Turn on a TV newscast on a network affiliate in any major city in this country, and the odds are overwhelming that the people delivering the news will be a multiracial mix of men and women. This does not happen by accident. Local stations make their money on news, and networks make their money mostly through the local stations they own, NBC West Coast President Scott Sassa recently acknowledged. With so much at stake, every detail of a newscast has to be rooted in good business practice.
But watch any of those stations for the prime-time fare — the mixture of sitcoms and dramas and movies that pass as entertainment — and suddenly the picture is likely to get a lot whiter, a situation that is making a lot of people outside television red with anger and those inside it red with embarrassment.
The lineup, to pick one example, starts to look a lot more like ABC’s popular Tuesday night grouping: at 7 p.m., the ensemble comedy “Spin City,” which has an all-white cast except for a gay African-American character — a “twofer” in the parlance of those who tabulate minority representation; from 7:30 to 9 p.m., the ensemble comedies “It’s Like, You Know …,” “Dharma & Greg” and “Sports Night,” which are essentially all white; at 9 p.m., the new drama “Once and Again,” all white in the principal roles and on the air for four weeks until the season premiere of the drama “NYPD Blue,” which has had a diverse cast, including that television staple, the black lieutenant.
That ethnic blending stops making good business sense when the programming shifts from news to entertainment is a conundrum of modern TV, one that many smart people have spent the summer puzzling over. The overwhelming whiteness of the new prime-time programming for fall — and the lineups’ symbolic cold shoulder to minority groups — has been the prime topic of discussion as the television industry prepares for the new season.
It is also a paradox that, as the medium expands and targets smaller and smaller segments of the audience — as we discussed in the first part of this series — the main television networks are not including minorities in their sights. The cable channels that are driving all of TV toward the new, narrowcasting model are targeting groups by interest rather than by demographic, while the networks — if you accept the reality that people tend to watch programs that feature their own race — seem to all be going after different segments of the majority white audience.
Indeed, the established network that is the closest thing left to a traditional broadcaster, CBS, is also the one with the greatest claim to diversity in its overall lineup, with two series starring Bill Cosby, another series (“Martial Law”) with the only Asian lead character on TV and an African-American co-lead, and such racially mixed fare as “Touched by an Angel” and “Nash Bridges.” Narrowcasting in network television is becoming synonymous with whitewashing.
TARGETING THE NETWORKS
The problem, which has been brewing for years, boiled over this summer when NAACP President Kweisi Mfume threatened to sue the networks over what he described as 26 new series on the four primary networks — ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC — featuring no actors of color in leading roles. A coalition of Latino organizations soon joined in the outcry.
The reality was a little more complicated. NBC’s “Third Watch,” a drama about paramedics, cops and firefighters, has five minorities among its nine principals. CBS’ “Ladies Man” features Alfred Molina, an Englishman of Latino heritage, as the star and executive producer.
And UPN, a startup network that Mfume did not include in his criticism, is introducing four new series with African-Americans among the leads, the biracial “Grown Ups,” “Shasta McNasty” and “The Strip,” and the almost all-black “The Parkers.”
But still, of roughly three dozen new series on the six networks, there are, all told, only six with minority actors in leading roles, defined here as people you could reasonably call the stars of the shows. When you get to second-banana roles — lieutenants and the like — the number goes up, as in the case of “The Badland,” a Fox cop drama that includes a Latina policewoman who is a fellow rookie alongside the series’ true lead character, or “Now and Again,” a CBS sci-fi show with an African-American as the sort of lieutenant-equivalent authority figure.
It’s a situation that network executives, under pressure from the NAACP and the press over the summer, pledged to improve, pleading a combination of coincidence — `We had minority shows in development; they just didn’t make the final cut’ — and lack of awareness. Kevin Williamson, the writer of “Dawson’s Creek” and the movie “Scream,” seemed to have been taken by surprise by criticism of his new “Wasteland” as unrealistic for representing a large peer group of New York twentysomethings as being all white.
“I’m enlightened by what is going on,” Williamson said recently. “It certainly raised my awareness, and I would love to see pilots being shipped out to you as diverse as they come.”
Like Williamson, who hurriedly added to his cast Jeffrey D. Sams in the role of a prosecutor and love interest for one of his leads, the networks moved quickly to try to ameliorate things, signing new minority, mostly black, cast members to at least 10 shows, and firming up development deals with established black writers such as Yvette Lee Bowser and Keenen Ivory Wayans.
Bowser even has two shows in the works featuring black leads, a comedy-drama for WB and a sitcom for NBC. “There’s a very unfortunate reality that we have to deal with this particular season,” she said. “But it existed last year, too, and the year before. . . . And I think that people . . . are considering the kind of impact, the social impact, that homogenized television will have on our culture.”
But it also begs the question: Why does it take the NAACP and media critics to awaken a TV network to something so obvious as the fact that television, as a primary social force, will come under scrutiny with regards to hot-button issues such as race?
TV has “increasingly become only white,” says UPN President Dean Valentine, and is “becoming increasingly divorced from the American way of life.”
“I’ve always felt that it was good business and it was responsible business for us to try, over time, to reflect the way the country looked,” Valentine says. “There’s a huge African-American middle class. . . . We’re one big capitalist country and I think it’s a silly and shortsighted business decision to alienate an entire segment of the population.”
Of course, you could also argue that Valentine is only following the classic programming strategy of new startup networks, like Fox at one time and the WB currently. To help build a stable audience, they program a night or two of African-American shows. Then as their non-minority shows gain attention, they begin to phase out the black shows.
QUANTITY VS. QUALITY
Meanwhile, you have people like LA Weekly writer Erin J. Aubry arguing that the point should not be quantity but quality. African-American herself, she responded to the controversy by calling for fewer blacks on TV, a point rooted in such tripe as “The Wayans Brothers” and “Homeboys from Outer Space.”
“With few exceptions,” writes Aubry, “the black television presence has come to mean fetishized ghettoism or insipid vamping on the middle class, buffoonery across the board, nonexistent character development . . .”
John Wells, the executive producer of “Third Watch” and “ER,” said when he heard of the NAACP complaint he kept quiet about his show’s diverse cast because he believed the organization’s point, overall, to be a valid one.
And he directly challenged the assertions of many of his peers in the producing ranks, many of whom told TV critics at July’s summer TV press tour in Pasadena that they had tried colorblind casting and, wouldn’t you know it, kept coming up with white actors as best for the roles.
Wells said he has had the opposite experience: Whenever he casts for a minority role, he finds an “embarrassment of riches,” because there is so little work for the available talent.
Race is, of course, massively complicated. Scott Sassa, the NBC boss, said that as a Japanese-American he feels a personal connection to the issue. He recalled being “p—ed off” as a boy watching “Kung Fu” with the white David Carradine in the role. But as a participant in a Chicago panel discussion on Asian images in television observed recently, it should not be Sassa’s special responsibility to right TV’s wrongs.
And Sassa said it was important for minorities to be on TV as positive role models — though when he was asked whether they shouldn’t be allowed to be fully human, he backed off and agreed with that.
A show that satisfies one minority group can peeve another. “ER” has Eriq LaSalle in a lead role, an African-American doctor and potential strong role model. But some Asian-Americans point out that “ER” grossly underrepresents the proportion of Asian doctors in actual U.S. medical practice. At the same time, some Asian groups are quick to roll their eyes when they see yet another Asian doctor on TV, a role that can be a stereotype.
Then there is Sandra Tsing Loh, the Los Angeles based writer of mixed Asian and Caucasian descent. She says she gets less worked up about the status of Asian-Americans on TV than she does about the absence of women over 35.
It’s a valid point. Diversity is not simply a matter of color. “Once and Again,” the new ABC show singled out earlier as an all-white show (bad), also happens to be about two people in their 40s experiencing a new romance. As such, it blasts TV stereotypes about age and sexuality (good).
The point is TV pretty much discriminates against anybody who is not lean, handsome and white: Hefty eaters, middle-aged women, awkward teens, glasses wearers, non-spunky seniors, blue-collar workers and more are all pretty much out of the TV picture. Television is, after all, in the business of selling a cultural ideal, however misguided, back to that culture.
Still, you have to think television is missing the boat when you look at something so simple as the lineup of the WB network. The WB, CEO Jamie Kellner says, makes 85 percent of its money via the 12-to-34-year-olds it is able to attract.
YOUTH CULTURE
In the youth culture at large, multiculturalism is an ideal; in rap and hip-hop music playing in suburban teens’ bedrooms, in the non-white models in ads for the Gap, the message is that white is boring and uncool. Yet the new WB series, almost exclusively about teens and twentysomethings, are also almost exclusively white.
Almost nobody will tell you they believe TV is deliberately trying to marginalize segments of society. But what has happened can probably be explained through the experience of the one minority group that is making strides. Gays are finally becoming a significant TV presence this year. One count cited by Williamson, who is gay, has 17 gay characters on prime time, a goodly number of them in the new fall series.
The reason is probably as simple as pursestrings. There have always been, and continue to be, a lot more gays in positions of power in Hollywood — writing, producing, giving the green light to projects — than there have been ethnic minorities.
The real path to change — and one that Kweisi Mfume reiterated after a recent round of meetings with network executives — seems to lie in getting non-white faces into the writing rooms and the executive offices.
This probably explains why TV news can be so determinedly diverse, while entertainment is not. Though it may, generally speaking, be easier for a white audience to hear impartial news from a black anchorman than to identify with a black character in a dramatic series, probably the greater part of the explanation lies in how the two types of shows are made.
TV news is crafted through consultants and test marketing and, for all its flaws, a sense of responsibility to the community. Entertainment, despite the incursion of focus groups and the like, comes more from the will of individual writers, who are likely to write about what they know, and from the relatively remote vantage point of Hollywood.
But sometimes, despite the old adage, good writing comes from challenging yourself to learn more about something you don’t know.
And the implicit assumption in the preponderance of white shows — that that is where the advertising money is — does not stand up to reality.
Sassa pointed out that “ER,” the highest-rated show on TV and one that features a diverse, ensemble cast, is NBC’s highest rated show among African-Americans, the country’s sixth highest rated show among African-Americans, and also the television show with the highest number of viewers who live in households earning $75,000 and up.
Diversity, in addition to paying off in dramatic interest, can also pay off on the bottom line.
