ABBIANCA

Did Friends steal the concept from Living Single?

Two shows. Almost the exact same idea. One year apart and only one of them became a global, billion-dollar institution that’s still everywhere today while the other became the show you have to remind people existed. So let’s actually talk about it.

First, let me be careful I can’t sit here and tell you Friends stole anything and neither can anyone else. You can’t copyright a premise,” a group of young friends hang out in a big city” isn’t something a person gets to own and nobody outside those writers’ rooms will ever really know what was in anyone’s head.

So this isn’t an accusation. It’s a timeline and a pile of coincidences and I’m going to lay them out and let you make up your own mind 👀

So here’s what’s just… true.

Living Single came first. It premiered in 1993, on Fox, created by a woman named Yvette Lee Bowser widely credited as the first Black woman to create and run her own primetime show, which is history on its own. And the setup? Six friends, mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings, living in a Brooklyn brownstone, figuring out their careers, their love lives and leaning on each other through all of it.

Four women, two men. One central place they all hang out. City singles, doing life together.

Friends premiered the very next year, in 1994, on NBC. Six friends, twenty- and thirty-somethings, living in New York, figuring out their careers, their love lives, and leaning on each other through all of it.

Three women, three men. One central place they all hang out the coffee shop. City singles, doing life together.

Same idea, one year apart.

The way Queen Latifah has told it over the years: around the time Friends was coming together, a magazine asked a bunch of TV executives which show they’d most love to have on their own network and the answer that came back was Living Single.

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And then, a year later, NBC had its own version of six friends in the city.

The sourcing is fuzzy, which is part of why this will never actually be settled. But that’s the reason the “they saw what was working and wanted their own” theory has never died.

Okay but here’s where I have to be fair, because the other side is real too.

Living Single didn’t invent this format either.

“Friends hanging out in a city” is one of the oldest shapes in television. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was doing the found-family-in-the-city thing back in the ‘70s.

Seinfeld was already a huge hit about friends in New York.

That whole “young singles figuring it out together” idea was in the air in the early ‘90s, floating around everybody.

And Friends’ creators have always said it came straight from their own memories of being broke twenty-somethings in New York which is completely believable, because here’s the thing about culture: it feeds everyone the same ingredients at the same time.

Two different people can land on the same idea in the same moment without one copying the other.

So the honest verdict is the unsatisfying one: we don’t know. We can’t know. It could be influence. It could be the air of the era or it could be a little of both. And anyone telling you it’s obvious in either direction is selling you a certainty they don’t actually have.

But here’s the part I really want you to sit with — because “did they copy it” might genuinely be the wrong question.

The better question is this: if two shows launch a year apart with basically the same concept… why did one become a billion-dollar cultural institution, and the other quietly go off the air and become a footnote?

Because that gap has nothing to do with who had the idea first. It’s about what happened after.

Friends was on NBC, the biggest network on television, with the marketing muscle and the prime Thursday-night slot to make it unavoidable. Living Single was on Fox, younger, smaller, with a fraction of that push.

Friends got the giant budget, the endless syndication, the streaming deals worth hundreds of millions, the immortality. Living Single got a devoted audience and a quiet goodbye. Same concept. Wildly different resources, promotion, and reward.

And it’s really hard to look at “the Black original” versus “the white version that got the empire” and not see a pattern that runs through so much of media history, where the thing gets made first by people who don’t get the credit, and then the safer, whiter, better-funded version becomes the one the whole world remembers.

That’s what Queen Latifah meant with the line that says it best. Living Single walked so Friends could run. Not “Friends is a thief” but that being first and being loved, is not the same as being rewarded.

And who gets the money, the push, and the place in history? That’s a decision the industry makes long, long after the idea itself.

5 days ago | [YT] | 41

ABBIANCA

When does being pretty actually work against you? Let's talk about Leonardo DiCaprio.

We treat beauty like it's a cheat code, that if you're gorgeous, everything's easier and usually it is but there's a version of pretty that quietly becomes a cage, and Leonardo DiCaprio is the best example in Hollywood.

Beauty is an attention asset, it makes people look but attention and respect are two different currencies and in some rooms, being too pretty actively lowers how seriously people take you. There's even a bias behind it: we tend to assume the beautiful, adored, teen-idol type is lightweight all surface, no depth.

So when your whole brand becomes "the gorgeous heartthrob," you can win the entire world's attention and still be locked out of the one thing you actually want: to be believed as a serious artist.

Titanic made him a god and trapped him

In 1997, Titanic turned Leo into arguably the biggest heartthrob on the planet. "Leo-mania." Bedroom posters, screaming teenage girls, the most famous face alive. On paper, the dream.

In branding terms, a trap because that level of fame welded one single association onto him Leo, the pretty boy, the fantasy object for teen girls.

The exact thing that made him famous became the ceiling on his credibility.

He spent 20 years deliberately destroying the heartthrob

he basically declared war on his own prettiness. He stopped taking the obvious romantic-lead roles that would've printed money and reinforced the fantasy. Instead he chased dark, ugly, tormented, broken men addicts, con men, obsessives, villains. He deliberately roughed himself up, aged himself, made himself unlikable on screen. Every role was a hammer swing at the "pretty boy" brand, trying to break it apart and replace it with "serious craftsman." He wasn't picking roles to be loved but picking them to be believed.

Then he attached himself to Martin Scorsese, one of the most respected directors in film history, and made movie after movie with him: Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street.

This is called a co-sign, when a respected name attaches to yours, their credibility transfers onto you. Scorsese is a stamp of "this is serious cinema," and by becoming his go-to leading man, Leo borrowed that seriousness until it became his own.

You cannot call a man a lightweight pretty-boy when the greatest living director keeps building films around him. The association did the arguing for him.

The Oscar took 20 years because he had to overwrite the brand first

He was nominated again and again, and kept losing, for two decades. He didn't finally win until The Revenant in 2016, a role where he crawled through freezing rivers, ate raw bison liver, got mauled, and was caked in dirt and blood for two hours with barely any dialogue.

It was the least pretty performance imaginable and that's what got him the trophy. That's not a coincidence. He had to travel so far from "heartthrob" that the industry could finally see him as pure actor, no face in the way.

The beauty that made him famous at 22 is the reason the respect took until he was 41.

1 week ago | [YT] | 52

ABBIANCA

How did Denzel Washington become the one name in Hollywood you can actually trust?

There's a short list of actors whose name alone makes you go, "okay, I'll watch that." just because they're in it. Denzel Washington might be the best example of this.

"Denzel's in it" has quietly become a promise: this will, at the very least, be worth your time.

So here's the branding question underneath a forty-year career, how does a person's name turn into a guarantee? It's trust that travels with your name and does the selling for you.

The timing: he arrived when the lane was almost empty

Denzel's timing was enormous. He came up in the 1980s and broke out through the early '90s...Sidney Poitier had carried the weight of being "the" dignified Black leading man a generation earlier and after him there was a wide, mostly empty space where serious, powerful, leading-man roles for Black actors should have been.

Hollywood wasn't producing many of them, which is its own problem but in pure positioning terms, it meant the lane was open. In branding, positioning means owning a space in people's minds that nobody else has claimed. When Denzel delivered Glory, then Malcolm X, he didn't have to fight ten other people for the title of the serious, commanding Black leading man of his era.

He stepped into a space that was waiting for someone to fill it/

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Being a Black man: the scrutiny that forged the discipline

He came up knowing the roles offered to Black men were often small, or demeaning, or the fool, or the criminal. And he made a decision that became the backbone of everything: he would protect how Black men were portrayed.

He's spoken for decades about refusing parts that degrade or weaken the men he represents.

a brand is defined as much by what it refuses as by what it does.

Every "no" to a demeaning role was an act of brand management. He curated a body of work where his character almost always carries dignity, so over time "Denzel" came to mean dignity.

The range: proof it's skill, not a costume

He'll play the hero you're rooting for and then he'll play the most magnetic villain you've ever seen he won his second Oscar for Training Day playing a corrupt cop, deliberately against everything audiences expected of him.

Range signals depth, and depth signals that there's an actual craftsman under the fame, which is exactly what makes the trust feel earned rather than lucky.

Loyalty:

Personally, he's been married to Pauletta since 1983, in an industry where that is almost science fiction, grounded, private, no tabloid churn. Professionally, he's loyal to the people he works with he's made five films with the director Spike Lee across decades he's famous for mentoring younger actors, most movingly the story that he quietly paid for a young Chadwick Boseman's acting program before either of the men was a household name.

When you are consistent, faithful, and generous to the people around you over decades, you build a reservoir of goodwill collaborators vouch for you, protégés praise you, the industry protects you, and audiences absorb all of that and decide he's the real thing.

So why does all of this actually work on us? When we pick what to watch, we're mostly trying to avoid wasting our time, we're managing risk. And a trusted name is a shortcut that lowers the risk. "Denzel's in it" tells your brain, before you've seen a single frame, this is a safe bet, the odds of regret just dropped.

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1 week ago | [YT] | 75

ABBIANCA

It’s out 🎉 Thanks so much for the support so far.

1 week ago | [YT] | 5

ABBIANCA

Did you know Reese Witherspoon had it written into her contract that she got to keep every single outfit from Legally Blonde 2 including 77 pairs of Jimmy Choos?

When I read that I actually laughed, because it’s SO smart.

But Reese was one of the most bankable actresses alive and still getting handed thin, forgettable “the girlfriend” roles.

So instead of waiting for better scripts, she started buying the books herself, optioned the rights, produced them. Gone Girl. Wild. Big Little Lies. She built a company, Hello Sunshine, to make stories about women and in 2021 she sold it in a deal that valued it at around $900 million, keeping equity and a board seat.

The lesson? Ask for the thing. Out loud and in writing. Most of us just… don’t. We take what we’re offered and feel grateful it was offered at all. We haggle over the salary (maybe) and forget everything else, the title, the credit, the flexibility, the ownership of what we actually make. Reese’s superpower wasn’t talent, it was that she asked for the specific thing she wanted, even when it seemed cheeky, even when nobody else at the table would’ve thought to.

So next time you’re handed something, a job offer, a project, a “quick favour” that’s actually enormous pause before you say yes and ask yourself: what do I want to keep out of this? Then ask for it. Worst case they say no. Best case you walk away with the equivalent of 77 pairs of shoes no one else thought to request.

1 week ago | [YT] | 145

ABBIANCA

Can you believe Jessica Alba was told she was “too exotic” to be a leading lady? 💀🫪

Casting directors literally couldn’t place her. Her words: “You’re not Latin enough to play a Latina, and you’re not Caucasian enough to play the leading lady, so you’re going to be the ‘exotic’ one.” Whatever that meant.

When I first read it I was SO shocked. Too exotic?? Too what, exactly? They couldn’t even define it they just knew she didn’t fit the box, so they made her be the box

They cast her as Sue Storm, a character who’s blonde and blue-eyed in the comics, and rather than just hire a blonde, they dyed Alba’s hair and put her in blue contacts. Too “exotic” to be a leading lady but paint over the exotic and suddenly she’s fronting a franchise. The problem was never her…

So she decided to step back from acting at 27 and built The Honest Company. When it went public in 2021 it listed at around a $1.4 billion valuation and her stake was worth well over $100 million on day one the kind of money her acting would almost never allow her to see.

She refused to keep auditioning for people who’d already decided she didn’t fit and putting her energy somewhere it actually counted.

When someone can’t put you in a box, that’s not your problem to fix, it’s theirs. Most of us have had a version of “too exotic.” Too quiet for leadership but too opinionated to just sit there. Too junior for the big project but somehow expected to carry it. Overqualified for one role, “not quite right” for the next. You end up twisting yourself trying to fit a box the other person can’t even define.

So stop shrinking yourself to be legible to people who were never going to pick you. The room that keeps telling you you’re “too much” or “not enough” isn’t a room to win over it’s a sign to spend your energy where you’re actually wanted.

You don’t need a billion-dollar company. You just need to stop pouring yourself into a door that keeps not opening.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 34

ABBIANCA

We're surrounded by 'overnight success' stories. What rarely gets discussed is the long, unglamorous phase where nothing seems to move, where you're practicing in public, getting ignored and wondering whether the effort is worth it.

I have some big goals for Q4/Q1, especially as I enter my second year working for myself.

But I had to remind myself to always look back.

Nothing ever came without the mundane, sometimes boring habits.

Not to steal quotes from Atomic Habits, but it really is true: "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."

I spent three years filming outside shops in Stratford, uploading to YouTube with single-digit views and writing blogs no one read.

At the time, there was no visible payoff. In hindsight, it was the most valuable training I could have had because it eventually got me in the right rooms.

So this year, I'm returning back to basics.

In order to achieve half the things I want this year, I really do have to commit to the daily work that doesn't look impressive but compounds over time.

What I've noticed since, across thousands of conversations with politicians, founders, investors, executives and people rebuilding their lives from the ground up, is a consistent pattern:

The people who appear to "break through" aren't necessarily more talented but they've stayed consistent and build systems that don't rely on motivation.

By the time an opportunity presents itself, they're ready for it.

So a little motivational post (for you and me too) to say whatever you're building right now that feels small or invisible, keep building.

The compound effect is real but only if you stay consistent long enough to see it work.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 19

ABBIANCA

Taraji P. Henson is one of those actresses who deserved so much better and should’ve been even bigger.

I love that Tyler Perry has given so many Black actors their first major film opportunities and pay cheques, and that impact shouldn’t be overlooked. But I do sometimes wonder why Taraji is still doing some of his films at this stage in her career and what that’s doing for her brand..

Anyways, here’s examples of how Hollywood has continued to play with her and a prime example of how talent has nothing to do with success sometimes…it’s also who you know, who manages you, £££, proximity and more.

🎬 Paid significantly less than her co-stars in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Henson said she earned less than 2% of what Brad Pitt was paid, despite receiving an Oscar nomination for her performance. She also revealed she had to pay for her own accommodation during filming.

🎥 Repeatedly having to renegotiate from scratch. Henson has said that after every successful role, she feels studios treat her as if she hasn’t already proven her value, forcing her to fight for fair pay all over again.

📚 Speaking out about the pay gap for Black women in Hollywood. During The Color Purple press tour, she became emotional, saying she was “getting paid a fraction of the cost” and that “the math ain’t mathing” because taxes, agents, managers, lawyers and other expenses dramatically reduce actors’ earnings.


🚨 Long-standing claims of being undervalued despite major success. Despite starring in hits such as Empire, Hidden Figures, The Color Purple and earning award nominations, Henson has consistently said her compensation has not reflected her impact or résumé.

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3 weeks ago | [YT] | 174

ABBIANCA

So… I’ve been sitting on this for months and next week you’ll finally get to see it. I really hope you like it.

It’s a monthly show coming to this channel. (If you guys love it, we’ll move it to twice a month but you’ve got to support your girl because this is completely self-funded. 🫠 *screams in money leaving my account*)

It’s not a sit-down interview series. It’s an investigation and debate-style show.

Each episode, I’ll take one cultural question and open it up as a case. Cultural, political, marketing and branding perspectives all of it examined, debated, all leading to a verdict at the end.

Occasionally, I’ll bring people in to debate with me, or I’ll phone a friend (which could easily be one of you lot, too! Maybe we already have a subscriber turned friend featuring in the pilot 👀)

Why did I decide to do this?

As many of you know, I previously worked as a journalist first in magazines, then newspapers, before moving into TV and radio and then being made redundant due to the changing media landscape.

I loved it but there were always gatekeepers who had the final say over what was published, what wasn’t and how stories were told. At times, that was incredibly frustrating.

As this channel continues to grow, I kept asking myself: Why not me?

Then I had my son and something genuinely shifted in me. My mindset became, Why not now?

Why should I wait until I have 10k subscribers?

Why not take the risk? Why not build the thing I’ve always wanted to make? And if it doesn’t work, what a wonderful story I’ll be able to tell him one day that I had an idea, I believed in it enough to try, and I gave it everything I had.

I hope this encourages someone reading this. Sometimes you have to take hold of your dreams with both hands and just go for it, even when you don’t know exactly how it’ll turn out.

So here’s to new beginnings.

See you next week with the pilot. ❤️

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4 weeks ago | [YT] | 52

ABBIANCA

Why do you do what you do? For me it’s because I understand the privilege I have. To not chase my dreams would be insulting to those who came before me.

Home can be a complicated word for any migrant. It can evoke all sorts of uncomfortable feelings...

Two years ago I visited my birth country, my first home, after years of being away. My sole mission was to learn more about my family’s history, a history that was wiped away by the country I now consider my other home.

Most of my family, except my mum and an aunt, still live there. So, I had a lot of people to learn from.

Why was this important? I think everyone should know who they are and where they come from. I'd argue the reason why most people feel lost in life is because they’ve never been on a self discovery journey or lost sight of who they were and why they were doing something

I live in London, I’m happy, and I’ve built my entire life here. Yet, there are times I miss Zimbabwe. I miss the people, who never fail to say “hello” even when they don’t know you, the shared understanding that when you see an older person walking past, you bend your knee slightly out of respect, the food, the rich and sometimes complicated culture and the country’s beauty. Obviously, life is tough, the country is suffering economically due to the hands of a selfish government. Yet, somehow, people still find ways to smile

The one word that comes to mind when I speak about the country is community. That's how most people survive, through the village of people they've built around them

So, who are the Makonis? (my maiden name)

- The Makoni kingdom was founded in 1635. It was & still is primarily a farming district with multiple hubs of agriculture.

- Makoni rulers were regarded as fighters of social injustice from the colonial settlers. eg. Chief Gandanzara ruled from 1996 to 2008 and managed to fight for land, resettling his people in fertile areas.

- The Makoni princesses were regarded as symbols of wealth and had a special burial site.

- Life, according to scholars and my family, was good for a while.

- Then Cecil Rhodes came along with his army and eventually stopped the people’s uprising

- It was a long battle; eventually, he won and cut off the head of Chief Makoni

- In 2015, Britain said it was negotiating with Zimbabwe over the repatriation of remains thought to belong to fighters currently held in the Natural History Museum...yes they still have his head

- Life is very different in the 'Kingdom' now due to colonisation, mismanagement, government etc

- My family were so joyful the entire trip & "proud" of what I've gone onto achieve as one of the few children living abroad

In short, the Makoni's were courageous “soldiers” who stood for what they believed in. My trip was bittersweet but I was reminded whether it's in career, business or my personal life - I should always remain firm on my values & not sway from them

We stress about so much in the UK...things that honestly don't matter

Work is important & money needs to be made but be intentional about building your own village/community

So the fact I’ve been able to be a journalist (for almost 10 years) before switching to branding and marketing and been in the rooms I’ve been in it is a privilege!!

1 month ago | [YT] | 57