Ava DuVernay felt a responsibility to make Queen Sugar Season 5 "a time capsule of this time for Black Americans"

The Hollywood Reporter

DuVernay had six of 14 episodes to go when the coronavirus shutdown happened last year. But looking at her completed scripts, they seemed out of touch with the times, which included the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter protests. "We had written through the eighth episode when everything shut down," DuVernay tells The Hollywood Reporter. "For a while, when we were looking at the prospect of resuming production, we were going to shoot those. But it felt disingenuous and just odd to act like none of this was happening. We really wanted to try to see if we could incorporate real-world events into the season...First I looked at the season and said, 'Can we just kind of fit this into the existing episodes?' But it quickly became apparent that we could not. The conflict, challenges and struggles of Black people, the reality of that, is something that Queen Sugar has never shied away from. So how could we do it in this particular year, when the stakes were so high? The studio and the network kind of bought my pitch on what we would do and rolled the dice on us. We were able to pull it off with just three writers and three directors — instead of a different writer and director for every episode, like we usually have." DuVernay adds in an interview with TVLine: “This was a tough one because we had written the full season before everything got shut down. We thought we’d be back in a couple of weeks. But in between getting shut down and coming back in the fall, the world changed, and it felt crazy to try to do those old scripts. I had already paid all those writers, and our writing budget was decimated because we had finished the season. So, there was no one to write. We started from scratch in early August with three writers.”