An ex-con brims with hope when he returns to his family in surrealist comedy Government Cheese
To post-Second World War Americans, the term “Government Cheese” has a certain connotation. The processed cheese was provided to welfare beneficiaries, seniors receiving social security, as well as food banks and churches. With a taste that lands somewhere between Velveeta and mild cheddar, it is usually correlated with low socioeconomic status. However, on the new surrealist comedy from David Oyelowo (Selma, Les Misérables) the term evokes something more hopeful. “For so many people, it elicits nostalgia,” he says. “Even though it’s cheap food, it’s something that people turned into a delicacy — they essentially made nothing into something. And that’s what the Chambers family are very adept at.”
in Government Cheese, the series, Oyelowo stars as Hampton Chambers, a convicted burglar who is released from prison and returns home to a world that has filled in the gap he once held. Never one to be discouraged, the perpetually optimistic Hampton sets out to prove his worth to his wife Astoria (Simone Missick) and his two sons, by inventing a self-sharpening power drill called the “Bit Magician.” “You go from being incarcerated to coming out with an invention that you are hoping is going to be the means by which your family will be able to progress,” says Oyelowo. “Your wife is wanting to be an interior designer and achieve a better life . . . That is what Government Cheese symbolizes, for me, in a really celebratory, quirky and surreal way.”
Government Cheese is based on the real life of series co-creator Paul Hunter, a factor that normally would add some weight to a role for the British actor. Not so with this script, however. “What I read on the page was fantastical, outlandish and irreverent,” says the Oxford-born Oyelowo. “This had a lightness to it. That, in and of itself, was one of the unique aspects that really caught my attention.” The way this family was depicted by Hunter and co-creator Aeysha Carr was also the draw for Oyelowo’s onscreen partner. “I read these characters and thought, I would love to be able to escape into this comedy that was both parabolic and had fantastical realism, and yet was grounded in the reality of a family in 1969, in the San Fernando Valley — which I had never seen with Black people, that did not tie itself to trauma or to the civil rights movement,” says Missick. “And the opportunity to work with David . . . This is a person who is not only tremendous in what he does, but he approached this character with such a care.”
A show depicting re-entry into society by a formerly incarcerated individual is usually a bleak affair. In Government Cheese, the undertones of strife are there, but the tone is one of hopefulness. “I came into this knowing I didn’t want to tell a story about a Black man coming out of prison and having hardship,” says Carr. “There’s been great storytelling around that, but we wanted to take these pieces that happened in Paul’s life, and bring some joy and some levity to them. Hampton is ‘Pie in the sky, blue skies ahead.’ There’s no rain. He sees optimism in everything. When you have this character that is optimistically looking at the world, we never tread in the things that everybody’s kind of treading. We tell it a little differently.”
That’s not to say that Hampton does not continuously face challenges, both in his professional life and in claiming his space within a family that has made do without him. “Hampton had always relished being the head of that family and Astoria felt completely satisfied and happy allowing for him to lead. It was after years of disappointment and him ultimately going to prison that she had to forge a new path,” explains Missick. “So, she is challenging him to meet her where she is, with these new expectations, goals and aspirations that she has for herself and for her family. She wants Hampton to meet them where they are. And I think that it is something that he wants for himself, as well, but doesn’t necessarily see how that fits with his idea of where his family was when he last saw them.”
As they introduce the audience to a world that occasionally feels warped, like a funhouse, Oyelowo and Missick believe the audience will appreciate the creative approach that feels wholly original. “It felt like a dance,” says Missick. “It felt like a balloon that was constantly just almost floating away and you had to keep grounding it. It was a lovely way to approach something that would normally be rooted in trauma or pain, that we were able to find a different way in. I think that is what will keep audiences on their toes.”
The season finale of Government Cheese streams Wednesday, May 28 on Apple TV+