'Colin in Black & White' Review – The Hollywood Reporter

A useful exercise, before describing the new Netflix limited series Colin in Black & White as “too dogmatic” or “too on-the-nose” or “lacking in subtlety” is to take five minutes to search Colin Kaepernick’s name on Twitter or your favorite social media platform. Kaepernick hasn’t played an NFL game since he was informally blacklisted in 2017 — I can give you a list of some of the names of inept third-string quarterbacks who have started games in recent years, if you somehow think his unemployment is based exclusively on talent — but he remains a figure who generates binary reactions. Either he’s a crusader and martyr to a cause or else he’s … let’s just say that Colin Kaepernick’s detractors are rarely graceful in their selection of words. Colin in Black & White The Bottom Line A sometimes provocative, sometimes frustrating mixture of elements. The show’s title refers to that split in people’s perceptions of Kaepernick as much as it refers to the racial binary in which the athlete has always felt trapped. It refers as well to the bluntness of the series that Kaepernick created with Ava DuVernay, six half-hour episodes that swing between wildly perceptive and entirely self-obsessed,…
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