Taye Diggs from 'Day Break'
(Photo: Kevork Djansezian/AP)
Don’t adjust your television sets--it’s no use. Yes, small screen entertainment is a void of color these days and attempting to augment the picture by fiddling with the brightness won’t help. And while there certainly is an abundance of quality-scripted fare on television these days, it is mostly written, directed, and acted by white Americans.
It almost feels as if African-Americans are on the endangered species list when it comes to television. How else can it be explained that there are only a handful of black shows on TV today? Programs like “Everybody Hates Chris” and “The Game” air on The CW’s dead zone known as Friday night, while another series stars the modern day minstrel act known as Flavor Flav on MyTV’s “Under One Roof.”
And although HBO recently debuted the series “The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which stars Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose (“Dreamgirls”), the pickings still sadly remain quite slim.
You can read the rest of this article on my new television and film blog: The Screen Fiend
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Michael Langston Moore also writes for AFRICAN AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT EXAMINER column.
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Comments
Great article! Curious what your take is on showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and her efforts to make her shows ("Grey's Anatomy," Private Practice") racially diverse? We definitely need another "Soul Food" on the tv landscape, but I'd argue also that Rhimes is on the right track: Perhaps the future of successful television are shows that effortlessly weave people of color into the tapestry as opposed to the other two extremes - white shows with token minority characters, or programs that can only be characterized as 'Black Shows'.
I like Shonda Rhimes--there's no doubt that there aren't many minority show runners. And there's a significantly less amount of them who are given the ability to run non-minority casted shows. So I really like that.
I also do like the fact that a show like "Grey's Anatomy" doesn't have to be an all-black show. I loved what CBS tried to do with "City of Angels"--seeing black doctors in every scene was incredibly impressive. But I also recognize that there are Indian, Asian, and Hispanic doctors out there, too. So that impresses me, though I do question why a show that's run by a black woman and is racially diverse does seem to revolve around, still, a white lead character.
And you may be right, the future might be that an all black show becomes less and less the norm, and minorities become intertwined into other shows. I think that's happening, though you would no doubt agree that there still remains tons of all white shows. So there's still a significant imbalance.
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