Focus Features lists Something New as a PG-13 romance and comedy released February 3, 2006, running 1 hour 40 minutes. Sanaa Lathan plays Kenya McQueen. Simon Baker plays Brian Kelly. Sanaa Hamri directed, Kriss Turner wrote it, and Stephanie Allain produced it.

That studio page never says “Black woman, White man.”

The reviews name the couple

Kevin Crust’s Los Angeles Times review, February 3, 2006, calls Kenya a proud African American professional woman and Brian a White landscape architect. He quotes Allain characterizing the film as “the first interracial love story of the 21st century with a black woman and a white man.” The same paragraph says that interracial romance is no longer much of a novelty, and it points at Guess Who, the 2005 Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher comedy. Allain’s “first” is a pitch. The review will not carry it, and neither will this page.

Variety had already described the pairing. Brian Lowry’s January 22, 2006 lede puts a white man opposite African-American characters in Something New, with Guess Who in the same sentence. The Los Angeles Times names Kenya and Brian. Between those two reviews, “the only such film” is not a claim this page can use.

BWWM names that pairing and nothing grander. A movie earns the label here when a studio, newspaper, or trade page says who the couple is. Something New clears that bar. A “best BWWM movies” ranking would not, unless every title on it cleared the bar separately. The same defect shows up in ranked BWWM romance books: a tag is not a headcount.

Kenya, in the film, has to choose between Brian and the man presented as the expected match, played by Blair Underwood. That is one plot. It is not a filmography.

Television is a looser container

A film like this one can be sold as the couple’s story. A series is usually a job or a household, and a couple is one line through it. Putting the whole show on a BWWM movie list counts the subplot as the product.

This page does not name a series. Something New is here because the distributor page and two reviews describe the people in it. A show would need that kind of page before it was added, and it still would not make this film the only one.

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