As a little girl growing up in Houston, Anna Diop devoured rerun after rerun of a particular TV program because her mother was crazy about it. That show, Diop says now, improved her English-language facility — her family relocated from Senegal to the United States when Diop was 5 — and her mother loved its reassuringly merry depiction of the country they now called home.
She particularly loved the star of the show.
“I mean, my mother loves John Ritter,” Diop said, laughing. “‘Three’s Company’ was a huge part of our welcoming into this country. You could tell he had a kind soul. We watched it for months straight. By the time I started school, I was a lot more fluent in English than I would’ve been otherwise.”
