Over the
past week, the television industry has gathered in Los Angeles for the winter Television
Critics Association (or TCA) meetings, which are essentially an opportunity
for both broadcast and cable networks to show off their upcoming projects to
the press. No show so far has caused more of a stir than HBO’s Girls panel, perhaps not a surprise
given that the Judd Apatow-produced dramedy has been a controversy magnet ever
since it debuted in April 2012. While the majority of the media’s attention has
focused on the panel’s antagonistic
response to a clumsy, bordering
on offensive question about creator and star Lena Dunham’s proclivity for
onscreen nudity, an inquiry regarding the show’s racial diversity – or, more
accurately, its lack thereof – is arguably more deserving of widespread
discussion. The responses were telling not only of this particular show’s
attitude toward race, but also of how urgent the issue still is in the TV and
entertainment world as a whole.
A refreshingly considerate Dunham allowed that they were still grappling
with how to adequately address such concerns within the show and said that she has
learned a lot, thanks to the conversation
that Girls has helped open up.
Unfortunately, her clear willingness to listen and learn was overshadowed by Apatow’s
much more dismissive answer, which boiled down to not wanting to feel
pressured into including a more racially diverse cast and looking for ways to
make it feel “organic”. Without getting too caught up in the specifics of what
he said, it’s a disappointing display of ignorance and white male privilege. Of
course someone with no personal stake in the matter would see increasing
diversity as cool but optional, something subject to the whims of artistic
desire and inspiration. I can only wish someone had asked him to explain the
difference between organic and inorganic POC inclusion; it’s not like we’re
talking about whether they should incorporate dragons into the show, though
that would also be awesome. What Apatow and, sadly, too many of his colleagues
in the entertainment industry don’t understand is that diversity isn’t about
being politically correct or not alienating different audiences, though the
latter is important, but rather about reflecting the world we live in more
faithfully and acknowledging that people have wildly different backgrounds,
perspectives and experiences. They should care about diversity because it’s
good for art and will open up a wide range of new creative and storytelling
possibilities, not out of a resentful sense of obligation.
The issue of racial diversity in
particular has received renewed attention lately, with the Girls debate coming on the heels of SNL naming
Sasheer Zamata as its newest cast member, along with the announcement that
the landmark late-night comedy show will hire two
female African American writers. On the
surface, this sounds like something we should unconditionally celebrate, but
the reality is that Zamata was only hired after the show generated outrage when
it unveiled its latest crop of performers in the fall to be five white dudes
and one white woman. Even worse, veteran cast member Kenan Thompson, one of
only three actors of color on the show at the time, blamed
the lack of diversity, and specifically the absence of black women, on the
comediennes they’ve auditioned not being ready or good enough. The show’s
producers responded to the controversy by holding
“secret” auditions for black female comediennes, which led to Zamata’s
hiring. Although Zamata no doubt deserves the spot and should hopefully succeed
on the show, her casting smacks of the worst kind of tokenism: the kind
designed to shut people up. I suppose it’s good that they reacted at all,
instead of getting defensive or ignoring the issue, but we still shouldn’t
praise them for doing something they should’ve done on their own, without the
prompting of an angry, frustrated Internet and media. Zamata and the
Iranian-born Nasim Pedrad shouldn’t have to carry the burden of being the only
two women of color in a cast of sixteen people, and furthermore, as dire as the
situation with black cast members is, the show has been even worse when
it comes to other minorities, having featured next-to-no performers of
Latino or Asian descent.
When Fred Armisen is the closest you’ve gotten to
representing East Asia, you’ve got a problem.
SNL shouldn’t look at the issue of racial diversity as
quota-filling. Bringing in more players from different backgrounds would not
only allow them to include a wider range of characters without resorting to offensive practices, but also introduce
new ways of looking at comedy and the world, thereby enriching the show.
Despite the fact that diversity can only be good for entertainment, it’s evident
that many people still don’t want to broach the topic, let alone do anything to
fix it. When faced with a question about the
SNL diversity debate, ex-cast member Amy Poehler flat-out
refused to answer, a rare instance of hostility from the normally genial,
press-friendly actress. Perhaps she didn’t want to gossip about the former
employer that made her a household name, and several earlier questions in the
interview seemed set her on edge (that American
Hustle question is just insulting). Still, it shouldn’t have been difficult
for Poehler to come up with a tactful statement that neither badmouths SNL nor dismisses race as an important
issue, like ex-coworker and friend Tina Fey’s diplomatic response. By not even
doing that, she comes off as someone who’s afraid to talk about race and
diversity – or, worse, as someone who doesn’t care. Poehler did later
congratulate Zamata and claim her other quote was taken out of context,
since the interview was conducted before the new cast addition, though that
doesn’t change the fact that she didn’t want to address race when asked in
December.
It’s not all reluctant tokenism
and frustrated sighs when it comes to racial diversity on TV, though. Although
the difference isn’t especially significant, television has generally exhibited
a more progressive approach to representation than its big-screen counterpart,
where race
is regularly treated as a genre designation. Movies have been whitewashed
to the point where the industry’s jaw collectively drops whenever a project
with a predominantly minority cast attracts
an audience, where it’s cause for celebration when a POC actor, instead of
a white actor, gets first
billing on a movie about race relations.
So many white people
Perhaps spurred by the rigidity of Hollywood’s mindset when it comes to
cinema, TV has started to back away from a so-called Golden Age largely defined
by white male antiheroes and has emerged as the better medium for fostering more
diverse talent and stories that revolve around people besides white men. No
show exemplifies this more than Orange Is
the New Black, which has an overwhelmingly female ensemble cast that boasts
a variety of ethnicities and sexual orientations, but that Netflix original
series is hardly alone. While HBO has traditionally been almost blindingly
white outside of The Wire and Treme, the cable channel seems interested
in rectifying that with upcoming shows like Looking,
which revolves around gay men in San Francisco and was created by Weekend director Andrew Haigh, and a
comedy from Larry Wilmore and Issa Rae that follows the problems and
experiences of a modern-day African American woman played by Rae. Whatever you
think of the soapy melodrama that often characterizes her shows, producer and
writer Shonda Rhimes has become a leading advocate for racial diversity on TV
thanks to Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. Yet, one of the most promising
signs of an impending paradigm shift came last
fall from network executives at FOX, who apparently see diversity as
beneficial for business and actively support shows with more diverse casts.
Though a cynic may scoff and bemoan that they only appear to care because of
profits, not out of a sense of social or cultural imperative, the network’s
conscious effort to promote diversity have already manifested itself in their
nicely eclectic programming slate. It’s hard to question motives when the result
is shows like Brooklyn 99, Sleepy Hollow, The Mindy Project, Almost
Human and New Girl (even if the
diversity in that last one was kind of accidental).
The idea that being more
inclusive of different cultures and demographics isn’t just important from a
social standpoint, but is also financially advisable seems to have gotten more
traction lately. Evidence of this can be seen, surprisingly enough, in
commercials and other forms of advertising. Just last summer, Cheerios became
embroiled in a race relations controversy when an
ad featuring a mixed race family received so much racist vitriol the
company had to disable its YouTube comments section. If corporations had
decided to retreat further into their usual unwavering focus on white consumers
after the Cheerios incident, it would’ve been irritating but foreseeable;
instead, by my eye, commercials have become noticeably more diverse, at least in terms of race. Check out a small handful
of examples below:
A mixed race family commercial racists didn’t completely
lose their shit over
(Probably because he’s a famous
NFL player)
While commercials (being
corporate capitalism at its most blatant) may not be the ideal place to look
for cultural progress, an increase in minority representation signals that
advertisers have started to take those audiences seriously, giving them
marketing value traditionally reserved for the white bourgeois
demographic. Make no mistake: in the
society we live in, consumer power can be very potent. Race is still a thorny
topic, one that many prefer not to discuss at all and that often devolves into
ugliness instead of anything productive or intelligent when it does come up in
conversation, but recent developments in television suggest that attitudes
toward diversity and representation might be changing, however slowly,
providing a glimmer of hope and reason for optimism. Who knows? Maybe one day
ten years from now, casts that look like the ones on Brooklyn 99 and Sleepy Hollow,
rather than the homogeneity of, say, Girls,
will be the norm. That sounds like a good future to me.
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