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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
How TV networks turned around their lily-white lineups -- and why that still isn't enough.
May 23, 2001 | Back in 1999, Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, blasted prime-time television's "virtual whitewash in programming" of black characters and actors. He was reacting to the 1999 prime-time lineup, which had not one black or minority performer in a leading role in any of 26 new programs.
The networks reacted -- and fast. Shows without black actors added them. "The West Wing," for example, on NBC, quickly cast Dulé Hill as the president's personal aide. Other shows responded too. Indeed, the moves led to an overrepresentation of African-Americans in prime-time network television for that year.
"The nation's largest minority group is over-represented in prime-time television programming," said the African-American Television Report, a June 2000 Screen Actors Guild-commissioned study of the 1999-2000 fall television season. "African-Americans make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but nearly 16 percent of the characters seen on the networks during prime time."
Problem solved?
Not a chance. That effort, token or not, didn't even begin to address the issue of the way blacks are represented on network television. Although African-Americans have been a presence on television since its birth, their presence hasn't always been a positive or representative one.
Why? The answer varies depending upon whom you ask and what statistics you look at. Mostly, though, the question leads to the conclusion that TV is still considered a business that takes place in a vacuum rather than a cultural force with significant social side effects.
To look at the problem from a purely statistical point of view, the Screen Actors Guild commissioned the African-American Television Report to examine the landscape well before the uproar occurred. But by the time the study of the 1999-2000 season had been completed, most networks had already reacted to the criticism.
While several shows added black series regulars, which led to the overrepresentation, those characters were "often ... marginal to the programs' central narratives," according to Darnell Hunt, who wrote the SAG report. And more significantly, the report found, "over 44 percent of all African-American characters seen in prime time" were on the WB and UPN -- "the two upstart networks with the smallest viewership and the shakiest futures," Hunt says.
With just under 13 percent of its characters African-American, CBS was "the only major network that seemed to present important black characters in rough proportion to the share of blacks in the overall population," he says.
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Hunt's study coincides with several examinations of African-Americans on TV. Another is Donald Bogle's "Primetime Blues," an exhaustive study of the history of African-Americans on prime time. His smartly written, nearly 500-page narrative chronicles the significant contributions of African-Americans -- and the slow evolution of their presence on television.
Bogle says that 1963's "East Side, West Side," which featured Cicely Tyson as "a brown-skinned African American woman, who was not a ditsy maid ... [and] was functioning successfully in a professional life," made progress over the earliest, most directly racist programs. Later, there were exaggerated black comedies like "Good Times," "The Jeffersons" and "Sanford & Son." He argues that not until "The Cosby Show," long after the civil rights movement, was there a series that "truly reflected a certain African-American sensibility."
Television is affected by the social-political atmosphere, but often trails sociopolitical change, Bogle says. The African-American community criticized TV shows that aired in the 1960s -- shows that would have been cutting-edge, progressive programs a decade earlier -- because they failed to address the current societal and political climate. "Television is a really a very conservative sort of medium," says Bogle. "It's coming into people's homes."
There's evidence, too, that other groups aren't being treated fairly by Hollywood. SAG's report "Still Missing: Latinos in and out of Hollywood" primarily examined the overall Latino employment in the entertainment industries, rather than their appearance on television; still, it found that Latino or Hispanic actors "face an uphill battle to find employment in the entertainment industry."
"It takes television quite a while before [programming] really begins to catch up" to the political landscape. Shows like "'NYPD Blue' or maybe 'Homicide' or maybe 'ER' are closer to the spirit and the social-political outlook of the era in which they appear," Bogle says. Still, they're not perfect; although Bogle and others praise "ER" for presenting some representative characters, they still lack "cultural definition and cultural references."
The SAG study found that the current TV grid concentrates African-American shows on particular evenings and, more significantly, smaller networks. UPN, which along with the WB is the youngest network on the air, overwhelmingly led the six-network pack in all categories relating to African-Americans: the number of black characters, the number of black series regulars as a percent of all black characters, black series regulars as a percent of all series regulars and average screen time for black characters.
