What do "Two and a Half Men," "Glee," "NCIS" and "House" all have in common? To start, they are four of the most popular shows on television. But they also share a trait that is endemic throughout television and the broader entertainment industry: They are all led by white actors, with few (if any) performers of color making up the supporting casts.
Although racial attitudes have changed dramatically over the past 50 years and the election of the first black president is a celebratory accomplishment, racial inequality continues to play a substantial role in a society that is dominated by white culture. The television landscape has followed a similar trajectory to that of the nation's overall racial progress: Blatant acts of racism and bigotry are now taboo, but people of color are still marginalized and their opportunities limited.
The number and quality of the roles available to actors of color continue to be limited and reflect neither the numerical size nor the contributions of the population of color in the United States. For a country that will be less than 50 percent white by 2050, as the U.S. Census Bureau projects, it seems time for American TV screens to better reflect the audience watching them.
"When it comes to [the] position of … minorities in the television industry, I honestly think there's been far too little progress — things aren't much better than they were a decade or two ago. In some ways, they're worse," Maureen Ryan, TV critic for AOL, said in an email to the Daily. In essence, racial diversity in TV, in both quality and quantity, is still lacking, and "sadly nobody seems willing to do much about it," she said.
History of racial diversity on TV
People of color have historically been underrepresented on television, but their portrayals have evolved over time. "The Amos ‘n' Andy Show," which aired from 1951 to 53, was the first television series to feature an all-black cast, yet it immediately drew the ire of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which condemned the show during its 1951 convention for the humor "built on the backbone of negative stereotypes." The blatant racism of "Amos ‘n' Andy" was unacceptable, but after it was canceled — due primarily to pressure from the NAACP — it still took roughly 20 years for another primetime network TV show with a predominantly black cast to make it to the air.
Even once the wave of shows with casts of color began, it did not reflect a broader trend of diversity on TV. "The Jeffersons" (1975-85), "The Cosby Show" (1984-92), "Family Matters" (1989-98) and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" (1990-96) for instance, all aired between the mid-'70s and mid-'90s, but they were a relatively small number of shows in a still white-dominated TV landscape.
"When those shows were on, it's not like all of the rest of the TV schedule was notably diverse," Josh Wolk, entertainment editor for New York Magazine's Vulture blog, said in an email to the Daily. "I think it's a mistake to say that those shows were symbols of a more diverse era."
Dan Fienberg, executive editor and TV blogger for HitFix.com, explained that those shows were able to succeed because of the narrow television landscape at the time. "Shows like [those] came along at a time where the Big Three networks were the only game in town, so you could guarantee that an audience was available and watching and that the press would pay attention," he said in an email to the Daily. "Today those shows would probably only be developed for cable; they'd get a tenth the audience, and much of the media would ignore them until they reached genuine phenomenon status."
Why the continued marginalization?
In 1999, the NAACP publicly criticized the major television networks for a fall schedule that featured no people of color in prominent roles. Organization president Kweisi Mfume referred to it as a "virtual whiteout," and although the NAACP concluded it was more a problem of narrow thinking and "country club elitism" among network executives, rather than deliberate decision-making, the problem of an ever-growing population of people of color not being adequately reflected, quantitatively or qualitatively, on TV screens remained.
Entertainment journalists and TV critics agreed that deliberate decision-making was not the problem, but that it was embedded in more structural and systemic considerations. "I don't think they [network executives] actively think, ‘We've gotta keep minorities off of the television,'" Wolk said.
Ryan echoed that sentiment. "I don't think it's conscious racism, but I do think that people want to go with what has worked before — and what has worked before are shows starring white characters," she said.
Myles McNutt, a TV critic at Cultural-Learnings.com and The A.V. Club, believed the reason for the continued marginalization of people of color in television is "simply a matter of demographics." In an email to the Daily, he said, "The truth is that networks don't want to limit their audience and thus aim towards a generalized (read: white) audience."
"There's always been an underlying and horribly flawed theory that minority audiences will watch shows led by white characters, but white audiences won't watch shows led by minority characters," Fienberg said. "But what are we basing that on? When networks do minority-driven shows, it ends up being something like ‘Brothers' (2009) or ‘Outsourced.' When those shows fail, is that an audience rejecting minority-centric TV or is that audiences rejecting trash? Nobody ever says that a show like ‘Lone Star' (2010) or ‘My Generation' (2010) failed because audiences don't respond to white people."
While there seems to be a consensus that the proliferation of white-led TV shows is not due to active racial discrimination, the problem at least partially lies in the fact that executives and those behind the shows that make it to the screen are predominantly from privileged backgrounds.
"People generally tell stories that interest them, and if I'm a middle-aged, white, middle class, heterosexual man, what interest[s] me? Not surprisingly, it's probably stories about middle-aged, white, middle class, heterosexual men," Ryan said.
"The upper echelons of the TV industry are still predominantly white and, although there are more exceptions, disproportionately male. Although there are more exceptions every year, the majority of TV writers and showrunners are still white and disproportionately male. Of course that's going to have a major impact on what you see on your TV," Fienberg said.
Indeed, the heads of four out of the five major networks are white: Bob Greenblatt (NBC), Paul Lee (ABC), Peter Rice and Kevin Reilly (Fox) and Dawn Ostroff (The CW). Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment, is Latina, but even that "has not had any significant impact on the whiteness of that network because CBS' audience remains demographically older and stereotypically less likely to find these types of programming appealing," McNutt said.
McNutt thus cautioned that more diversity in these positions would not necessarily solve the problem. "I would say that the lack of minority representation within these types of positions is its own problem, and that even if there were executives of color it would likely not make much of an impact."
Evaluating on-screen representation
People of color continue to be underrepresented on TV, but considerable progress has been made since 1999, when the NAACP and the four major broadcast networks agreed to promote diversity in the television industry. In its 2008 report "Out of Focus, Out of Sync — Take 4," the NAACP reported that "more actors of color are on-air, particularly as ensemble players" and that "network television places more emphasis on outreach and recruitment of qualified minority candidates." However, looking across this season's TV offerings, it's hard not to notice the continued lack of meaningful minority representation.
Of the shows that aired this TV season on the major networks (NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC and The CW), only a handful featured a lead character of color. Unfortunately, two of those — "Outlaw" (2010) and "Undercovers" (2010) — have already been canceled, narrowing the field even further.
That is not to say there are no lead roles available to actors of color. "TV is actually beginning to change and take advantage of similar racial difficulties on the big screen," Fienberg said. He pointed to lead actors like Forest Whitaker ("Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior"), Laurence Fishburne ("CSI") and Don Cheadle (the upcoming Showtime comedy "House of Lies").
"These are actors who by any measurement are among the best we have, but they look at what [they're] being offered in movies and suddenly taking the lead in a generic CBS procedural looks really good," Fienberg said. "Well, that's bad for them as movie stars, but it's good for TV."
Other shows, too, have racially mixed casts, even if they are not led by actors of color. "There are some show creators who work hard to have a diverse cast. Shonda Rhimes, for example, with her shows on ABC. … [And] ‘Community' is pretty diverse," Wolk said.
But for every rich, uncliched lead or racially diverse cast like those mentioned above, there are many more token supporting roles. "Roles available to actors of color are generally in the friend/assistant category. They play characters who can help the lead characters achieve their goals, but we rarely, if ever, see those supporting characters' goals. They really only exist in relation to the lead character, who is usually white," Ryan said.
This is particularly evident when looking at characters of color who are in positions of power (Lance Reddick as the team leader on "Fringe," Blair Underwood as the U.S. president on "The Event") but are still supporting characters. Although they hold power within the show's dynamic, they are not driving the narrative and remain in second position to the white leads.
When broken down by race, the results are even worse, with very few roles for Latino and Asian American actors and practically none for Native Americans. Wolk did point out the recent increase in Indian Americans on screen, citing Aziz Ansari, Danny Pudi and Archie Panjabi as actors who "all have regular roles where their ethnicity seems to be beside the point," but also noted "Outsourced," which features a white lead and "where the whole show is a joke about how they're Indian."
"The idea of doing an ensemble without at least one minority is no longer acceptable," Fienberg said, "but often it's just that one character who's there to keep people from asking why the show is so darned white."
Even an increase in roles for actors of color wouldn't be a final solution, though, according to McNutt. The failure of "Undercovers" on NBC "demonstrate[s] that just because minorities are placed in those [lead] roles does not mean that the battle is won," he said. "I'd argue that even if the role imbalance was corrected there would remain larger systemic concerns within the industry." Diversity for diversity's sake would be a step toward formal equality, which ignores historical context and circumstance, but the deeper question is how to attain substantive equality so that TV screens not only reflect the numerical population of people of color in the United States, but also the breadth and depth of their contributions to American life.
