Private Project

Addie & Addy Pilot

Two Nigerian-American women with the same name but completely different personalities end up living together in an apartment after a rental lease mix up. Rather than fight over which one gets the spacious rent-controlled apartment, they decide to live together since the deal is too good to pass up. What’s the worst that can happen?

  • Adenike Thomas
    Director
  • Adenike Thomas
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Television
  • Runtime:
    23 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    February 25, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    16,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital,
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Adenike Thomas

Adenike is an award-winning actress-writer-director hailing from Queens, NY, and a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

She has had lead roles independent films such as The Morning After, which was a Vimeo staff pick and Short of the week

Watch Here, and the short Me Time. Her role in Me Time has garnered her 3 awards, including Outstanding Performance at Art the BKLYN Film Fest & Best Performance awards at Atlanta ShortsFest and the Idyllwild International Film Festival.

Me Time has won over 11 awards and is an official selection for 22 flim festivals including Nitehawk Film Fest, Rooftop Films Summer Series, San Francisco Black Film Fest, Langston Hughes Afri-American Film Fest, The Art of BKLYN Film Fest, BLACKSTAR Film Fest, & Sarasota Film Fest. Watch Me Time Trailer Here

Her web series, 'Addie & Addy' was included in NYWIFT's 2018 Women Filmmakers: Immigrant Stories Screening Series and was an official selection for NYWIFT’s Online Shorts Festival 2018. Adenike was recently awarded a generous grant through Made in NY Women's Film, TV & Theatre Fund and is currently in pre-production for the pilot of Addy & Addie.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

When “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” dropped, I was in my sophomore year at NYU studying theater. I was shook. “You mean, there’s room for multiple portrayals of black women in between the around-the-way-girls and hard-ass district attorneys???” I gawked at Issa in all her bald-headed glory, gangsta rapping to her bathroom mirror as that show redefined the way I looked tv, the entertainment industry and myself. Representation matters and more importantly, a variety of representation matters. Ordinary/weird/alternative black girls need to see that- not just the fabulous Olivia Popes out there.
So when I created my web series, Addie & Addy, I felt like a step in the right direction. And after making that web series, I’ve expanded the series into a half-hour comedy that focuses on the friendship of these two first-generation Nigerian-Americans. Addie & Addy seeks to create different, authentic and truthful portrayals of black women that will be recognized and respected in the media.
Here are two very different women that look the same on paper—women identifying as African, American and New Yorkers— but brought together by accident. The series follows Addie, a type-A personal assistant, and Addy, a razor-tongue visual artist, who are forced to share an apartment after a huge mix up by an incompetent landlord. Because the rent is too damn high and because they have no other options, the women are forced to lean on each other for support as they encounter the difficulties of life in the city.
As they learn more about one another and their apartment, they encounter a cast of shifty neighbors including the otherworldly Nelly that never leaves their apartment empty-handed, the proud Haitian Lamont who is obsessed with Addie and the pothead slumlord Mario, who is always cutting corners to fix their constantly faulty apartment. His personal struggle with selling the apartment is the crux of season one. The apartment complex becomes the hub in which these characters relate to one another, grow into a community and learn to stand together as the neighborhood changes.
Its Grace and Frankie meets insecure meets New Girl—It’s about how these drastically different personalities drastically need one another. It’s Living Single revamped but West Africa style, employing a Nollywood aesthetic including absurdist tangents and a hefty dose of Yoruba proverbs.
As we track the trajectory of this unlikely friendship and their experiences in a rapidly gentrifying Bed Stuy, we navigate complexities of blackness, female friendships, and culture in the city that is constantly reinventing itself. Each episode will explore themes/issues that pertain to young black women including classism, color-ism, situation-ships, code-switching and the ever-present burden of gentrification in an educational and light-hearted way.
Addie & Addy is apart of that classic New York story; It’s about meeting people that are completely different from you, stepping outside your comfort zone and learning how to create your own community in the process. And that’s the true testament to living in New York City.