With the CW's 'All American' and 'All American: Homecoming' and now NBC's 'Found,' Okoro Carroll joins Shonda Rhimes in a very small club. And she wants to use her power for good.
was a newly married economist for the Federal Reserve Bank, moonlighting as a playwright and director at New York black-box theaters. She had settled into a heady routine: Arrive at work by 6:30 a.m., where she would spend the day analyzing domestic and foreign markets; clock out at 5:30 p.m. and head down the street to rehearse productions through the night; go home to shower and sleep a few hours; repeat. But she knew it wasn’t a sustainable long-term plan.
Filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood, who first met Okoro Carroll at a Black moms group, says that the writer has made a conscious decision to ensure that she was never the only Black woman in the room: “She has made it and is intentional on using her power and influence to raise the next generation of Black writers.”
“You have the feeling that making her sit in a chair is like putting her in handcuffs; I wondered how anyone so exuberant could sit still long enough to write a script,” Hanson recalls. “Someone with Nkechi’s charisma can be a pain in the ass in the writers room, but she wasn’t like that. She was a team player. I often found writers in Nkechi’s office, [and she was] helping them with their stories — or vice versa.
“We were tired of being called the ‘unicorns’ in our [writers] rooms and by the executives we were interacting with,” says Okoro Carroll. “As I was moving up in the business, if people came to me and they were like, ‘We can’t find people like you,’ I didn’t like that I couldn’t roll the names off my tongue. I knew they were out there, but I didn’t like that I couldn’t be a resource.”
“Her expectations are high, because she puts in the work and expects the same from those around her, and we all want to work hard for her,” Hoffman says. “It is possible to be a strong, decisive leader, but also cultivate a joyful environment. These things are not mutually exclusive.”
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