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At the heart of the disagreement between Monica and Quincy — and for that matter, Solomon and me — was our generation’s gender wars gone buppie: Could Monica really win the boy next door, play ball and have it all?

As characters make speeches about fatherhood and police corruption, and we sit through stiff, sentimental flashbacks to Ronnie’s stressful return from military duty in the Middle East, the show starts to feel like an earlier Showtime drama set in Chicago, the buppie soap opera “Soul Food.”

The poet Amiri Baraka once derisively wrote that Lee was “the quintessential buppie,” his work frivolous and bourgeois, but that is vicious.

Its stories of buppie frustration and romance, set in Los Angeles, aren’t revolutionary, but they’re funny and moving, powered by Ms. Rae’s ear for dialogue of a kind of crystalline, pitch-perfect profanity.

But he ultimately proved dispensable, always played second fiddle, and before he became Rocky’s trainer, was deliberately characterised as an uppity, preening buppie.