Last night marked the 100th episode of Black-ish and, instead of tooting their own horn and looking back the history of their own show, they decided to dedicate a whole episode to someone bigger than any TV show: Prince. They tribute they do is not just surface level. The parents in the show, Dre and Bow, discover that their kids don't know who Prince is. To solve this glaring issue, they decide to educate them with some performances of Prince songs including "Erotic City," "Kiss," "Purple Rain" and more. Vulture asked Kenny Smith, the showrunner of Black-Ish, how the idea for a Prince tribute came about:
Over the summer, when we got together the first week [of the new season], Kenya [Barris] came in and told us this story about how he was at dinner with some friends and there was a guy in his twenties and they started playing Prince on the restaurant system. He was like, “Who is this?” Kenya was flabbergasted. “What do you mean, who is this? This is Prince"[...] Kenya actually gave him a list of songs he had to listen to. Later on the guy called him back — he went through Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times, and he was a huge Prince fan by the end. So Kenya said he wanted to do an episode where one of the kids didn’t know who Prince was. We started developing it from there.
Here are a couple clips of the show's tributes:
