Race + TV: NBC (And The Rest)–More Colorful!
By Guest Contributor Kendra James
If you’re a regular R reader, you’ve been noticing that quite a bit of the stuff on TV–and by “stuff,” I mean “how characters of color have been treated”– has given us the blues while we’re not giving side-eye to what’s on the tiny screen. It’s hard to be optimistic given everything, but dare I say that network television might be listening? It’s pilot season, and if you’ve been out of the loop and hadn’t heard about some of the more diverse bits of new casting, I’ve got you covered.
The news of Lucy Liu as Watson on CBS’ Elementary was the first of a few announcements that piqued my interest this spring. BBC’s Sherlock fandom went predictably ballistic over: first, the news of an American Sherlock Holmes story (forgetting en masse, I suppose, that House has existed for eight years now); then the casting of a female in the Watson role; finally. that the wardrobe department would dare put Holmes (Johnny Lee Miller) in a scarf “so similar” to the BBC’s version’s. (you think I’m joking?)
Weird, as the first thing I thought about was how she’d be the singular leading lady of Asian descent on network television.
Rochelle Aytes. Courtesy: Hairspiration
Funny how priorities can flip like that. But it’s all right, because as it turns out I was wrong. Word broke that Yunjin Kim (Lost) would be returning to ABC in 2013 as part of a four-woman ensemble cast in the American reboot of the BBC’s Mistresses. African-American actor Rochelle Aytes also stars as one of the four, actually making the leading cast more diverse than it was in the original BBC version. While 2013 is a ways off, if the ABC Sunday night lineup stays similar to what it is now, Mistresses would fit in nicely. The show’s plot is no more complicated than the title makes it out to be and, along with Good Christian Bitches, it could fill the rest of the ‘evening soap opera’ void that the departing Desperate Housewives is going to leave.
Scandal, also on ABC, will premiere this April starring Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a PR executive who specialises in cleaning up DC scandals. The series was developed by network staple Shonda Rhimes and will be the only show on network television to be helmed by an African-American actress when it starts. Back when Undercovers was cancelled there were some who wondered if with that failure black actors had completely failed at their one chance to lead an hour-long drama. It’s risky for a network that depends on millions of viewers for advertising revenue to cast a lead that the majority of viewers (read: white people) may not relate to.
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