Jas Waters, writer for American drama ‘This is Us’ and Jim Carrey’s comedy show ‘Kidding’, has passed away aged 39 in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Also known by the nickname ‘JasFly’, Waters was well-known as a screenwriter, an author, and a journalist.
The official Twitter account of the writing team of ‘This Is Us’, going by the name ‘ThisIsUsWriters’, announced her death in a tweet without giving the cause of death: “The entire ThisIsUs family was devastated to learn of Jas Waters passing. In our time together, Jas left her mark on us and ALL over the show. She was a brilliant storyteller and a force of nature. We send our deepest sympathies to her loved ones. She was one of us. RIP JasFly.”
Waters was also the writing brain of the 2019 film What Men Want. She Alongside This is Us and Kidding, she also wrote for Hood Adjacent and The Breaks. Despite usually being a person behind the scenes, she starred in the VH1’s reality show ‘The Gossip Game’ as ‘JasFly’ in 2013, which followed the lives of several media professionals.
In an interview with Shadow and Act last year, Jas Waters opened up about what it means to be working as a black woman in the world of the entertainment industry, “We as people of color want to see ourselves; we deserve to see ourselves,” she said. “So the fight first is to see ourselves — and that is a very rightful fight — but it’s a fight that I also fight. The shows that I create from now until the foreseeable future will probably feature people of color first because I’m itching to tell our story. But that does not mean that you don’t have people of color working in the field, who are doing great work still telling the stories that are being told.”
Following the announcement of her death, several co-workers of Waters took to Twitter to mourn her untimely demise.