With Oprah Winfrey in the morning and Arsenio Hall at night, we have what might seem to be bookends on a substantial shelf of black TV entertainment.
And Thursday evenings-as you watch ”The Cosby Show” and ”A Different World,” see James Earl Jones in ”Gabriel`s Fire” and Blair Underwood in
”L.A. Law”-you could be convinced that TV has come a long way from the days when its only black faces were broadly smiling servants.
You would be wrong.
You would be dead wrong even though ”The Cosby Show” is the most popular sitcom series in history, ”A Different World” is a consistent ratings winner, Jones is a formidable presence and Underwood a handsome one.
Television`s Thursday nights are not an accurate reflection of the state or presence of blacks in TV. It`s one of the medium`s typically crafty mirages, the same sort created about life and love by soap operas.
Face it: Oprah and Arsenio are bookends on a thin shelf.
I will not argue with Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil rights leader, who has called ”The Cosby Show,” ”the most positive portrayal of black family life that has ever been broadcast.”
But positive images-like suntans out of a bottle-are not always what they appear and do not always have meaningful, lasting results.
The success of ”Cosby” lies, in large part, with the fact that its star has complete control and can thereby exercise his own black sensibility. The show presents positive images, provides good humor.
Those who charge that its image is too cozy and consumer-driven fail to understand that Cosby and his program, though mildly progressive, is not intended to represent the experience of all blacks. Rather, by accurately depicting one segment of black society, Cosby is a pioneer in the latest effort to give blacks a more assertive, realistic TV presence.
There is no doubt that television-the whole country-has made some progress on the race-relations front in the last 40 years. But the steps from Ethel Waters as a maid in ”Beulah” (CBS 1950-53) to Robin Givens in ”Head of the Class” represent a relatively meager advance.
The history of blacks on TV is filled with controversy, conflict and frustration.
The first all-black cast appeared in 1951`s ”Amos `n` Andy,” a show that caused outrage from many who said it presented unfortunate stereotypes.
Though it ran in reruns until 1966, the show`s early controversy made the networks jittery, as did the response-in some cases at the other extreme-to other featured blacks from some members of the public.
In 1954, during the second season of CBS` popular ”Make Room for Daddy,” members of the white family could be seen hugging or otherwise expressing affection for their maid, Louise, played by Amanda Randolph. Sheldon Leonard, the show`s producer, recalled the negative reactions in the TV history ”Prime Time, Our Time”: ”(I would get) a flood of hysterical mail.”
There was not a black in a dramatic starring role until 1965, when Cosby appeared opposite Robert Culp in ”I Spy.” It ran until 1968, the year Diahann Carroll became the first black, female, nonservant lead in her underrated ”Julia” (1968-71).
Entertainers, always acceptable to white society, frequently popped up with their own variety shows. There was Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr. and Flip Wilson, whose show ranked second to ”All in the Family” as the 1970s began. Mostly, however, that decade featured what Donald Bogle, in ”Blacks in American Films and Television,” called ”families or friends hootin`
and hollerin` and carryin` on as much as had Old Kingfish and his friends from the Mystic Knights of the Sea” in ”Amos `n` Andy.” There was ”Sanford and Son,” ”That`s My Mama,” ”What`s Happenin,”` ”Good Times” and ”The Jeffersons.”
Some action shows appeared: ”Shaft,” ”Get Christie Love” and
”Tenafly.” Each lasted one season. Black actors continued to get roles in white series, most notably Greg Morris in ”Mission: Impossible,” Gail Fisher in ”Mannix,” Nichelle Nichols in ”Star Trek,” Georg Stanford Brown in
”The Rookies” and Clarence Williams in ”The Mod Squad.”
And don`t forget that the 1970s contained two of the most important events in TV movie history: 1974`s ”The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and 1977`s ”Roots.” Yet they had almost no ancillary effect on the schedules.
The early 1980s were notable for the success of ”Diff`rent Strokes” and ”Webster,” each of which featured cute black children at the center of white families. ”Gimme a Break” had Nell Carter as a housekeeper.
Then came ”The Cosby Show” in 1984, and though its success spawned ”A Different World,” so did it generate such limp ripoffs as ”Charlie & Company,” ”Melba,” ”227” and the successful ”Amen.” But ”Frank`s Place,” the New Orleans-based comedy about a black-owned restaurant-bar that relied less on gags than characterization, was a fairly speedy ratings failure.
Numbers over substance
So where are we now?
The 1990 fall season featured a larger number of black performers than any fall in memory. Joining the group dominated by Cosby and Company was, most prominently, Jones, as an ex-convict working for a white female attorney in
”Gabriel`s Fire”; rapper Will Smith, moving from the ghetto to the mansion of wealthy, spoiled relatives in ”Fresh Prince of Bel Air”; Barbara Montgomery and Ray Aranha in ”Married People”; Thelma Hopkins and Reginald VelJohnson as parents of a brood on ”Family Matters”; Whoopi Goldberg in
”Bagdad Cafe”; Ossie Davis in ”Evening Shade”; Richard Brooks in ”Law & Order”; and Frankie Faison and two young actors sharing an interracial marriage in Fox`s ”True Colors.”
Other black faces were in the casts of various other shows, often as criminals, hustlers like Rooster in ”Baretta,” or grunts in such Vietnam-based shows as ”China Beach” and ”Tour of Duty.” And cable, especially its Black Entertainment Network, MTV and some of the pay-movie channels, have given blacks increasing presence in a determined courtship of blacks viewers. But don`t be fooled by the numbers.
Rosemary L. Bray, an editor of The New York Times Book Review, recently wrote in that paper`s Arts & Leisure section, ”I wish that there was a television schedule that reflected the world I live in, with black people doing all kinds of things every day of the year.”
Bray is black and I am not, but I couldn`t agree with her more.
Television remains a place in which blacks are not allowed to exhibit, as Bogle writes, ”the rhythms and passions, the outlooks and attitudes, the dreams and aches, of black life in America.”
In the history of TV there have only been a handful of serious dramatic shows that focused on blacks. ”Palmerstown, U.S.A,” ”Harris and Company”
and Winfrey`s recent ”The Women of Brewster Place” were quick failures.
Most black shows are little more than hoary TV concepts and formulas dressed in-OK, let`s say it-blackface. And too many of the black actors and actresses in otherwise white TV worlds are-OK, let`s say it-tokens.
Why hasn`t there been a successful show with a black-run corporation such as ”Dallas”? Or a hit with black yuppies a la ”thirtysomething”? Why haven`t we seen a black ”Hunter” or ”Magnum P.I.” succeed in the ratings? `Miami Vice` vice
The networks, always complacent, operate on a better-safe theory. Even though Cosby has proven that the public, white and black, will go for a show with a black cast, there are not enough black network producers to create new or daring concepts. Black viewers do not necessarily want more, more, more. Like any viewers they want more quality options.
Putting Blair Underwood in an Armani suit can not disguise the fact that he doesn`t get to handle important cases. He, like Phil Morris in ”W.I.O.U,” is a minor player in an otherwise white, non-ethnic environment. (Jimmy Smits of ”L.A. Law” notwithstanding, the Hispanic presence on TV is quite another matter).
Brooks, playing assistant to white Michael Moriarty in ”Law & Order,”
follows in the footsteps of Philip Michael Thomas to Don Johnson on ”Miami Vice,” and Cosby to Robert Culp in ”I Spy”: the black as sidekick.
”Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” started out with the potential to break new ground by examining the class distinctions between blacks. But the show has fallen into schtick: Will Smith as a jazzed-up J.J. from ”Good Times.”
Taking chances
”The Cosby Show,” which undeniably set a new tone for sitcoms with non- derisive humor and no quick-gag gimmicks, probably comes the closest to accurately reflecting a segment of black society. And ”A Different World”
has improved dramatically since Debbie Allen and other blacks have gotten more deeply involved in the creative process.
The show that is really taking chances is Fox`s ”In Living Color,” the
”Saturday Night Live”-like comedy show that takes satirical shots at black celebrities and issues. Its creator and star, Damon Ivory Wayans, grew up on the tough streets of Harlem.
”Now, for the first time,” Wayans told ”Emmy” magazine, referring to his show, Cosby and Eddie Murphy, ”you have black creators behind works that represent black people. So, when it`s coming from the source, you don`t have to worry about criticisms and uproars from the community.”
Sadly, network TV remains, like much of white America, fearful of examining the black experience in its totality.
What other reason is there for the four-decade parade of safe and sanitized black images? There`s a subtle racism operating when network TV gives us happy-go-lucky, comfortable black families and button-down blacks in white worlds because they reassure white America by being more like white America.
They fit, sometimes uneasily to be sure, into familiar costumes. Even Mr. T, the snarling and physically menacing man from ”The A-Team,” was diluted to levels acceptable to whites. He was made into a cartoon.
The networks must realize, or be bold enough to accept, that blacks must no longer be treated as hired hands.
Until blacks are allowed to express their lives-with the diversity of emotions, failings, dreams, passions and pain that human beings share-TV will continue to fill its black entertainment shelf with things that are closer to minstrel shows than to things that matter.
