Game of Thrones: Jon Snow's journey to season 8, Best TV Actors and Actresses from Each State, Back to the Future Trilogy: Top 30 Vehicles, 50 Most Heartbreaking Moments from the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: Ranking the 67 Best Characters, Ranking All 50 Episodes of Game of Thrones, 50 Biggest WTF Moments in Star Wars History. Addressing deep-seated institutional problems is an awkward job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Your privacy is safe with us. We talk about why he’s tackling it, and how we became so inured to its severity. “If after we aired episode 10, miraculously the criminal justice system had been overhauled into something that was more restorative and rehabilitative… I would be doing victory laps around wherever they give out the Nobel Peace Prize,” Cenac told me during a recent conversation about the show. Yet they’re so dedicated and underpaid that many take second jobs and plead with their loved ones in order to execute their jobs. “I think charity often is something that arrives after a natural disaster has happened. Cenac travels to West Virginia where teachers have been a part of a surprising conservative uprising as members of their unions. We’re ready to listen. This season focuses on education in America, investigating teacher pay, student mental health, the school-to-prison pipeline and other pressing topics. So we normally see charity drives after a hurricane or a wild fire or a tornado. All episodes are available on Topic.com and on YouTube.Watch on both, to prove you're not a robot. Maybe the greatest legacy of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, at least when you look at the modern era of late-night news programs, is the field segments. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, also a graduate of The Daily Show, has made its name on full-episode long versions of them. ‘Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas’ spends its new season tackling America’s broken education system. (In Friday’s premiere, Cenac literally shows magazine articles from the 1950s raising the same issues that we have today. Your favorite teams, topics, and players all on your favorite mobile devices. Last year, Cenac dedicated Problem Areas’ first 10 episodes to the issue of policing, police shootings, and police corruption, explored through a mix of Cenac’s commentary in a throwback, ’70s-era PBS studio and, yep, field segments shot all across the country. To say that applies to the issue of education in America, the subject of season two of Problem Areas, is an understatement. Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas Comedian and writer Wyatt Cenac explores America’s most pressing issues as he travels to different parts of the country, bringing unique perspectives to systemic issues while also tackling more benign everyday inconveniences with comedic solutions. They turned the likes of Steve Carell and Ed Helms into stars. The teachers themselves, concerned that so many of their students rely on free breakfast and lunch, called local churches and restaurants to offer meals to the students during a shutdown. Game of Thrones: Who is on the Greyjoy ship? ), “I think we forget how many teachers there are in this country and how connected we all are to teachers,” Cenac says. The education system is underfunded, and almost of all of us—based on our experiences in it, because we have our own children, or because we know educators—know this. Wyatt Cenac (/ ˈ w aɪ. “When 80 percent of teachers in this country are women, maybe it feels like there’s a larger conversation to be had about it being a women’s rights issue, too.”. “Could you imagine if doctors had to use GoFundMes for scalpels?” she says. We talk about why he’s tackling it, and how we became so inured to its severity. Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, his HBO late-night news series launching its second season this Friday, expands on Oliver’s in-depth examinations into the most corrupt, convoluted, and in-crisis aspects of American society. Season 2 of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas premieres Friday, April 5th at 11/10c on HBO. He was a correspondent and writer for The Daily Show from 2008 to 2012. For the second season of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, set to premiere on HBO on April 5th, Wyatt Cenac is on the case. We'll never pass along your email address to spammers, scammers, or the like. Cenac’s wry and uncompromising style of interviewing continues to result in unexpected interactions that are wholly interesting and always organic. “When you look at it through that prism, the same things that we see actresses fighting for recently, whether it was equal pay or sexual discrimination in the workplace, are those things translatable?” Cenac says. “That seems ridiculous that that’s where we’ve allowed ourselves to just accept that OK this is just part of the gig. We don’t want to stand for it.”. “We’ve just allowed ourselves to accept that that’s the way it is,” Cenac says. ‘Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas’ spends its new season tackling America’s broken education system. After the wave of public protests following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, HBO made both seasons of “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas” … There’s a universality to the episodes this season. “Aunt Becky’s already gotten her moment in the sun,” he says, when I praise him for focusing on what the players in the fight for better education are doing instead of the shitty things rich celebrities have made headlines for lately. Addressing deep-seated institutional problems is an awkward job, but somebody’s gotta do it. (My sister and cousin are teachers in struggling areas and have no recourse but to do this often, as I’m sure many friends and family of anyone reading this might recognize from their own social media news feeds.). Watching, so that the online views go up and up and up is. In the premiere of Problem Areas, educator and activist Brittany Packnett, whom Cenac interviews, puts this into jarring context. He starred in the TBS series People of Earth and in Barry Jenkins's first feature Medicine for Melancholy.He also hosted and produced the HBO series Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas The Topic.com web series, aka Wyatt Cenac, was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series.It didn’t win, but winning isn’t everything. ə t s ɪ ˈ n æ k /; born April 19, 1976) is an American comedian, actor, producer, and writer. Powered by Minute Media © 2020 All Rights Reserved. The entire community had their backs. The teaser trailer below showcases him in all his hilariously awkward glory. “Are those same things happening in another profession where a majority of its workers are women?”, If there’s one thing he learned through traveling the country in order to do an entire season of a show on the broken education system, it’s this: “We need to put the money and resources into this in a way that makes this job one where teachers can give everything to their students but also that their schools have enough to give everything to their students. The goal, all the activists Cenac interviews say, was to fill the 700 teacher vacancies by securing higher pay. Students joined in marches on the state capital. Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas returns for Season 2 on HBO, focusing on education in America. The first contains footage of teacher strikes in West Virginia that aren’t that different, for instance, from what I remember seeing from my school bus window when local educators protested in Maryland while I was in middle school. Build your custom FanSided TV email newsletter with news and analysis on All Television and all your favorite sports teams, TV shows, and more. The realistic goal, albeit over the course of an entire season instead of just one episode’s viral segment, is to “help a conversation that’s already been happening get a little more wind in sails.”. Check it out below. Though, as Cenac tells her, “Shouldn’t you be able to buy a Disney Vacation Club?”. “I always remember seeing school drives and charity as this thing that’s a part of education,” Cenac says. Looks like Cenac will be dropping a whole lot of knowledge about how we process knowledge in the U.S. Take us to school, Wyatt. This approach lends a natural element to each episode, allowing the places and faces at the forefront of each highlighted issue to be front and center. Acquired via HBO PR Medium page. While education today serves as the season’s primary focus, WYATT CENAC’S PROBLEM AREAS will address other issues, including the unionization of fast-food workers and the potential dangers of facial recognition software, as well as comedic solutions to lighter topics, such as how to get more steps in at the office or how to teach kids practical skills, like filing taxes. Game of Thrones Season 8 trailer: A hint at Jaime Lannister's fate? “It isn’t so I can buy a Disney Vacation Club,” West Virginia teacher Nicole McCormick says. That teachers have had to independently raise money for decades in order to fund their lesson plans is likely recognizable to all of us. What you’ve seen teachers do time and again when they go on strike is to say, no, this shouldn’t be part of this. The challenge now is to keep this from being a fight that must be fought every generation, if not more often than that.