Can Blacks Bum Rush The Show?: Bringing Diversity to TV

By Guest Contributor Patrice Peck, cross-posted from Zora & Alice

How can you notice that something is missing if you never even acknowledged that thing to begin with? The lack of racial diversity on the major television networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and The CW—clearly illustrates how an omission can actually be rather glaring. Yet, whenever critics draw attention to the lopsided numbers of lead minorities in television, writers, producers, and casting directors are quick to cry color-blind in hopes of white washing the issue with a fresh coat of guiltless naivete. When addressing this issue, television executives always point to profitability and markets as the main reasoning behind their casting while uncomfortably skirting around their propensity for narrow thinking, country club-style hiring, and disregarding racial diversity.

Then, this September, NBC inadvertently shed light on television’s homogeneity by picking up J.J. Abrams’ newest project, Undercovers, a show surrounding a married couple who leave retirement to rejoin the CIA. Abrams (Lost, Alias) and co-creator Josh Reims (Felicity) made headlines with their unorthodox casting of Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, both black actors, making Undercovers the second NBC show to feature a black lead couple (The Cosby Show being the first.)

Nonetheless, at a panel for Undercovers, Reims still insisted that when it came to casting the leads, both he and Abrams considered novelty as opposed to color as if the two weren’t synonymous in Hollywood. “[We said] Let’s just see every possible incarnation of person [so we won’t end up with] the same people we’ve seen on TV a million times … Boris and Gugu came in, and we sort of knew immediately, these are them. We didn’t go out of our way to say we are hiring two black people to be the leads of our show, but we didn’t ignore it either.”

All of this trailblazing, intentional or not, came to a screeching halt on Thursday, November 4th, when NBC canceled Undercovers due to a drastic decline in ratings. While there is little debate across the board about sub-par quality of the freshman series, a consensus on sustaining the diversification that Undercovers exemplified has yet to be seen or heard. Can television executives still justifiably profess ignorance and oversight once the elephant has been revealed for all to see? Will Undercovers serve as cautionary tale for networks that consider crossing the color line? In Hollywood, money talks and green takes precedence over every color, so perhaps it is actually black viewers who should be blamed for the television industry’s propensity for exclusionary content.

In her review of an Undercovers episode, Cocoa Popps, an Urban Culturalist Writer for The Huffington Post wrote,

I guess I’m just mad because this is a big deal people! Having black lead actors on television in programming that isn’t comedy is a major step in networks finally believing that yes, black folks watch TV, and yes we do more than laugh — we like to think too! But we need and appreciate good content.

Nevertheless, one could argue that if black viewers had stormed their television sets every Wednesday night at eight and tuned in to the series, the number of viewers would have exponentially increased, ultimately resulting in a rating impressive enough to demand not only an order of more episodes but a new season all together. Because high ratings clearly indicate a profitable market, television executives, naive or not, would be hard pressed not to jump on the black lead bandwagon. Then, as the amount of shows targeted to black viewers would increase, so would the chance of those shows actually being good, not to mention successful. If that were the case, should black viewers take one for the team at the cost of being subjected to sub-par content? Surely not. Then again, television executives cannot feasibly create shows without a clear market. Bringing diversity to television is, without a doubt, a two-way street.

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