A lot of today’s best shows just happen to have black casts
African-American shows among today’s most compelling offerings
This isn’t an article about diversity on TV. It’s not filled with stats about how percenty per cent of shows have African-American leads, or how the amount of minorities behind the camera has jumped from This Number to That Number.
It doesn’t go on about things like proportionate representation or identity politics, as important and top of mind as those things may be — especially now that Black History Month is upon us.
Nope, it’s just an article about good TV. Television that’s timely. Television with a specific point of view, with universal appeal, that offers compelling plots and provokes emotional reactions. It just so happens that some casts are predominantly black.
Take the new wave of AfricanAmerican comedies, for example. ABC’s sitcom Black-ish and NBC’s The Carmichael Show have both aired episodes dealing with the 2016 American election and Donald Trump’s tenuous relationship with the black community.
Black-ish’s postelection episode, Lemons, showed each member of the Johnson family mourning Hillary Clinton’s loss in their own way. But a boardroom scene in which patriarch Dre (Anthony Anderson), discusses Trump’s win with his colleagues stands out.
In a back-and-forth voicing of almost every argument people around the country have had, hashing and rehashing why Trump won and what could happen next, it cast each character as a segment of the population.
We heard from the black voter, the hardcore Democrat, the Trump supporter disillusioned by the Democratic Party. It opened a dialogue and — after Dre’s impassioned speech about the history of blacks in America — offered hope.
It is, after all, a comedy show and can’t leave the audience depressed.
Now in its third season, Blackish has consistently delivered accessible yet ambitious material, doling out episodes on the N-word, religion, economic privilege, being biracial and the dark side of the Internet, among other things.
Focused on an upper-class black family, it hints at The Cosby Show, and critics have taken notice. Created by Kenya Barris, and with The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore as an executive producer, it has netted star Tracee Ellis Ross a Golden Globe Award and earned several Emmy and Globe nominations.
The Carmichael Show has also aimed for timely, sharp material. Since it debuted in 2015, critics may as well have described it as Norman Lear-eque, Norman Lear-y and Norman Lear-icious, referencing the producer known for socially conscious shows like The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Sanford and Son.
Based on the comedy of Jerrod Carmichael, it uses family discussions to explore subjects like porn addiction, the prison system, gender roles and, yup, Donald Trump. In the Trump episode, aired mid-campaign, dad Joe (David Alan Grier), decided to vote for The Donald after meeting him, much to the dismay of future daughter-in-law Maxine (Amber Stevens West).
Over on FX, Donald Glover’s dramatic comedy Atlanta has earned two Golden Globe Awards for its take on the modern black experience, with a surreal and subversive depiction of two cousins trying to make a name for themselves in the Atlanta rap scene — and it’s only wrapped Season 1.
Of course, as How to Get Away With Murder star Viola Davis said while accepting her Emmy for best dramatic actress in 2015, “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”
Likewise shows like Black-ish, The Carmichael Show and Atlanta are only made possible because of the work previous comedies have done to bring the black experience to the mainstream.
Compare the cousins trying to better their situation in Atlanta to the students earning degrees on A Different World in the ’80s and ’90s. Or the sketch-comedy offered by dearly departed Key & Peele to the groundbreaking work of In Living Color in the 1990s.
Or the 2000s series Girlfriends, about black women living single, to, well, the ’90s sitcom Living Single, about a group of black girlfriends. Even The Boondocks, which ran from 2005 to 2014, can trace its animated roots to Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, if not its acerbic tone.
For their part, African-American family sitcoms have a rich history of shows to build on: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show, Good Times, Julia, Everybody Hates Chris, The Bernie Mac Show and many more. It’s paying off. Literally. As viewers have more ways to consume shows, including niche networks and online streaming services, the potential viewing audience for each series is smaller and advertisers can target specific groups — black urbanites, white suburbanites, MMA enthusiasts, bottle-cap collectors or any other population.
Plus, advertisers are ever on the hunt for 18- to 24-year-olds, and that group craves authentic diversity — racial, religious, sexual — in their programing, as well as everything else in their lives.
Oops. There’s the D-word: diversity.
Good TV is good TV, but money talks. And as long as advertisers and company accountants can see the benefit in reflecting the changing population, there’ll be more and more programming aimed toward it. Maybe those stats about how percenty per cent of shows have African-American leads aren’t so bad after all.