Three years ago, Black-ish creator Kenya Barris developed an episode of the show that reflects on President Trump’s first year in office. Now, the segment is finally available to stream on Hulu.

Titled “Please, Baby, Please”, the episode was initially scrubbed by executives at ABC network because of it reportedly being “too anti-Trump.” But after the protests against systemic racism and police brutality erupted in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many other Black people in America, Baris went back to Walt Disney Television and asked them to change their minds. They complied. 

“In November 2017, we made an episode of black-ish entitled ‘Please, Baby, Please.’ We were one year post-election and coming to the end of a year that left us, like many Americans, grappling with the state of our country and anxious about its future,” Barris posted on Instagram. “Those feelings poured onto the page, becoming 22 minutes of television that I was, and still am, incredibly proud of. ‘Please, Baby, Please’ didn’t make it to air that season and, while much has been speculated about its contents, the episode has never been seen publicly… until now.”

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The show’s creator expressed that he “cannot wait for everyone to finally see the episode for themselves and, as was the case nearly three years ago, we hope it inspires some much-needed conversation — not only about what we were grappling with then or how it led to where we are now, but conversations about where we want our country to go moving forward and, most importantly, how we get there together.” In the aforementioned post, he also shouted out “the entire black-ish family for never shying away from tough conversations, making telling stories like this possible.”

This is not the first time the show is touching on the real-world issues concurrently happening off-screen: in January 2017, days before Trump’s presidential inauguration, the show released an episode titled “Lemons” wherein Dre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) delivers a powerful monologue in which he challenges the claim posed to him by the white boss that he has somehow checked out of “what is happening” to the country. Other sociopolitical issues have been highlighted in episodes “Juneteenth” and “Hope”.

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