When Peacock was preparing to film “Long Bright River,” the TV series based on Liz Moore’s novel of the same name, Bill McKinney, executive director of New Kensington CDC (NKCDC), and a long time resident of Kensington got a call from the author. Soon, he was talking to Moore and the show’s producers, telling them about the real Kensington.
“They had a number of questions about representation of the community,” recalled McKinney. “It’s a complicated issue when you are discussing people who are suffering and how they were thinking of working through some of those issues.”
The series follows a police officer whose sister is dealing with addiction and whose community is in peril, in the midst of the opioid crisis in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, where NKCDC is based. Kensington itself has been referred to by the Drug Enforcement Administration as the East Coast’s largest open air drug market and photos of the community often accompany articles depicting the opioid epidemic; it’s become a “poster city” for the drug crisis.
But the neighborhood is much more than that, and there are people who help, especially nonprofits. McKinney often emphasizes the beauty of the neighborhood and the strength of its people. He wanted to make sure the series creators knew that, too.
The show is not actually filmed in Philadelphia (it’s Brooklyn), but the producers still had questions about historical and political context. “It was happening during the election of the mayor and I tried to help them understand how politicized it all was. I shared materials and articles and encouraged them and the entire production team and the actors to get as familiar with the real story as possible.”
McKinney also prepared talking points for actors and producers, and talked to them about the sorts of questions they might get from the public as they were trying to get press for the show, which began airing in March. He encouraged them to learn about the community – but also to admit when they didn’t know something and leave those answers to the experts.
One question he thought they would get, because it’s a question he often gets as well: Is there a path forward to solving Kensington’s problems?
“My answer is always yes,” McKinney said. “I believe in it or I wouldn’t be doing this work.” Trauma-informed, participatory strategies that include the residents in the solutions can lead to solid path forward, he believes, along with “recognition of the context and history that got us to this moment.”
In any TV series, the audience is dropping into a certain moment in time, often without much context. At NKCDC, and in other community development organizations like it, staff are living the context.
Pascal Pictures, the production company for Long Bright River, wanted to make a donation to the community, and as his last bit of consulting work, McKinney steered them to John H. Webster Elementary School. The show funded a new freezer, gym uniforms, and a new washer and dryer. “It’s a reminder of the basic needs in the school that have not been met,” McKinney said.
He has not yet seen Long Bright River, which has a 4.0 rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “I live what they made the series about,” he said. “I’m not entertained by it – by what I deal with every day.”
But he probably will watch at some point, when there’s time. It’s not because he cares about Hollywood, he said. “It’s because I care about Kensington.”
