Luckily, there are outlets like The Hollywood Reporter to do it for her, reporting former president Barack Obama’s eldest daughter’s latest achievement: a TV writing gig on an upcoming Donald Glover series tentatively called Hive for Amazon, about a “Beyoncé-like” public figure. Malia is scheduled to graduate from Harvard University this spring, which means it wouldn’t have been unusual for the senior to be doing some job-hunting as she prepares for the looming gulf that is adult life. And while she may well have been, THR further reports that Malia was actually specifically recruited for this writing job. It’s baller moves only for the Obama girls, and that means you wait for showrunner Glover to call you.
Malia will have the privilege of working in a writer’s room headed up by Watchmen‘s Janine Nabers on this Amazon project, which is currently in the recruiting phase and starting to put together a creative team. The former first daughter has previously interned at The Weinstein Company (yes, that Weinstein) and on the set of Lena Dunham’s Girls. She was also a production assistant on Halle Berry-led drama Extant, though both Berry and Dunham have admitted that it was tough to treat Malia accordingly.
“She was down to do whatever a PA is asked to do, and I had wild respect for her for that,” Berry told host Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. “Everybody couldn’t really see her as a PA, although she tried and tried to be one. We just couldn’t really see her as one, but to her credit, she tried very hard to be one.”
“Obviously we weren’t, like, making her go get our coffee,” Dunham added to Howard Stern of her time working with Malia. “But she wanted to do all the jobs. That was the cool thing. She was totally enthusiastic.”
As a former production assistant who got a lot of coffee, I am tempted to say that enthusiasm may be easier to come by when you’re not doing menial labor for 12-14 hours a day. But I can’t fault Malia for long: she never chose to become one of America’s most-watched women growing up in the White House, and there’s nothing to suggest she’s growing into anything other than a spectacular young woman — one with both her parents’ work ethic and fondness for dabbling in TV, no less.
With an Amazon writing credit under her belt fresh out of college, there’s no telling where Malia might go next. But tapping her expertise for a show about a Beyoncé-like figure, AKA a powerful, famous Black woman with a legion of devoted fans, sounds like a really smart idea.