Chatting All Things Black-ish With Tracee Ellis Ross!

We loved chatting about Black-ish with Tracee Ellis Ross. We’re sharing our time on the Blackish TV show set where we Tracee showed us around and shared a behind the scenes peek!

image: Black-ish/ABC

Black-ish with Tracee Ellis Ross

When I was in Los Angeles with Disney and ABC last month, one of the grand highlights for me was meeting the lovely Tracee Ellis Ross on the set of her TV show Black-ish! Besides the fact that the show is a refreshing sitcom featuring a black family on a positive, witty and utterly hilarious note, I have been a fan of Tracee’s since her days on the show Girlfriends!

This woman. She’s friendly and personable, happy, always smiling, and downright gorgeous! She greeted and shook hands with each and every one of us, something you don’t see too often these days. She offered to give our group a personal tour of the Black-ish set, cruising through each room, describing how scenes are filmed, and all of the need to know goodness.

A few things we learned about Black-ish with Tracee Ellis Ross

It takes up to 5 days just to shoot one episode, so Tracee and Anthony Anderson (plays her husband, Dre Johnson) have been known to take naps in between takes on set! Also, some of the walls are missing so that camera people can shoot scenes from the best possible angle.
She says that she loves working with the kids on the show, Yara Shahidi, Marcus Scribner, Miles Brown and Marsai Martin, and that they are so great. They’re so young and “not yet jaded, and have a pure joy” about them each morning, lots of giggling and laughing, and fun on set!
The kids have very strict rules as far as their time working, you know, labor laws. They have to take breaks at certain times, go through 3blocks of schooling throughout the day and follow a huge time schedule on their calendar.
Tracee once told Miles, one of the younger kids, to “focus” while on set, but later realized that he might not know what that means, exactly. They’re so young with such grown-up jobs, it can get tough. She came up with a metaphor she was proud of: Miles is a fan of basketball, and she took that and ran with it! She told him that to focus is kinda like in basketball, you’ve gotta know “who has the ball, but even if he doesn’t have the ball, who has the ball?” Staying in the scene and knowing what’s going on is just like staying in the game!

Black-ish ABC Man At Work, Tracee Elis Ross, Faizon Love, Anthony Anderson, ABC-Eddy Chen

image: Eddy Chen/ABC

It was wonderful to be able to visit the Black-ish set and meet Tracee! You don’t really know how much work goes into shooting a TV show until you get a behind the scenes look! The whole ABC team was awesome for letting us stop by, and Tracee was great to talk to.

Be sure to watch Black-ish with Tracee Ellis RossWednesdays (that’s tonight!) at 9:30pm/8:30pm central on ABC. I watched this episode already, it’s called “Man At Work” and it is good and hilarious! Don’t miss it, special guests Wanda Sykes and Faizon Love add to the fun, see what they end up doing to get a freeloader out of their house!