly Pitts was reduced to a recurring character so we didn’t see much of her. This season, we may not see her at all. But who we did see was Brandy as “Chardonnay”. She played a bartender who Jason Pitts (Cody Bell) got fired from her job, then in “Hangover” fashion, got married to while he was drunk. She did a fabulous job, but her hood persona failed. But in this segment we did get a chance to see Jason face his past issues with why he doesn’t prefer black women. Surprisingly enough he confronted his daughter about dating white boys and insisted she accept that she is black. So maybe we’ll see Jason accept that he is black… Eventually.

Blended families, struggling marriages, abortions, drug abuse, insecurity with trying to maintain in a society that has a narrow concept of beauty, interracial relationships, and trying to hold the family together was the jest of the episode. These issues are what we face everyday and not just in the black community. They are worth being talked about fully. Maybe we’ll see more in the episodes to come.

I want to hear from you! Let me know what you think or how you feel about these issues!

Stay tuned…

@Nonie_B_