Dimension

Sure, TV’s More Inclusive Now,
But It Has A
Long Way to Go
By Jason Parham
When I think back to growing up in 1990s Los Angeles, a
handful of impressions remain sharper than others — the
killing of Latasha Harlins, the ’92 rebellion (what the
media referred to as “riots”), the ’94 earthquake, the O.J.
Simpson trial — but often, when I reach back, it’s the
cultural touchstones I land on first. Of those, none remains
quite so vivid as in 1996, the year after the upstart United
Paramount Network launched. UPN couldn’t match the
budget of rivals like NBC, but it was the only one of the
Big Five that devoted a considerable slate of programming
to investigating black lives. Even more important,
somehow it found an unprecedented breadth in its focus.
It was a postboom era for black TV — by now pioneering
comedies like Good Times and The Cosby Show seemed
like relics of a more conventional time — and over the
course of 11 years, UPN’s show creators and staff writers
rendered black Americans in full, vibrant strokes. These
were not tales of the exceptional but of the mundane. On
sitcoms like Moesha and The Hughleys, the rigors of teenhood
and family life were made plain in episodes dealing
with financial security and substance abuse. Malcolm
& Eddie, which followed two friends in Kansas City,
introduced the peaks and valleys of black entrepreneurship.
With The Parkers and Girlfriends, the image of the
Black Woman morphed and expanded before viewers’
eyes — she was loving, she was witty, she was vulnerable,
she was free. These shows were disruptive by virtue of
their very perspective: Blackness was the default, not the
subject matter. These were people I knew.
And UPN wasn’t totally alone. Major networks like
NBC, ABC, and FOX featured an array of shows devoted
to working-class angst (Roc), brotherhood (New York
Undercover), and social integration (The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air, The Steve Harvey Show). Still, UPN seemed like an
outlier among a patch of networks more concerned with
safer and whiter narratives. And in spite of show ratings,
which were never anything to brag about, the message was
palpable: These stories — our stories — mattered.
It’s been two decades since UPN first aired those sitcoms,
and the landscape of television has changed in large
measure thanks to the introduction of online streaming
hubs like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. The sweep
of shows across legacy networks, scrappy cable channels,
and streaming services is as robust as it’s been in decades.
There’s Jane the Virgin, the CW’s modern revamp of the
telenovela format for American audiences; The Carmichael
Show, a wonderfully quarrelsome family comedy; John
Ridley’s potent serial drama American Crime. Outside of
the traditional networks, Amazon’s Transparent tackles
trans identity and ageism with compassion and quirkiness;
Netflix boasts Orange Is the New Black and Narcos. On
Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, there’s the megachurch drama
Greenleaf, with Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar set to arrive
this month. All of these shows, in varying ways, tap into
the rich and complicated palette of daily life. Even Issa
Rae, who was able to broker her hit web series, The Mis-
Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, into a TV deal, created
and stars in Insecure, a show premiering on HBO this fall.
Yet for all the inclusion the streaming revolution has
cultivated — across gender, race, sexual orientation, and
religion — roadblocks persist, both in front of the camera
and behind it. According to a March 2016 report
from the Writers Guild of America, West, minorities
account for 13 percent of television writers and “remained
50 DIMENSION