Ni’jah has her Killer Bees. Beyoncé has her Beyhive. Photo: Warrick Page/Prime Video
Swarm begins each episode with an odd introduction: “This is not fiction,” says the introductory title card. “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is intentional.” It might seem like an odd way to position a seven-episode limited series about a fictional Stan named Dre (Dominique Fishback) who goes on a two-year homicidal rampage to save her Defending favorite pop artist Ni’jah, but anyone who’s devoured Swarm or even had a glimpse of the trailer knows that Ni’jah is an avatar for the real Queen Bey and her die-hard fans, the Killer Bees , representing the Beyhive. “We were approaching [the similarities to Beyoncé] with much respect,” said creator Janine Nabers Vulture. “The legal things we did were very calculated, focused and thoughtful. If it happens, you can write about it. When things are happening out in the world and you are a public figure – legally we don’t lie. We presented everything: ‘This is not fiction.’ That’s the first thing you see when you watch this show. And it was legally deleted because it’s not fiction.”
The Prime Video show, set in Houston and a grab bag of other American cities during the Ni’jah Festival era — a time that parallels Beyoncé’s lemonade promotions, which ended with a masterful headlining performance at Coachella — has had no other Choice to adapt as notable moments due to the fact that they’re stuck in our collective pop consciousness. “If you’re doing a show about culture, you have to think about the moments in those two and a half years where black people broke the cultural noise with music,” Nabers explained. “When you narrate a period within a very iconic time in an artist’s life – real events that happened between 2016 and 2018 – you reach the standards that people will be talking about for years to come.”
Cultural events, especially Beyoncé’s, take on a sort of historical significance for pop obsessives. “If you see something, anything, in an elevator, you’ll think of the moment you saw that happen and where you were and who you called and who you texted,” she said, relating refers to Solange’s fight with Jay-Z in an elevator at the Standard Hotel, a seismic event that swept through Page Six and eventually burned itself into our memories (and was faked in Swarm). “It’s about the feeling of being somewhere when our version of the Berlin Wall fell.”