Posted By richards on September 20, 2014
A ritual dance performed during fall TV seasons of yore involved parsing the new dramas and comedies for any examples of diversity in casting or, more often, noting the profound lack of it then expressing predictable outrage at the networks shortcomings in that area.
Press releases would go out from watchdog groups representing minorities asking why census numbers never seemed to translate to pilot season; the networks would officially share that concern, offering whatever response they had come up with this time around - including token casting of minorities in auxiliary best friend, junior partner and precinct captain roles, sometimes even offering a minority president of the United States as a fantasy before that became a reality.
Over the past couple of years, the industry got distracted by the much bigger and more dire story of televisions future as a business model how would it be watched, by whom, on what devices, with ratings success or failure measured by what sort of new metrics?
In this chaos, while no one was rattling the networks cages, a beautiful thing happened: For the first time in recent memory, theres a noticeable breakthrough in the characters and cultures that make up this falls schedule. While they are not nearly as diverse as the households that might tune in, some of the new shows have a remarkably casual and more entertaining approach to the self-conscious burden that comes with telling minority stories. From a critical standpoint, these shows are doing a better job by choosing what one might call a post-racial approach.
ABCs new comedy Black-ish, premiering Wednesday night after the sixth-season return of Modern Family, will get the most scrutiny from viewers who are curious about its comedic take on the lives of a well-off African-American family. Premise-wise, Black-ish is somewhat thin: Co-creator/producer Anthony Anderson stars as Andre, a successful advertising executive married to a pediatric surgeon (Tracee Ellis Ross); Andre worries that his children are growing up in a bubble of whiteness and forgetting their culture and heritage.
As he tries to steer his brood toward heritage awareness (throwing his 13-year-old son a bro mitzvah instead of the bar mitzvah the lad longs for), Andre is mocked by his wife and his father (Laurence Fishburne) for leaning toward stereotype rather than recognizing how the world has moved on. Black-ish succeeds as a simple comedy in which the writers, performers and the viewer are asked to notice race by not noticing it. (Instead, class and wealth seem to be the bigger issues.)
The show has so much less to do with race than it does culture and identity and family, co-creator and writer Kenya Barris told reporters in July during the summer TV press tour. (Race) is honestly something were not running from, obviously, by our title, which we stick behind really fervently.
But Black-ish, Barris said, is about life inside a quote-unquote post-Obama society where race (and) culture are talked about less than ever before. ... My kids are living in such a homogenized world where there really isnt a white or black kid within them. ... Weve all taken a little bit of -ish from each of us, and we blend it into who we are today as a people.
-Ish is an increasingly useful concept in scripted television, which, as a venue for make-believe, will never do a perfect job of reflecting society as it is. A little-ish goes a long way in a TV show about anyone, minority or otherwise. Example: The Goldbergs, a ratings success for ABC, is clearly about a Jewish family, whove apparently never once made reference to being Jewish. This has the broadening effect of making them Jewish-ish. Likewise, Modern Family found huge success by -ishing its gay characters just enough that they became welcome guests in the homes of viewers who previously seemed allergic to stories of gay male couples.
By letting -ish work its slight magic, ABC more effortlessly scheduled back-to-back dramas on Thursday from hitmaker Shonda Rhimes that each star a strong black female character starting with Scandal, which will now accompany How to Get Away With Murder. The new drama stars Oscar-nominated actress Viola Davis, who told reporters and critics that she took the TV job because much of the film work she was being offered felt marginalized. It was as if, she said, I (had) been invited to a really fabulous party, only to hold up the wall.
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Fall TV Season Ushers In More Nuanced Portrayals of Race
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