How ‘The Chi’ Spotlighted Love, Hope and Loss on the South Side of Chicago

After an eight-season run, The Chi now heads into its series finale after spotlighting the many heartaches, tragedies, joys and triumphs of a tight-knit Chicago South Side community. What audiences have found in the Showtime/Paramount + streaming series is a tapestry of people who live on the vast South Side of the city of Chicago, a section of that is home for a great majority of the city’s Black population. In The Chi, like in real life, the people who live in these communities run the gamut from working-class citizens to well-off small-business owners and dedicated church-going people to members of the LGBTQ community, as well as the most hardcore violent gangsters. blogherads.adq.push(function () { blogherads .defineSlot( 'medrec', 'gpt-article-mid-article-uid0' ) .setTargeting( 'pos', ["mid-article1","mid-articleX","mid","mid-article"] ) .setTargeting( 'viewable', 'yes' ) .setSubAdUnitPath("ros\/mid-article") .addSize([[300,250],[2,2],[300,251],[620,350],[2,4],[4,2],[320,480],[620,366]]) .setClsOptimization("minsize") ; }); Related Stories Lifestyle Native Son Awards to Recognize Anthony Hemingway, Durand Bernarr and Tramell Tillman TV 'The Chi' First Look for Final Season Follows Lynn Whitfield, Yolonda Ross Exits Many of this community’s neighbors and family members, however, are connected by the commonly known theory of “six degrees of separation.” Their social economic backgrounds may be different, but viewers can be sure they will all cross paths either during a family member’s summer barbecue, reunion with school classmates, a community social gatherings, or, of course, a funeral or wedding. The Chi’s creator and executive producer Lena Waithe recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about her vision for the streaming series when she first started developing storylines. “I am only going to speak for myself, but I think with the pilot of a show, which obviously I wrote and I had this vision for it, was that it’s like life,” Waithe explained. “You could have a vision for your own life, but a higher power, the universe, has no patience for that vision. Because there’s another vision that you know nothing about, and you have no control over. blogherads.adq.push(function () { blogherads .defineSlot( 'medrec', 'gpt-dsk-tab-mid-article2-uid1' ) .setTargeting( 'pos', ["mid","mid-article2","mid-articleX"] ) .setTargeting( 'viewable', 'yes' ) .setSubAdUnitPath("ros\/mid-article2") .addSize([[300,250],[300,251],[620,350],[2,4],[4,2],[320,480],[620,366]]) .setClsOptimization("minsize") ; }); “So what I’m grateful for is that the show took on a life of its own,” Waithe continued. “And that it has become way more than I could have envisioned. It is vast. It embraces so many. I think my dreams, the human dream, is always too small. I always want to surrender to a greater power or bigger vision than one I could ever dream of for myself. So I’m really grateful for how the show has evolved. Everything that happened on the show was supposed to happen. And I’ve grown so much because of it. I’ve learned so much about who I want to be as a person, as an artist, as a leader, as a show creator and about what I want to say. 
I don’t want to be preachy. I always want to just show people maybe in a different way, not unlike Living Single, A Different World and all these shows did for me.” After the penultimate episode, “Cold Feet,” and heading into the series finale (releasing on Friday), the boundaries of loyalty are tested, especially once-tight family bonds. In the eighth episode, “Cold Hearted,” everyone in the circle of family and friends for engaged couple Emmett Washington (Jacob Latimore) and Keisha Williams (Birgundi Baker) seemed to know the truth about Tiffany (Hannaha Hall) killing head gang leader Nuck (Cortez Smith) — The Chi’s most feared gangster since Douda (Curtiss Cook) was taken out by Nuck in season six. Everyone except Keisha, making for a precarious situation as Nuck is the father of Keisha’s firstborn. But Tiffany is her best friend from childhood and the ex-wife of Emmett, Keisha’s soon-to-be husband. blogherads.adq.push(function () { blogherads .defineSlot( 'medrec', 'gpt-thr-article-mid-articleX-uid2' ) .setTargeting( 'pos', ["btf","mid-articleX","mid"] ) .setTargeting( 'viewable', 'yes' ) .setSubAdUnitPath("ros\/mid-articleX") .addSize([[300,250],[300,251],[620,350],[320,480],[620,366]]) .setLazyLoadMultiplier(2) .setClsOptimization("minsize") ; }); Nuck, who became Tiffany’s lover this season, was shot at close-range in her house after discovering through a secret recording that Nuck shot and killed her boyfriend, Rob Lafayette (Iman Shumpert), in the season six finale after he refused an extortion attempt by Nuck. As hardcore of a killer that Nuck was, he a loving father to his toddler son, which endeared him to Keisha and they stayed friends. Baker, and Latimore explained to THR how the blended family of raising six children between them and Tiffany impacts this final season. Baker believes her Keisha character is the glue that holds the family and friendships together between those three. “She’s the voice of reason. She is the emotional core. She’s a mother, a leader,” she told THR. Being the one who holds the core family together, it breaks Keisha’s heart when Emmett finally breaks down and tells her that it was Tiffany who killed Nuck (Tiff had originally tried to make mutual friend Bakari, played by Ahmad Ferguson, take the fall for the murder because he knew Nuck killed Rob, but never told her).