PUTTING IT ALL DOWN IN BLACK AND WHITE
TV is more diverse than ever, and the prime-time shows leading the way prove whole races can’t be pigeonholed
The recent TV diversity revolution, in which several of the US broadcast networks’ best new shows featured minority lead characters, was long overdue. It was also just in time. With racial controversies, especially those involving African-Americans, increasingly making headlines over the past year, it would have been that much more glaring if there were only lily-white TV families to answer back.
The second-season premiere of black-ish demonstrated both what a terrific show that ABC family comedy has become and how lucky we are to have it. At a school talent show, Jack, the youngest son of the Johnsons, performed a dance and rap of Kanye West’s Gold Digger — and not, as his twin sister, Diane, begged him, the radio edit.
Which means that in front of a horrified crowd of parents and teachers, a smiling, innocent Jack used an epithet for an African-American, the broke variety of which the song’s subject ain’t messing with. (Yes, I am avoiding using the epithet, which risks investing it with that much more power. The black-ish episode bleeped it as well.) The incident caused a fallout worthy of South Park, as Jack was threatened with expulsion for “hate speech” for using a slur against his own race. But the true brilliance of the episode, like many black-ish episodes, is that it used the premise to demonstrate that there’s no single “black” position on the word — any more than there is among any group on any issue.
Here, the divide cut across cultural and generational lines. Jack’s mother, Rainbow, the liberal child of a racially mixed marriage, is zero-tolerance on the epithet. Andre, the family’s patriarch — well, it turns out he shared the song (his favourite) with Jack. Gen-X Andre is a believer in “reclaiming” the word “as a term of colloquialism and power”. That put him at odds with his parents, who do use it, but only, in his mother’s inimitable words, as “a judgement said with disdainful indictment”. Likewise with his daughter Zoey, who doesn’t see why her white friends shouldn’t use it.
The episode included nearly every racial angle, culminating in a hilarious workplace seminar on the various Hispanic subgroups that do and do not get a pass on using the slur. As with last season’s Crime and Punishment, a timely, post-Adrian Peterson episode about spanking, it was both broadly hilarious and impressively nuanced for a broadcast comedy.
Every bit as impressive, if very different in tone, was the opening scene of the Season 2 premiere of Fox’s Empire, involving a protest concert for a jailed Lucious Lyon. It was fiery, audaciously theatrical and symbolic (Taraji P Henson’s Cookie was lowered to the stage in the costume of a caged gorilla), and unapologetically political, building to a cry — “How much longer?” — that resonated far beyond Lucious’s case, on a show that had already acknowledged the #BlackLivesMatter protests. Taking the stage, Cookie sounds less like a soap-opera queen than an uprising’s leader, crying “It is a system that must be dismantled, piece by piece” as the camera flits across New York Police Department emblems on uniforms in the crowd.
Like everything in Empire, the messages and implications of this cry for justice were messy and challenging to untangle. (Larger issues aside, Lucious is guilty of the murder he’s imprisoned for.) But above all, it was simply an astonishing statement to open the year’s biggest new mainstream-TV hit; the first words of the episode were statistics on the rate of incarceration of black men in the United States.
And it happened only because a network realised it was good business to have a prime-time schedule that looked more like America. (In a curious coincidence, both this and the black-ish premiere commented on the CNN anchor Don Lemon’s having held up a sign bearing the epithet on the air, which he did in June after President Barack Obama used it on Marc Maron’s podcast.)
That approach from the last TV season paid off at this year’s Emmy Awards, as Viola Davis of How to Get Away With
Murder became the first African-American to win the award for best actress in a drama. It was a powerful moment. And if the TV industry is a little prematurely self-congratulatory (“Racism is over!” joked the Emmy host, Andy Samberg), it’s good that networks are conscious of casting more diversely across the schedule.
But it’s also valuable to have deep minority representation within individual shows, as necessarily happens on family comedies and dramas. Series like black-ish and Empire can pass a sort of racial version of the Bechdel Test, the feminist-criticism measure of whether a story has two female characters who talk to each other about something besides a man: having minority characters talk about race in a way that’s not always in relation to white people.
That idea is spreading, thankfully and productively. This summer, NBC took a flyer on The Carmichael Show, an African-American family sitcom whose topic-oriented episodes — on protest, gender, guns and more — recalled the get-it-all-onthe-table spirit of the Norman Lear ’70s. And with Trevor Noah behind the desk at The Daily Show, Comedy Central has a late-night line-up with two different black hosts’ perspectives: that of Noah, a 31-year-old South African, and of the 53-yearold African-American Larry Wilmore, with his ideologically unpredictable Nightly Show.
Of course, treating race well on TV is about more than casting; it requires sharp writing, calibrated performances and a commitment to saying something that matters. But as black-ish and Empire have shown, being authentic, or to quote a sometime Wilmore segment, keeping it 100 is also a matter of numbers.