From Scratch, the new show your group chat should be gushing over, isn’t just a warm exploration of the struggle between surreal love and real life. It certainly is that (I laughed, I swooned, I cried… a lot), but it’s also a true story based on the eponymous memoir by Tembi Locke (she/her)—a woman who traveled to Italy, found her person, and protected that Florentine bliss in the face of changing family dynamics, disease, and moving back to American soil.

Tembi’s sister and From Scratch showrunner Attica Locke (she/her)—who also co-executive produced Little Fires Everywhere—eventually pitched the book to Reese Witherspoon’s production company, leading them from Hello Sunshine to hello, Netflix’s top 10. “This was never a part of the larger aspiration at all. I needed to write [the memoir] for me, for my heart, for my soul,” Tembi says. “This has been a wonderful ride kicked off by my sister’s vision and foresight. We explored that a little bit in the series, that sisterhood and how we support each other.”

That part. That’s why I’m watching (or did watch within a span of 2 days). I just ended 9 months of solo travel where I not-so-secretly hoped I’d stumble upon the love of my life. I didn’t. But since returning home to crash at my mom’s, I’ve been questioning why I undervalue familial love so much despite it being the most reliable comfort in my life. (Warning: You’re entering the spoilers zone.)

The love story between Zoe Saldana’s Amy and Eugenio Mastrandrea’s Lino is an enchanting affair full of delicious food, passionate sex, and utter heartbreak as Lino slowly dies from cancer. But the sisterhood between Amy (TV Tembi) and Danielle Deadwyler’s Zora (TV Attica) is just as powerful as they lift each other up through the highs and hold each other down through the lows. And I say “hold each other down” because these are two Black women from Texas, and the characters make that very clear.

If Amy and Lino are the heart of the show, Zora is consistently the rock, offering up a shoulder or spare room whenever Amy’s going through it. In real life, though, the emotional fatigue between the two wasn’t so one-sided. They both lost Saro (real-life Lino), and they both had to relive the whole experience day in and day out. Tembi recounts, “I understood that making series would require traveling back to many of those memories. But when you bring in other writers, you’re touching on the universal experience of loss, some of the universal experiences of illness, so I felt a little less alone in it.”

When reliving did get overwhelming, the sisters gave each other the space to sit in their emotions without fear of delaying the production. “I’m remembering a day when I said, ‘I need to step off-set and cry. Can you handle it?’” Attica says. “Tembi was like, ‘Of course I can.’ Then there were other times where she’s like, ‘I don’t know that I can be on set for this particular day,’ and I would say, ‘I got it. Don’t worry.’ We could just pick up the slack if the other one needed a break.”

The two could trade off crying sessions because they had already discussed how their personal relationship always took priority. As Tembi made clear, “We knew the working relationship wouldn’t work if the sister relationship didn’t work.” If that sister relationship needed weekly check-ins to keep going, so be it. If that sister relationship took figuring out their differences, which helped Attica realize they “don’t have to be alike to be great together,” then that’s what needed to happen.

Just as Amy and Zora relied on their resilient relationship to survive the turmoils of others (and trust me, their mother was a lot), Attica and Tembi trusted their sisterhood to make a damn good season of TV.

Still crying in Cali,
Kennedy, brand development editor