TELEVISION in CRISIS
in late june, it was reported that Hulu would remove an episode of Golden Girls from its service. It was the latest in a growing list of sitcoms, including Community, Scrubs, and 30
Rock, that in recent weeks have had blackface scenes scrubbed from digital archives. But Golden Girls was a particularly instructive check of the industry temperature. In the pulled episode, “Mixed Blessings,” Rose and Blanche do at-home facials, only to be horrified when Black guests come over while their faces are covered in mud masks. The story was a commentary about white anxiety around race. And now, in a twist fit for an episode of television, streaming executives had decided to erase it because of their own anxieties around race.
Like every corner of American society, the TV industry is rushing to rewrite history. Also in June, two white actors, Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell, put out statements saying they would no longer voice their Black animated characters. The reality show Vanderpump Rules fired two of its biggest stars owing to stories of racist behavior, while The Bachelor announced it had cast its first Black Bachelor ever. New rules have suddenly been adopted, with a zeal for zero-tolerance policies, but the changes can also feel cosmetic. In a 2015 interview with NPR, Bachelor host Chris Harrison summed up his philosophy on the show’s diversity: that it could
be bad economics to have a Black protagonist. “Television is a business, like anything else,” Harrison said. “We can’t just say, ‘We’re changing the world’ … What happens when our show is off in six months, and you’re not watching it anymore, and now hundreds if not thousands of people are out of a job?”
Thousands of people are currently out of a job, but not for the reason Harrison imagined. Productions ground to a halt this spring because of the world-stopping pandemic. In a few weeks’ time, the era of television known as Peak TV, which has been defined by its water hose of content, will slow to a trickle. You might say the television industry is in the midst of an existential crisis—paralyzed, panicked, more uncertain of its future than ever. What it will look like when it returns, after months of producing shows within the constraints of social distancing, is anyone’s guess. Which is why a distinctive new series like Michaela Coel’s
I May Destroy You feels like a lifeline, arriving in the middle of a critical juncture in history. To make it, Coel triumphed over an industry that sought to capitalize on the talent of Black creators like herself without empowering them. The result is an inventive work of autofiction, guided by intense self-reflection. Coel went through her own crisis and found her way to the other side, and then turned her map of survival into electrifying television.