In the small world of television shows with predominantly black casts, Felicia D. Henderson has an admirable track record. She was a writer and producer for the 1990s sitcoms “Moesha” and “Sister, Sister” and she developed “Soul Food,” the underrated Showtime family drama whose 74 episodes in the early 2000s have made it the longest-running African-American drama on American TV.
Her new show, “The Quad,” beginning on Wednesday on BET, has a shot at breaking that record. Starring Anika Noni Rose as the new president of a (fictional) historically black university in Atlanta, it’s an urbane, relatively low-key prime-time soap opera with an attractive cast. If it finds an audience on BET, where the ratings pressure shouldn’t be too onerous, it could be around awhile.
Ms. Rose’s Eva Fletcher is a Northeastern dynamo: a Dartmouth grad and the former president of a small college whose name, Laura Farnsworth, couldn’t be more white. In her new job at Georgia A&M, she faces a gamut of sociocultural challenges — she’s not black enough; she’s too aggressive but also too bourgeois; she threatens the old boys club that’s used to running things. She’s quickly assigned the nickname Black Ivy.
Her primary antagonist, played with quiet malevolence by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, is Cecil Diamond, who has turned the university’s famous marching band into a cultlike personal fief that weighs heavily on Eva’s budget. Ms. Henderson, who created the show and wrote the two-hour pilot with Charles D. Holland, makes Cecil such a thorough creep that you wonder how she can develop the Eva-Cecil battle. If he reveals a softer side, as the villains in these scenarios tend to, it may be hard to buy, but Mr. Santiago-Hudson could probably pull it off.
“The Quad” offers a typical prime-time-soap package: some sex, some intrigue, some music, some scandal. (Eva lost her job at Laura Farnsworth for reasons that are revealed to us late in the pilot and will surely be used against her before the season ends.) Ms. Henderson puts her stamp on the genre by putting issues like bullying and sexual harassment in the foreground, and by mostly avoiding extremes of either sentimentality or sensationalism.
On the surface, “The Quad,” with a female African-American creator and a hard-charging black woman as its main character, calls to mind Shonda Rhimes’s “Scandal.”
It’s actually closer in style to an adult version of teenage-focused, issues-oriented, naturalistic Freeform series like “The Fosters” or “Switched at Birth,” especially in the story lines focused on students. But it has its Rhimesian elements, particularly in the pilot’s shock ending, which sends the story in a new and not necessarily promising direction.
(It’s noticeable that in the pilot’s darker plot elements — involving stalking, a violent hazing incident and a disappearance, as well as a concerted effort to unseat Eva as president — the targets are all women. Sexist TV formulas, or realism?)
With just the pilot available for review, we’ll have to wait and see how Ms. Henderson and her fellow producers develop the potentially entertaining and provocative situations they’ve set up. In the meantime, it should be fun to watch Ms. Rose, who’s like a more human version of Kerry Washington in “Scandal,” and Mr. Santiago-Hudson. And for nostalgists, there’s the bonus of seeing Jasmine Guy play a professor allied with Eva.
Ms. Guy, of course, played a student at a historically black college more than two decades ago in “A Different World,” and it’s as if Whitley Gilbert had grown up and joined the faculty. For Ms. Henderson, the history of television may be the most important subject.