Do not adjust your set
TV shows are becoming more diverse, but there’s still a long way to go
Once upon a time, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Star’s weekly TV magazine griping over why Ensign Harry Kim in Star Trek: Voyager never seemed to get the girl, while his predecessors, including that spaceaged Lothario Capt. James T. Kirk, managed to hook up with every green-hued alien imaginable.
Asian men on television have been portrayed as hopeless geeks, Chinese food delivery boys or swordwielding Triad gangsters, but they have rarely been the hero. And they certainly weren’t portrayed as ordinary men with any sort of sexuality.
Of course, there was the time that George Takei as Sulu in Star Trek groped Uhura. But then, he was momentarily insane. Because according to the old rules of television, you had to be out of your mind to show an interracial relationship. But an interspecies coupling? No problem.
In later episodes Harry Kim did find love, most memorably with a holographic character, the futuristic equivalent of a blow-up doll.
That was then. Today, we’ve reached something of a tipping point where you have The Walking Dead’s Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) in a relationship with Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan) and nobody cares. That’s exactly the way it should be, though it remains a rarity on television. When Viola Davis won the Emmy Award in September for outstanding lead actress in a drama series, she became, astonishingly, the first black woman to do so in the 66-year history of the awards.
She was joined by Regina King (out- standing supporting actress in a limited series or movie, for American Crime) and Uzo Aduba (outstanding supporting actress in a drama series, for Orange Is the New Black) on a historic Emmy night.
After years of complaint about a lack of diversity in television, there are finally signs of change, even if mostly symbolic. Because symbols count. This was particularly weighty, because this year’s Academy Awards were criticized for having an all-white roster of actors competing for the 20 acting nominations. As host Neil Patrick Harris quipped: “Tonight we honour Hollywood’s best and whitest.”
It’s not a new notion that Hollywood has failed to produce stories that have been truly reflective of race, gender and sexual orientation. Or as a 2015 report on diversity by UCLA puts it: “White males have dominated the plum positions in front of and behind the camera, thereby marginalizing women and minorities in the creative process by which a nation circulates popular stories about itself.”
Executives are realizing, belatedly, that it makes good business sense to produce shows that reflect the communities they live in. When NBC was beaten in the fall sweeps by broadcaster Univision last year, making the Spanish-language broadcaster the fourth most watched network after FOX, it was a wake-up call. Minorities, it seemed, were firmly in the mainstream.
And it’s no surprise the stakeholders that are most visible feel the weight of that responsibility. “It’s really such a great time to have these kinds of diverse voices on television,” Randall Park, the star of Fresh off the Boat, told the Star.
Park played, somewhat infamously, Korean leader Kim Jong Un in The Interview, a film that sparked a cyberattack against Sony Pictures by North Korea. Now he is more famous for playing the clueless but well-meaning dad on ABC’s Fresh off the Boat.
As an Asian-American studies major in graduate school, Park says he understood the importance of seeing his own reality reflected in media.
“It was a huge weight for me going into this,” says Park.
“I really felt that was an opportunity for us to break down some barriers and to get a broad audience to feel familiar with a family that they never before had a chance to be familiar with.”
At the forefront of the change are executives such as ABC’s Paul Lee who have been churning out diverse programming at a furious pace, including Fresh off the Boat, Black-ish, Dr. Ken and (the now cancelled) Cristela.
Other networks have raced to catch up. The CW has the well-received comedy Jane the Virgin. Fox has the hip-hop drama Empire, which turned out to be a ratings blockbust- er and perhaps the best Harvard Business School case study for diversity.
As for LGBT representation, you only had to look to shows such as Amazon’s Transparent, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and E!’s I Am Cait. And in Canada, you have OMNI’s Blood and Water, the first drama by the broadcaster produced in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.
The changes are being noticed. At her Markham dry-cleaning store, owner Reetu Dharamshi, 54, is typically watching multicultural shows in the lull between customers. And she is encouraged by the current crop of fall shows, particularly ABC’s Montreal-shot Quantico, which stars Indian celebrity and former Miss World Priyanka Chopra in the lead as an FBI trainee.
“I think it’s great that they are putting a woman from India as the star,” says Dharamshi. “They could have put any star in that show, but I think it really makes the show different and real at the same time.”
But there also needs to be more people behind the cameras greenlighting shows that are culturally relevant.
According to the UCLA study, because of the high failure rate of TV and film, risk-averse stakeholders surround themselves with likeminded individuals who, not surprisingly, look like them.
It’s a systemic issue that “will not simply fix itself in the normal course of doing business,” but will take the input of stakeholders from the individual to the institutional to make a change, says the study.
Pearlena Igbokwe, NBC’s head of drama, isn’t banking on goodwill. She says she tells her development team to present her with a minimum number of scripts from diverse writers that they can get into production. “You can’t wish it, you have to invest in it,” she says.