What happened to Kareem in The Oval? Start with the pharmacist's side business in season one

If you only ever watched The Oval for the Franklins throwing each other over banisters, you may have lost the thread on Kareem. Fair. Kareem's storyline ran in the background of a show where the President was on cocaine and the First Lady was drugging the Second Lady.

But Kareem is the reason a lot of that background exists. So let's go back to the pharmacy.

The side business

Kareem Richardson (Matthew Law) owns a neighborhood pharmacy in D.C. with his father. He's polite, he's hardworking, he's still hung up on his ex Sharon (Teesha Renee), who works the counter. Season one lets you like him for about six episodes.

Then Sharon's new man Barry gets a tip that the pharmacy is a front and Kareem is moving product out the back. Everybody in the neighborhood apparently knew. Sharon didn't. That's the whole engine of the character: the nice guy whose nice-guy routine is a storefront.

Every soap needs a character who is quietly the supply chain. Kareem was The Oval's.

How it snowballed

Once the show establishes Kareem as a dealer, it never lets him off the hook. Over six seasons on BET:

• He runs up a debt in the neighborhood of $400,000, which is the reason Sharon ends up kidnapped.
• White House staffer Alonzo starts picking up "packages" at the counter, which is how the President's habit and Kareem's business end up on the same supply line.
• Sharon finds Barry's bloody body in Kareem's bedroom. Kareem's response is to stop her from leaving. Her response is a baseball bat.
• Kareem is pronounced dead at the scene. Sharon is arrested.
• Kareem is not dead. (This show has faked more deaths than a daytime funeral home.)
• He refuses to explain where he went, because the truth involves threats from the President himself. Hunter eventually has him pulled out of a hospital to answer for it in person.
• By season six he and his cousin Antonio are locked in a cell in the White House bunker, a plot thread even BET's own writers were describing as "unfinished" mid-season.

The season seven mess

Season six ended December 23, 2025, with the bunker unresolved. Then, on April 15, 2026, all 22 episodes of season seven appeared on Paramount+ at once, and were yanked within a week when it turned out the drop was an error tied to the BET+ merger. Viewers who'd binged ten episodes woke up to an "expired rights" message. It's the most Kareem thing to ever happen to Kareem: technically released, then made to disappear.

Season seven is where the bunker plot finally moves, and by every report it's also the last season the show gets; nobody is talking about an eighth. Whatever Kareem's final scene is, it's his final scene.

Kareem got out of the bunker. The show did not get out of cancellation. One of them saw it coming.

Where Matthew Law went

Law spent seven years as a recurring pharmacist and then pivoted hard: he's now a cop in Netflix's crime drama Nemesis, chasing Y'lan Noel across a season. Talking to TVLine about that role, he admitted it stuck to him: "I had to decompress afterwards." After seven years of being beaten, buried and bunkered on BET, that feels earned.

So what happened to Kareem

He sold drugs out of a pharmacy, got everyone he loved kidnapped or arrested, died twice on paper, spent a season in a hole under the White House, and outlasted the show that put him there. For a supporting character on a Tyler Perry soap, that's practically a knighthood.