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Are This Season’s Diverse Shows Ushering in a New Era of Multicultural Television?
"In the first episode of ABC’s
Fresh Off the Boat,
a new fish-out-of-water sitcom about a Taiwanese-American family that
moves from DC to suburban Orlando, patriarch Louis Huang (Randall Park)
floats the idea of hiring a white greeter for the steakhouse he owns so
white people will feel comfortable when they walk in and spot a familiar
face. It’s a clueless, optimistic line that is played for laughs, and
Park’s delivery is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also a line that works on
multiple levels, because it speaks volumes about the current television
landscape and its irritating approach to diversity: Networks cater to
white audiences by always promoting white faces — or trying to
universalize the nonwhite narratives that they do have in an attempt at
mass appeal — rather than taking chances on stories whose characters
don’t superficially resemble the majority of their viewers.
Fresh Off the Boat is the first Asian-American sitcom in
20 years, since Margaret Cho’s
All-American Girl,
which ran for just one season (also on ABC) in 1994. The show is doing
great in terms of both ratings (Episode 5, which aired February 17, had more viewers than
Parks and Recreation and
New Girl combined) and critical response — as are the other diverse freshman programs airing on major networks this season: ABC’s clever sitcoms
Black-ish and
Cristela, Fox’s infectious musical drama
Empire, and The CW’s telenovela-inspired
Jane the Virgin, which earned lead actress
Gina Rodriguez a Golden Globe award.
With the overwhelming success of these new programs centered on
nonwhite characters, it’s easy to wonder: Why didn’t this happen sooner?
The answer is as simple to state as it is complicated to explain:
Minority narratives have a hard time making it to network television and
an even harder time staying there.
What makes this even more frustrating is that once these programs
manage to get on the air, they tend to do very well in ratings and among
critics but face extra challenges in achieving longevity. The networks’
loyalty to these programs is always in question, because history has
shown executives aren’t fully committed to diverse shows for their own
sake, instead relying on them for quick monetary gain or a temporary
influx of viewers. And this is especially disappointing in light of
fans’ love for these shows — just take a quick glance at your Twitter
timeline during Shonda Rhimes’ Thursday takeover (
Scandal and
How to Get Away With Murder are inescapable) or when
Empire airs on Wednesday, blowing up the trending topics before the episode even begins. There is even an ongoing joke, largely on Black Twitter, about how
Black-ish and
Empire are on at the same time, forcing us to choose.
Outside of audience enthusiasm, these shows are flourishing in terms of sheer popularity.
Fresh Off the Boat‘s ratings increased 12 percent between Episodes 4 and 5 (and did especially well with teenagers).
Empire’s ratings have increased with every episode since its premiere, for eight straight weeks, breaking Nielsen (and DVR) records.
Cristela
has been praised by critics and performs solidly in the Friday-night
death slot (where it’s paired with conservative Tim Allen comedy
Last Man Standing; the shows will even air a crossover episode this season).
Black-ish not only debuted to great ratings but has also managed to hold its own in the coveted post-
Modern Family time slot — a feat that is even more impressive when you note the vast number of shows that
haven’t survived there:
Mixology,
How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life),
Super Fun Night, and
Mr. Sunshine were all canceled within one season;
Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 got axed after the two, finishing its second season on Hulu; and
Cougar Town eventually switched to TBS. These shows were, like most network series, largely white.
Some critics, culture writers, and network executives seem baffled by these new, diverse shows’ – and particularly ratings juggernaut
Empire’s
— success: Who knew that they would perform so well? Who knew that
white viewers would occasionally watch and enjoy programs with diverse
casts? Who knew that minority audiences seek out minority narratives?
This season it became painfully clear that there is a severe
disconnect between — largely white — TV executives and us minority
audiences. The fact that there is surprise about
Empire or
Black-ish’s success is almost offensive;
of course
these are shows that we wanted and shows that we will watch — we just
never had them before. The thirst for representation is so strong that
often we will latch on to any program that promotes diversity, even if
it’s not that great;
Shonda Rhimes’ first show,
Grey’s Anatomy, has lost its shine, but fans continue to tune in
to the current, 11th season to see black, Latino, and Asian medical
professionals portrayed on screen. We just happened to luck out in that
the shows being touted this season are actually good.
Naturally, there’s been a lot of praise for the diversity of this
season’s TV narratives — even if that praise fails to take into account
what a small percentage of programming these shows actually comprise.
But this isn’t the first time a “boom” in diversity has occurred on
television. Robin R. Means Coleman, an associate professor and the
author of
African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy,
is quick to dismiss the notion that this is a groundbreaking year for
minority-focused narratives, explaining that representation on TV is
follows a cyclical pattern. “About every 20 years, there is a surge in
representations of blacks on television,” Coleman says. “In the ‘70s,
there was a particular surge of blacks and black situation comedies:
everything from
Good Times and
The Jeffersons and
Sanford and Son — those kind of representations were being offered up.”
“In the ‘80s, you see a bit of an ebb in representations,” she
continues. But “then they come back with significant quantity — not
always quality — in the ‘90s and that’s what really sparked UPN and WB.
You’ve got just dozens of black situation comedies that are being
offered up in the ‘90s. The upstart networks are offering up these shows
that are really inexpensive and hailing to specific audiences.”
Coleman is referring to all of the television shows of my childhood —
I spent so much of the ‘90s glued to UPN that I feel a pang when she
first mentions the network. There was
In the House (1996-1999),
rescued from NBC after the ’95 season, a sitcom starring LL Cool J (LL
Cool J!) as a former football player who rents out his house to a
divorced mother and her children;
Malcolm and Eddie (1996-2000), an
Odd Couple-like sitcom starring Malcolm-Jamal Warner from
The Cosby Show and Eddie Griffin;
Homeboys in Outer Space (1996-1997), which was a black parody of
Star Trek;
Goode Behavior (1996-1997), a comedy where the main draw was star Sherman Hemsley from
The Jeffersons; and, of course,
Moesha
(1996-2001), which starred R&B singer Brandy and became the
network’s biggest success, effectively launching a string of black
sitcoms. The show’s impact is chronicled in Susanne Daniels and Cynthia
Littleton’s exhaustive 2007 book
Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise & Fall of the WB and UPN:
Once Moesha hit in early 1996, UPN went headlong
into the urban-ethnic comedy business. The network that bulled itself
as “dramatically different” in its first full season, in 1995-96, with
no half-hours on its three-night schedule, wound up stacking its 1996-97
season lineup with six urban-skewing comedy series, four on Monday and
two on Tuesday. They were in the Moesha vein, meaning that they were built around personalities who rated highly with African American viewers.
Despite
Moesha’s popularity with viewers, UPN was met with
controversy at the Television Critics Association in 1996, with critics
wondering if the network was actively trying to appeal to an urban
audience (implying that it shouldn’t) and using terms like “ghettoizing”
in reference to its new schedule. What these detractors failed to
realize was how important those shows were to minority viewers. (They
attracted white audiences as well; Coleman tells me that one of the
specific audiences these shows were created to reach was “particularly
[white] young men” who are interested in “comedies that had some
connection to hip-hop culture —
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for example.”) In fact, because I mostly watched UPN, WB (
The Jamie Foxx Show,
The Parent ‘Hood,
Smart Guy, and
Sister Sister, which had moved over from ABC), and Nickelodeon (
My Brother and Me,
Kenan & Kel) as a child, I was spoiled in the sense that I wasn’t fully aware that minorities were, well, also a minority on television.
Then, in the late ’90s, the tide of diverse television began to ebb
again. Coleman explains that the shortage in minority narratives became
“dire to the point that the NAACP, in ’99, launched a boycott against
the big four networks [ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox] saying there’s a
significantly poor representation [of minorities] both in front of and
behind the camera.” By the early ‘00s, I was becoming more and more
aware of how little I was seeing myself represented on television.
When the 2014-15 television season began, it was easy to characterize
this as some groundbreaking year in which networks were finally coming
to their senses about diverse programming. (This, despite the fact that
the results of this so-called boom still seem slight when compared to
the dozens of diverse shows that existed in the ‘90s, even though there
were so many fewer original programs 20 years ago. The Wrap’s recent
article, “
Black Is the New Black,” oddly cites two shows about white families —
The Goldbergs and
The McCarthys
— as examples of TV’s new diversity, perhaps because the author ran out
of ideas.) In reality, these shows more likely represent the beginning
of a new cycle to correct the lack of diversity that has plagued
networks in recent years: It’s been 19 years since UPN launched
Moesha, after all.
The existence of this cycle is what makes it difficult to muster
unreserved enthusiasm for TV’s new gestures towards diversity. The
abundance of African-American comedies in the ‘90s had less to do with
networks actively pursuing representation out of good faith than with
networks in a slump desperately seeking shows that were cheap and
guaranteed an audience. But, as Coleman explains, “Once [networks] get
back on sure grounds, they abandon that kind of programming. That’s
exactly what Fox, UPN, and WB did… Once they got their audience, they
moved into, and funneled that money into, other programs —
90210,
Dawson’s Creek, and those sort of things — and they built their network up for that.”
“There’s interesting analogies in all sorts of labor structures in
the history of America about how things are built on the backs of
blacks,” Coleman tells me, “and the television industry isn’t very
different.” Networks are always concerned with money above all, and will
use these minority narratives to get there. They
aren’t
actively concerned with gaining or maintaining any specific minority
audience, as long as they’re able to draw a sizable audience of any
variety. What will happen in, say, 2020, when networks have decided that
they no longer need
Black-ish or
Empire? Will those shows even last that long?
This year’s new shows do have one advantage over their predecessors:
their writers and producers can look to similar series from the last
cycle to learn what it takes to succeed — and what to avoid so you don’t
fail.
Margaret Cho’s
All-American Girl was a notorious disaster
and now serves as a master class on how not to make a minority-focused
sitcom. Despite promoting it as a sitcom based on Cho’s stand-up, ABC
effectively erased all of her comedy — and all of her uniqueness and
ethnic specificity, instead creating a series that relied solely on
stereotypes (the mother character was a typical “tiger mom” who tried to
force her daughter to date successful Koreans), overdone and unoriginal
sitcom plots (familial spats, dating woes), and uninspired parodies (of
The Real World and
Pulp Fiction). Amazingly, despite
being a show about a Korean family, the cast only featured one Korean:
Cho herself. Plagued with network notes, devastating criticism, and an
immense amount of pressure to represent Asian Americans, Cho spiraled
into depression, anorexia, and drug addiction, as detailed in her memoir
I’m the One That I Want. All-American Girl
was supposed to be groundbreaking, but instead proved that
minority-centric shows need to be more nuanced and more careful than the
average series, and find the proper balance between specific and
universal storytelling.
Fresh Off the Boat has already succeeded on all of these counts.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,
which aired on NBC from 1990 through 1996. Starring Will Smith as a
fictionalized version of himself, the show ran for six successful
seasons and still lives on in syndication. The show was a diverse hit
(though it must be mentioned that it was created by a white duo: Andy
and Susan Borowitz) and appealed to all audiences: black and white,
young and old.
Fresh Prince did a number of things right: It balanced universal appeal and black-specific plots (as
Black-ish is pulling off), it included a range of black characters rather than pigeonholing them (similar to
Jane the Virgin,
which incorporates a variety of Latino characters who don’t fit
stereotypes), and it aired a crossover episode with the white hit
Blossom (like
Cristela crossed over with
Last Man Standing).
But the key was to base the show around a big-name rapper who already
had legions of fans:
Will Smith. As Coleman observed, young, white
audiences are interested in hip-hop culture:
Empire is a hip-hop drama with multiple musical interludes (and rumors of an upcoming tour),
Black-ish uses hip-hop cues better than any other show on television, and
Fresh Off the Boat centers on a young Asian boy (Hudson Yang) who is heavily influenced by hip-hop, identifying with the genre’s outsider point of view and favoring Public Enemy and Notorious B.I.G. T-shirts.
Though
All-American Girl and
Fresh Prince are
virtually opposites (in terms of content, reception, and popularity),
they both helped to inform the diverse shows that are currently on air.
Fresh Prince showed how successful a program can be with a diverse cast as long as the target audience is clear, while
All-American Girl, which was ordered when ABC was freely handing out deals to comedians, shows that it might be harder to
keep a program on air than it is to get it there.
But it’s not just a matter of finding an audience. There’s also the
substantial pressure put on diverse shows to be practically perfect.
Sure, viewers and critics alike heavily scrutinize all new TV programs,
but there is an additional burden on these programs in particular. There
are so few minority images on television that all eyes are going to be
fixed on any new ones that pop up — Asian Americans lined up to watch
All-American Girl, but because the portrayal of Koreans was more stereotypical than original or refreshing, many of them changed the channel.
Fresh Off the Boat has received a substantially warmer welcome from the Asian-American community.
Eric Haywood, a writer on Fox’s
Empire, expands on this,
telling me that while this pressure doesn’t determine what happens in
the writers’ room, there is still “this underlying awareness that once
this show gets on the air, it’s going to have to perform pretty
extraordinarily well in order for it to be given the same consideration,
as far as
staying on the air, as a lot of the mainstream
shows.” This is a sentiment I heard echoed by several creators of
diverse TV series, who felt burdened with the tasks of both representing
an entire group
and providing a narrative that is exciting
enough to compete with highly rated white programs. It’s an idea that
reminds me of the more general sense among people of color that we have
to perform extraordinarily just to be considered mediocre.
This theme is articulated elegantly in the Season 3 premiere of
Scandal,
when Olivia Pope (
Kerry Washington) is being lectured by her father,
Rowan (Joe Morton), and he reminds her of an important mantra:
Rowan: Did I not raise you for better? How many times have I told you? You have to be
what?
Olivia: Twice as good.
Rowan: Twice as good as them to get half of what they have.
This is the sort of pressure creators who are people of color, and who write programs about people of color, feel.
Black-ish has to be twice as good as
Modern Family in order to be mentioned in the same conversation; I can’t even do the math to figure out how good
Black-ish
has to be to win the Emmy over its white peers. It’s why these shows
have to work harder, and it’s why viewers, to a certain extent, have our
own responsibilities to them. We have to first show that there is a
demand for these programs, then
continue to demand that more exist, and then, finally, demand that each one is better than the last.
Empire’s Haywood is invested in this process as both a content creator (he’s also written for
Private Practice and
Soul Food) and a voracious consumer (fans should follow his Twitter account,
where he regularly provides smart and funny insights on the TV he’s
watching) — meaning that he wants success not only for the shows he
works on but for other shows that promote minority representation. “I
look at the ratings for
Black-ish every single week because I
love the show, and I want it to do well,” he says. “I don’t want ABC to
have any excuse for not getting behind it 100 percent. I think if I
wasn’t writing for
Empire right now, I would have the exact same concern [for
Empire].”
Eddie Huang, a producer for
Fresh Off the Boat who also penned the memoir
it was based on and provides the voice-over as an older version of the
show’s Eddie, has been vocal about his experiences getting the show from
paper to screen, the conflicts he’s had with the higher-ups, and his
opinion of the finished product. Before his show premiered, we chatted
about the importance of increasing representation on television and why
we all need to put in effort to make sure these shows exist and survive.
He told me, “At the end of the day, if our communities — communities of
color, differences, sexual orientation, even just difference of thought
— if we can develop market power, if we can somehow aggregate our
voices and opinions, mobilize, and get people to support things
monetarily, then we become more important. We are able to then
participate or hedge against dominant culture.”
The question then becomes: How do we develop that market power if
networks are still overly reliant on the dominant, white culture?
Networks still have to sell shows that are specifically developed and
catered to minority audiences — or, as Huang puts it, “what’s left over
from people who watch
The Big Bang Theory” — to a white
audience for fear that they won’t last otherwise. It’s why networks tend
to interfere heavily to ensure that these shows are still appealing to
white viewers. It’s what we witnessed with
All-American Girl,
when ABC ignored the themes of Cho’s standup and focused more on the
“American” generalizations (hey, they’re right there in the title!) than
the Korean specifics. It’s why
Fresh Off the Boat may sometimes feel unbalanced and why
Black-ish repeatedly switches between trope-heavy family sitcom stories and smaller, black-centric shows; in my weekly coverage of the comedy,
there is always a discussion of whether the series is playing the race
card too often or too rarely. It’s a damned if you do/damned if you
don’t situation for all of these shows.
When I ask Haywood if he worries about whether white audiences will
embrace the shows he works on, he says that although he personally
doesn’t, he believes that networks do. “[Networks] simultaneously want a
show that feels different, but they don’t want it to be so different
that it alienates the white audience,” he says. “And I’m certain that
[with] predominately white shows, network executives are not concerned
about making sure that their shows incorporate huge numbers of black,
Latino, or Asian people. Whether it’s TV, music, or movies, there’s
always this undercurrent — or not even an undercurrent; sometimes it’s
very expressly slated: We want to make sure this has broad appeal.
That’s basically coded language for, ‘We want to make sure that white
people will watch.’ If white people don’t watch, for some reason, it is
considered not quite as legitimate…. And that can get a little bit
frustrating.”
This is a fairly universal struggle among creatives of color, not
only in television but also when it comes to diversity in movies, books, and other forms of popular art. It’s an endless internal struggle between telling the story you
want to tell and telling the story that you
need
to tell in order for the result to be deemed “successful” — and, as an
added slap, to have that “success” determined solely by white audiences.
One solution Eddie Huang suggests is to get those viewers early in the
first season and bulk up the ratings so the show will be renewed, and
then allow the writers freedom to provide more nuance in the second
season. “I hope this show does well,” he says of
Fresh Off the Boat, “but I hope that in Season 2, fans hold it even more responsible to the book or to this specific [Asian-American] experience.”
This leads to yet another question: If shows like
Fresh Off the Boat
are attempting a Trojan Horse approach to storytelling — emphasizing
universal, relatable stories in Season 1 before getting specific in
Season 2 — how do we ensure that they actually get to that second
season? One solution for those who crave diverse television is,
obviously, to watch them (Huang suggests putting on
Fresh Off the Boat, Cristela, and
Black-ish,
or at least DVR-ing them and letting them play through, even if you
don’t particularly like them). But the unfortunate truth is that no show
is guaranteed immunity from cancellation, so maybe a second strategy
for beating the dominant culture is to just go all-in in that first
season and hope something sticks.
The CW’s
Jane the Virgin, for example, a comedy-drama about
an accidentally-artificially-inseminated virgin that transcended its
silly premise within the first episode, balances its telenovela
sensibilities (secret affairs, murder, a big bad) with a surprising and
well-written plot about immigration reform. This aspect of the show was
hinted at earlier in the season but came to the forefront in the tenth episode,
in which Jane’s grandmother Alba (Ivonne Coll) is hospitalized and then
threatened with deportation when her undocumented status is found out.
Jane the Virgin
regularly uses voice-over and on-screen text to add to and comment on
its plot, and this episode is no different. Viewers read the words, “Yes, this really happens. Look it up. #ImmigrationReform.”
Not only does this illustrate how some diverse shows are seemingly
going for broke by saying what they need to say while they have the
opportunity, but it also proves
why we need these sort of
shows: Where else on TV are we going to find a careful, honest, and
accurate depiction of the problems that immigrants face?
Jane the Virgin isn’t the only first-year program using this strategy:
How to Get Away With Murder,
part of Rhimes’ Shondaland family, is tackling the intricacies and
complexities of black women’s lives, with highlights ranging from the
moment when Annalise (Viola Davis) bared her natural hair to the complicated and fraught relationship between black women and our mothers. Meanwhile,
Fresh off the Boat tackled the slur “chink” in its very first episode,
Empire is going hard on the topic of homophobia in hip-hop, and
Black-ish explores what it means to be black, privileged, and unaware of society’s racism.
These are the stories that you can’t find in the average CBS sitcom or
NBC drama, whether they feature token nonwhite characters or not.
Though these new shows are currently thriving, their collective future may not be as bright as it seems.
Empire,
Jane the Virgin, and
How to Get Away With Murder
have been renewed for a second season, but the others haven’t yet. And
while I am optimistic that the other diverse freshman programs will
return next year, it’s hard to hold on to that optimism when thinking
further into the future. If we are, as both Robin R. Means Coleman and I
suspect, just in the midst of another “diversity boom,” then it’s only a
matter of time before networks cast these projects aside and go back to
the white model that they’re used to.
There’s a more promising way of looking at the situation, too,
though: The particular programs that debuted this year don’t necessarily
fit the model of previous booms.
Black-ish,
Cristela, and
Fresh Off the Boat aren’t lazy, disposable sitcoms (and only
Cristela
is multi-camera); they’re comedies that have a deeper, underlying aim
to explore minority identities. It’s also notable that some of these
newer shows are dramas, because for a long time it seemed blacks could
only star in sitcoms — the racial implications of the “clown” character
are strong — or, to a lesser extent, as side characters ensemble dramas.
But perhaps it’s the creators themselves who are the most promising
part of the current “diversity boom.” They are all adamant about the
need for more representation on television and all committed to creating
more diverse narratives — even if networks don’t necessarily seek them
out (though, admirably, HBO is now actively searching for diverse
writers for its new writing fellowship). Take
The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl creator Issa Rae’s Color Creative TV initiative, which “aims
to increase opportunities for women and minority TV writers to showcase
and sell their work, both inside and outside the existing studio system.”
It’s a DIY, admirable, and hands-on response that does not exist within
the networks’ diversity boom but as a separate entity entirely — as if
to say, “If networks won’t give us a chance, we’ll force them to.”
These creators aren’t just idealistic crusaders, though – they’re
smart and self-aware, too. They have deep knowledge of how the
television business works and know what they can do to combat and,
hopefully, stealthily beat the system.
Fresh Off the Boat’s
Eddie Huang is characteristically candid about his emphasis on the
bigger picture of representation on network television, which he sees as
more valuable than making a niche, personal show on a cable network: “I
can go make the work of art and no one will watch it and it will be
canceled within a year,” he says. “And yeah, I intellectually
masturbated, but what did I actually change? I’m actually trying to
create change.”
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