page_title: Melanie Barnett
section_title: Response to Melanie
hierarchical_section_title: Melanie Barnett / Critical reception / Response to Melanie
caption_attribution_description: English: American actress Tia Mowry discussing her cookbook, "Whole New You: How Real Food Transforms Your Life for a Healthier More Gorgeous You" on Sidewalks TV show.
context_page_description: Melanie Barnett-Davis is a fictional character, portrayed by actress Tia Mowry, who appears in the American sitcom The Game, which aired on the CW Television Network and BET from 2006 to 2015. Introduced in a backdoor pilot on the sitcom Girlfriends as Joan Clayton's cousin, Melanie chooses to support her boyfriend Derwin Davis' career with the San Diego Sabres, a fictional National Football League team, rather than attend medical school at Johns Hopkins University. The series focuses primarily on Melanie and Derwin's complicated relationship, with her fears of his infidelity at the center of many of the episodes' storylines. Mowry left the series in 2012 upon learning that her role would be reduced as a result of co-star Pooch Hall's decision to reduce his role on The Game to appear in the crime drama series Ray Donovan. Both actors reprised their roles in the series finale, in which Melanie gives birth to twins.
  Melanie was created by producer Mara Brock Akil.
context_section_description: Melanie Barnett has been negatively received by television critics. Melanie McFarland of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer panned the character along with the show's main premise ("A woman on a professional track kicks it all aside to chase a football player"), feeling they were contradictory to the message of the parent show Girlfriends. Echoing McFarland's assessment, The San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman found Melanie's decision to be "a bleak little life lesson". When discussing the transition to BET, Britney Wilson of Clutch was critical of the deterioration of female friendships on the show, citing "the disintegration of the female identity" as signs of The Game's declining quality.
  The character's representation as a mother also received criticism. Wilson viewed negatively Melanie's decision to have an abortion in an attempt to reconcile with Derwin, and criticized the show's depiction of an abortion causing Melanie to become barren as based on "a link that is not medically solid". In her 2015 book Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood, California State University associate professor Marquita Marie Gammage felt the character was perpetuating negative images of black motherhood on television. Gammage criticized the series for showing Melanie becoming a wife "at the expanse of her career and possibility of bear[ing] her own children" and portraying her as unable to care for her stepson. She contrasted Melanie to white characters on television, writing that "white women seem to achieve it all and control their realities on their own terms."
  Mowry received positive feedback from fans, who "were fairly obsessed with Melanie and Derwin's journey early on". Fans reacted positively to the characters' relationship, and dubbed the couple the portmanteau "Merwin", which BET adopted and used to promote Mowry and Hall's appearances in the series finale. Jaime Lee of Soap Opera Network wrote that, in relating to their struggles, viewers connected with the fictional couple. A writer from HuffPost cited the pairing as a "big part of the winning formula for the series", and Mowry attributed the positive fan response to her chemistry with Hall. She said the following about the character's reception in The Washington Post:
  Through the course of playing Melanie, some people would love her, some would hate her, some would judge her[.] But I think they connected with her – they enjoyed her vulnerability, they enjoyed relating to her. ... It's refreshing to see a couple that's not perfect on television, a couple that works through trials and tribulations.
caption: Mowry (pictured in 2017) received a positive response from critics for her performance as Melanie.
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