On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
True heads will know that “Maverick” is a moniker that Arizona native Erika Alexander has had since her days starring as Maxine Shaw, Attorney at Law, on the innovative ‘90s sitcom “Living Single.” So much so that series creator Yvette Lee Bowser made a joke of it in Season 4, when Max ran for Alderwoman in Brooklyn (an elected position that does not actually exist).
“Her campaign was ‘Ride the Maverick.’ Yvette Lee Bowser built that in because of me. I’m the Maverick. So she was just trolling me a bit and put it in because I was walking around saying, ‘I’m the Maverick,’” Alexander said over Zoom. “So when I heard that IndieWire was giving me the Maverick Award, I said, ‘My goodness, look at the universe. How’s that possible?’ Finally, somebody gives me an award that I feel like, not earned, but I can understand what it means and be very grateful for. So I couldn’t be more pleased.”
Discovered by Merchant Ivory Productions for the 1986 film “My Little Girl” when she was a teenager attending the Philadelphia High School for Girls, Alexander became a household name after playing Cousin Pam in the final two seasons of “The Cosby Show,” which aired on NBC in the early ‘90s. Shortly afterward, she was cast as the aforementioned Max, one of the four women leading the groundbreaking Fox series “Living Single” (famously a predecessor to “Friends”), which forever cemented Alexander’s place in sitcom history.
“Thank God for syndication,” she said. “Up until the point where we had internet, the fact that people still were watching things mostly together, that’s what happened. It made me feel like I was ubiquitous and that I was everywhere even though I wasn’t.”
Alexander’s grand return to network TV this year as a series regular on the new NBC series “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins,” for which she will receive the Maverick Award at IndieWire Honors on June 4, also feels like things coming full circle. She emphasizes that although she had a long stretch of time when, at any given moment, there was a television episode starring her playing somewhere around the world, she, too, has had a rollercoaster career.
“The hard part is people see stardom as being something that’s like zoom, someone discovers you, and then you have to maintain. But no one maintains it like that. You go up and down and up and down. And if you can, there’ll be another high moment where you go, ‘Oh, people are definitely seeing me in there. And I’m feeling really much more central in the space as opposed to playing the smaller circus tents,’” said the recent Gotham TV Award nominee.
However, what makes Alexander a maverick is not so much her acting career as it is what she’s done with the platform it’s given her. “Directing and writing, comic books, huge campaigns for activists where I played a central role as a chief surrogate and made campaign posters that are in the Smithsonian,” said the Color Farm Media cofounder, listing some of the jobs she’s come into between acting jobs. “I just tried to be of service to what my gifts were and use it not just for me but for other people. And I’m very serious about that.”
Elaborating on her personal philosophy, Alexander added, “What you give, you get to keep. And if I’m keeping some of that glow and some of that energy is lifting my career at this particular moment, I’ve given a lot of the energy outwards. And it didn’t feel like it was going outwards. It certainly felt like it was filling me up.” She said, “I didn’t sit there waiting for someone to give me a job. I created new roles for myself, and not just as the characters, but as Erika Alexander. That’s what being a maverick is about. It’s seeing beyond how people see you and making new paths for yourself. People say, ‘Oh, stay in your lane.’ I say, ‘No, I’m an off-road vehicle.’ I’ve always been an off-road vehicle.”
Part of that was out of necessity. “I haven’t met anyone that was in my life that didn’t have to be many different things in order to survive, let alone thrive. I think that’s why you get a lot of Black women, especially, having several degrees, because their assumption is they’re going to have to be able to do it all, and they want to be able to be qualified to do it all,” said the actress and producer. “There’s no diploma or anybody that says you can do this. You can just show up at the edge of the continent, California, and say, ‘I’m an actor,’ and do it. But can you sustain that? If you get a couple of roles, how do you sustain a career?”
One of the most fascinating aspects of Alexander’s career is the answer to that question and how it has brought her back to television. The multihyphenate also enjoys calling herself “a rabbit’s foot,” because in the past decade she has appeared in the Oscar-winning films “Get Out” and “American Fiction,” BAFTA winner “Earth Mama,” and “Is God Is,” one of the best-reviewed films of the year so far. All four of those projects are from Black first-time filmmakers who had all sought her out for those roles.
“I’ve auditioned a lot and not gotten a lot of those auditions, but a lot of the things that are successful in my life, they were offers. It’s somebody who said, ‘We see you in this part, we invite you to play,’” said Alexander, recalling how even Cousin Pam on “The Cosby Show” was invented by the star in real time, during a meeting with him set up by his wife Camille Cosby (she’d come to see her best friend Gloria Foster in a play, and left wowed by Alexander).
She’s heard that Clint Eastwood is not a fan of auditions and often casts his friends, much like how she has been cast in those movie roles recently. “He calls his friends and says, ‘Will you play this role?’ That’s a different conversation. From then on, when you walk in, you know they want you, they know what you do, or they’re at least interested in you exploring this world with them,” said Alexander, diagnosing why her ventures into independent filmmaking have borne such fruit. “We’ve got new auteurs, and they are very sure about what they want, and they want to get on with the business of getting it on because picking the person is the least of it. They’ve got to make the thing, and that’s huge.”
As for how she knows when a first-time filmmaker is worth taking a risk on, the actress said, “Discernment you can’t teach. You’ve got to live in a space where quality matters, not so you can look down on things, so you can identify what makes it something that you can contribute to.” She said, “I want to bring value. I don’t want the thing to bring value just to me. I’m hoping that I can see within something that maybe I don’t even totally agree with, that there’s some value that I’m going to get out of it. Even if it’s just the experience of working with a person that I really would like to work with, and not knowing, but you’re willing to say, ‘Hey, let’s all go in.’ And you think it’s going to be a fun time. I also think that energy attracts energy … You see the costars around me ain’t no joke either. It’s not just me. There’s a whole story being told.”
That brings things back to “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins,” a series about a disgraced football player shooting a documentary to get back into the public’s good graces. Alexander stars in the NBC sitcom alongside Tracy Morgan, Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Moynihan, Precious Way, and Jalyn Hall as Monica Reese-Dinkins.
“It was a woman who was an agent, a sports agent, a business manager, and an ex-wife. I’m sorry, that’s comedy,” she said of her role, which came to her shortly after she’d garnered acclaim and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her turn in “American Fiction.” “But then you add [producer] Tina Fey, [and showrunners] Sam Means and Robert Carlock, and what they’ve created all these years, and I’ve admired and only hoped one day to meet them, let alone work with them. I never thought about that. That’s also important. I thought that I could do a good job, that I knew this person well enough, and that she was going to be wacky enough for me to get some juice out of it.”
Alexander does an impeccable impression of the show’s lead, Morgan, who told her at a table read that he fought to bring her onto the project. “He said, ‘You know, they wanted someone else. I wanted you,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, thanks, Tracy, for speaking up for me.’ ‘No, I said, you, you. You’re like Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball. Yeah, you’ … So again, somebody who speaks well of me when I’m not there, no matter who they are, that’s the reason I’m here now.”
While she is a sitcom veteran among several seasoned comedic performers, part of the joy of working on “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” is that it brings new challenges, like being the straight man this time around. “You can figure out how to play that funny. You’ve got to figure out how that odd thing of what she wants versus dealing with all these lunatics can challenge her, and that can be funny. And also to reach beyond, say, the Maxine Shaw character that people know me as so well, and see if I could bring something else to light, and they can meet Erika Alexander sans that character.”
The show is also not shot in the traditional multicam style she was accustomed to all those years ago on “The Cosby Show” and “Living Single.” “I had not done a mockumentary, and I’ve wanted to all this time. And it’s tough. It’s not easy. And so I’m working a different muscle, and having to have trust where I usually look out for the audience to tell me, and there’s power in that for an actor to say, ‘Oh, you all think it’s funny? OK, I’m going to do this,’” she said. “The audience is the executive producers, and so you’re really working for them to put this all together like a puzzle. And that’s tough, but I’m finding out who I am in that space.”
As she prepares for Season 2, she anticipates that her character will embark on a similarly introspective journey. “Monica is getting ready to go into her maverick-ness. I do not think she was a maverick up until this point. She was too busy trying to be the wife and the mother and stand by her man and all of that. But she is getting ready to go off the chain,” said the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy contender. “She’s going past those fences. She’s got to in order to discover who she is. So yeah, this is her maverick year, and she’s going to figure out what that looks like for her. I’m actually really excited about Season 2 to get back with the crew and cast who’s so brilliant. We had such a great time.”
“Tracy promised that we’d be a family, and that’s what we were. We want to continue to do that, and build and create something that we’re all proud of and that we spend time away from our families, but we know we can account well for our time,” said Alexander. Looking toward the future, “I’d like to see that I can start to settle into what it is to do a mockumentary and discover more things for Monica to do, whether it’s subtle and/or implicit, explicit, because I don’t think that they’ve used my physical comedy yet. I’ve said comedy’s a full contact sport, so I want to get in there and mix it up.”
“The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” Season 1 is now streaming on Peacock.
