Dear White People cast, EPs tease the 'true' series finale: 'Are they happy?'

The Dear White People cast is very pleased with how their journey on the Netflix satire wrapped up.

Set during senior year, the college comedy's fourth and final season is a '90s jukebox musical that follows Samantha White (Logan Browning) and the rest of the students at Winchester University's Armstrong-Parker House as they prepare for graduation. (Watch an exclusive sneak peek at one of the numbers.) Meanwhile, frequent flash-forwards to a not-so-distant-future that reveals each characters' fate. Ahead of the premiere, Browning, Marque Richardson (Reggie), Ashley Blaine Featherson (Joelle), Brandon P. Bell (Troy), Antoinette Robertson (CoCo), DeRon Horton (Lionel), John Patrick Amedori (Gabe), and co-showrunners Justin Simien and Jaclyn Moore joined EW for our latest installment of Around the Table.

During the roundtable interview, the cast and producers discussed the eerie yet somewhat unintentional parallels between season 4 and the real world. For example, in November 2019, they wrote a COVID reference into one of the flash-forwards, completely unaware of the omnishambles arriving in 2020.

"We worked in a COVID reference, and we had a full on several weeks-[long] back and forth about whether or not that line would even play," says Simien in the interview above. "Like, is this gonna date us? Cut to it never-ending."

"That kind of stuff happened a lot. It was very unnerving, but maybe it made us feel like maybe we're saying something that matters," says Moore. "So a lot of the stuff that's in the season that feels like, 'Wow, they're really responding stuff,' well actually we wrote it six months before anything was happening."

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The show's stars also shared their reactions to the series finale and how their characters' stories ended.

"The thing I appreciate about how you leave the character is that, in my personal opinion, you have this group of students who are very high-achieving, who are like the epitome of Black excellence —which everyone Black is excellent — very over-achieving, type-A folks, and I think it's fascinating look at what the world does to them," says Browning. "Like, how the world treats them, how the world takes them in and spits them back out, and where it leaves them, and if they're truly happy. They have these different successful things that they've been working for or maybe they don't, but are they happy is something I find myself, Logan, asking as I'm watching these characters...I think that exploration of where you leave the characters at the end is very fascinating."

Robertson agrees with Browning. "It makes you question the choices in your life and whether or not the things that you have done have been in your best interest or not," she says. "It's nice to see that with all of the characters," she says.

Figuring out how to end Dear White People — which is based on his 2014 Sundance hit movie — was a hard for Simien, who wanted to avoid a tragic ending, but also didn't want to write something disingenuous or unrealistic.

"The tricky thing with any story about racism or Black people [laughs] that is aiming for truth is that it's not necessarily a happy ending you can get to because we're nowhere near a happy ending when it comes to these issues," says Simien. "So the needle we tried to thread is, how do we avoid all of the tropes of Black tragic characters in shows like this, but also not saturate it with just Pollyanna-ish happy endings to where it doesn't even feel like we're talking about reality anymore? I realized that was the question I had for myself at that time we were making this. Okay, there have been some wins and losses, there have been some setbacks here, but we we still have to find some joys and we still have to find some community, and we still have to find a reason. That was as close to true and happy as I could get, and that's the tone we tried to strike with each of the characters."

NETFLIX

Watch the entire roundtable interview above to hear the cast and producers look back on their auditions, discuss the challenges of making a musical during a pandemic, and more.

Dear White People's 10-episode final season premieres Wednesday on Netflix.

Related content:

• Watch Joelle perform 'You Gotta Be' in Dear White People sneak peek

• Dear White People script page reveals Sam and Gabe's first duet and a new character

• Dear White People transforms into a '90s musical for final season — watch the new teaser