South Side’s ability to capture and take to its comical extreme the many absurdities of working-class Black life makes it an exciting series to recap. By centering a workplace comedy around a predatory Rent-a-Center–style store, it sharply exposes the myth of “class mobility†by showcasing people from different walks of life in Southside Chicago, who largely settle for being saddled in a debt trap for presentable furnishings. And it executes the conceit perfectly.
Take the first episode of season three, for example. Two parents are in the middle of affirming their children during breakfast with the word of the day: success. The camera sharply cuts to Kareme and Simon, who are there to repossess most of their household items after their father has failed to make payments for two years. In under 90 seconds, the kids quickly learn that the aphorisms their parents consistently tell them — “Don’t let anyone stand in your way†— will never surpass the carnivorous penchant of the invented logic behind a credit score. The lesson sinks in as the eldest son has his graphing calculator taken from him on his way to his math test, while his younger brother rushes to brush his teeth before the bathroom sink is no longer available.
In a normal show, Simon and Kareme would be villains, but South Side does a brilliant job of showing that most of the characters arrived at their RTO employment through various limited choices that left them participating in ruining households in the neighborhood. Simon has child support he needs to pay; RTO staffs employees by being one of the locations that doesn’t run background checks. This helps people who are precluded from other employment due to arrest records or poor experiences at previous jobs, but it occasionally gets them in unique binds, such as discovering that one of their employees, Greg the (fake) Marine, was secretly AWOL from the Army and doing their best to try to run out the clock.
Upon their discovery, the Army dispatch and the police show up at the RTO doors, sending fellow employee Stacy into a frenzy, declaring, “I visit jail, I don’t go there!†After getting past their frustrations at Greg putting them in a precarious legal position, the team collectively decides that the best way to stall the officers is to claim they are fumigating the office for bedbugs. This leads Greg and Kareme on a harrowing mission to a sex-worker-friendly Roach Motel to capture some bedbugs and bring them back to the store. As someone who has had personal experience with bedbugs, I think the officers had every right to want to evade any interaction with them — ridding yourself of them is a hellscape, and guns do not work on them.
Meanwhile, the other duo of officers, Goodnight and Turner, have a trip for a snow cone gone awry simply because Goodnight refuses to understand the value of relationship building among Black people. Instead of speaking to precocious children normally, Goodnight immediately approaches them like hooligans, leading to their squad car being stolen while Turner is away. Meanwhile, it takes a handful of questions from Turner to get a clue as to who has their car, which eventually lands in a tow lot. Goodnight attempts to muscle his way into recovering the vehicle with muscle rather than taking the gentler approach of massaging a notoriously exhausting, arbitrary system. Goodnight never learns, and it prevents him from engaging in anything resembling community policing. His innate distrust of the Black working class is his constant foil, but the series does a fantastic job of playing it up for laughs.
In the second episode, the series lets Kareme and Simon revisit their old high school. Through a series of harebrained events, Simon has convinced a teacher that his Twitter following and multiple side hustles legitimize him as a mentor to students. He uses his mentor status to argue against the necessity of college and encourages students to launch into a future of entrepreneurship, replete with dioramas showcasing the history of money, landing at bitcoin (catnip to serial working-class entrepreneurs everywhere). He immediately creates a nemesis in the vice principal, who advocates for college and critical-thinking skills and sharply points out “I don’t think you should be listening to someone who steals furniture for a living.†If only everyone who jumped on the crypto wave listened to similar advice, they wouldn’t be listening to people who say things like “price stability is an optical illusion.†Kareme, unfortunately, is too busy switching lives with a student for a week so that he could enter the science fair to put some sense in Simon’s head. His experiment? Proving the infallibility of the “made you look†hand gesture with a presentation called “Game Theory and Human Peripheral Vision.â€
The tragedy is that Simon was always meant to go to college on a baseball scholarship but never knew, so he resigned himself to the fact that college was an impractical choice because he had always believed it was never an option. The alternate universe where he is a successful baseball player has him in disbelief, but not until he finishes making love with the vice principal in a hilariously bizarre “love and basketball†ripoff gone awry.
On the other hand, Goodnight is trying to extract his wife from a frosting MLM that consumes all her time, money, and sanity. She quickly goes from selling frosting as if it’s Avon makeup products to serving frosting as mashed potatoes at dinner. The MLM has distinct cult overtones, as Goodnight’s wife becomes a top employee at the “frostquarters†and develops an unusual relationship with the founder, Whelan. “You look at him, and all you see is grift built on the sale of tasty frosting, and you judge him for his natural horniness,†she says earnestly to her husband, while Whelan is busy shredding documents before they take flight at the midway airport. Unfortunately, they are not quick enough for the FBI, and Whelan’s frost empire comes crumbling down. Goodnight might have kept his marriage afloat for now, thanks to federal interference, but those cracks are bound to resurface later in the season.