No major network is going to give time to a how which is minority heavy. They're too scared. The only time they give minority shows a chance is if they have nowhere to go but up and they want to try to get early success. FOX was more than happy to produce shows which were about black people, but as soon as they started becoming "respectable" due to stuff like the X-Files, the black faces went away.

As trite as it was, it's still a shame that the story the press used to sell about Gray's Anatomy - oh look at all these different races together - was blown to pieces by the ugly Isaiah Washington dramas and then the Katherine Heigl dramas, the Brooke Smith dramas. The media coverage turned away from racial integration to backstage chaos. If the talk had stayed towards integration, then more shows might try to cash in on the idea.

Back in the 60s, writers like Agnes Nixon KNEW TV was not integrated, America was not well integrated, and she wanted to do something about it. Today, we get the whole, "Everything's fine! What are you talking about???" backlash, and defensiveness, any time anything is brought up. We either get corny PSAs, tokens, or nothing at all. And any time a minority character does appear on the show, the cries of agenda and PC and jumping on a bandwagon start. In the eyes of many, it's "brave" to have a show which revolves around young, pretty, heterosexual white people.

And IIRC, Brooke Smith was dismissed from Grey's because her character was seen to be too much of a "butch dyke." And then they brought in Melissa George instead, didn't they? Who I like, but that's a real conventional choice. Generally, American television only cares to invest in lipstick lesbians for the titillation factor, and the lack of red state alienation. Stephanie Forrester doesn't count.

Speaking of lesbians, I was watching my Friday Night Lights S1 DVDs Saturday afternoon and was shocked to see that the mayor of Dillon is a lesbian. I consider myself a pretty die-hard fan of the show, but somehow, the issue was treated as such a non-issue that I never really noticed her feeling up her ladyfriend when she had Coach and Tami over for dinner. And now, speaking of FNL, that was a show that did good of job of integrating its lone main minority character (Smash) with the rest of the show, though his major storyline in the first season ('roids!) kinda islanded him. I loved the little touches, though, such as his Mama being the one to tell Tami she was pregnant and Coach making random visits to the Williams home. With the show moving to the "other side of town," this season, I think we may be getting more in the way of black and Latino characters. AMC's Michael B. Jordan joins the show, so who knows.

You know....... now that I'm REALLY thinking about it. When it comes to TV back then, there was almost as much minority presence on network TV in the 70's than today. Think about the shows from THAT time period that starred or co-starred minorities:

1: Good Times

2: The Jeffersons

3: What's Happening

4: That's My Mama

5: Tony Orlando And Dawn

6: Sonny and Cher (Cher's american indian, a TRUE rarity on TV)

7: Sanford And Son

8: Soul Train

9: Gimme A Break

10. Hawaii 5-0

11: Chips

12: Chico and The Man

13: Flip Wilson

It seems that heavily starred minority shows are more and more in the realm of cable TV... such as Soul Food on Showtime, which incidentally, was a black primetime soap that I thought was really good.

Edited October 6, 200916 yr by alphanguy74

Yes, primetime was much more open to blacks in the 70s. There were mostly sitcoms, which were often attacked for being stereotypical, but they were there. There was also the big TV dramas like Miss Jane Pittman and Roots.

The 80s had the big freezeout and then a return to black sitcoms after the Cosby Show took off.

The 90s had the FOX shows, not a lot else.

This decade has had even less. As you said, cable had more, Soul Food. The Wire. Oz. Oz had one of the greatest TV characters ever, Adebisi.

Donald Bogle's books go into great detail about this stuff.

Edited October 6, 200916 yr by CarlD2

2: Becuase of the homophobia within the black community, soap are afraid to write a gay black character.

No.

Just...no.

OLTL has done a lot of things right lately with its minority canvas; the Latino, black and gay components are, I I also am glad to see OLTL always pushing to continue Latino visibility with Antonio gone, even when it's only a tertiary character like Nick. Both Latino and gay, he is clearly an admirable guy, a nice fellow even though he's on the losing end of Kish. Putting him in there as an activist also advances OLTL's social conscience again. You can build on these minor characters (Nick, Mr. and Mrs. Evans, etc) and help them put together a larger whole with the more important minority contract players.

The Vegas are sorely missed.

I couldn't stand Antonio with Jessica but liked Tonio/Talia a lot & hated how they randomly killed her off instead of giving them a happy ending.

More Carlotta would be nice too with Clint possibly single soon & Markko working at the cafe TPTB should keep Sandra Santiago around.

Plus Tea spending time with The Vegas would let her be fun & get her away from Todd for at least a little while.

Kish is but TPTB need to not whitewash Kyle.

The magic of Kish is the chemistry of their opposite personalities.

Nick's a hottie hopefully TPTB keep him & don't turn him psycho to prop Kish like they do to third wheels in most romantic triangles.

I think Michael Park would've worked well with any number of daytime's underused actresses of color.

Michael Park & Amelia Marshall? LOVE.

Michael Park & Eva Tamargo? LOVE.

I never cared for Evangeline on OLTL, and I think her exit and Kish were the best things that ever happened to Layla, who would never have developed if she was still around. While REG was a beautiful woman and talented, I felt Evangeline as a character was another Lily-type, and then she was neutered further in that classic daytime way so as not to offend anyone, and then made sanctified a la Y&R's Christine or Natalia Livingston's Emily on GH. I don't think that's a good model for any character of any race, and I thought her two interracial romances, while perhaps laudatory by virtue of their very existence onscreen, were poorly written and acted, the way any other bad story with a same-race couple would be. Also, OLTL seemed to use Evangeline's character as a bludgeon to ward off criticism, or doing anything else with anyone else the audience might care for. No time for Layla, or for the Gannons, who audiences genuinely loved and cared for - the attitude was, who needs minority characters with personality when you have Evangeline making out with the leading men? I feel that's the same kind of blackmail Y&R now practices with Lily.

:wub: :wub:

The fact of the matter is, though, if it was an all black show, ABC would have never in a million bazillion years ever picked it up, ever ever ever everrrrrrrrr. That's what rubs me the wrong way about ABC Primetime. They're way too comfortable with their trendy white girl demographic...I don't see them ever trying to step out of that box until the box begins to cave in on them.

ABC clearly is after a certain demographic, and that is white upscale women. Grays Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Brothers and Sisters...it is clear all these shows are targeted to the same woman over and over and everyone else can just go watch Law&Order or WWE or something. I find TV underserves men, overserves women and here they come again with that Good Wife show or whatever it is called. But it seems to work for them because this is their niche, and with 500 channels a niche is probably the most you can expect.

This article i cam across is about sitcoms, but i seen someone a few posts up mention sitcoms so i thought id share. I wish it was a more in depth article tho...

Who is killing the African-American Sitcom?

With dozens of new sitcoms premiering on major networks this fall, only two center on African-American families. Both programs,

Brothers and The Cleveland Show, were picked up by Fox, and The Cleveland Show is voiced by mostly white actors. So how can it be that in an era when our country’s cultural balance is shifting faster than ever underneath the joint leadership of our first African-American president and American Idol’s soul judge Randy Jackson wat, black sitcoms are rapidly approaching extinction? And more importantly, who is responsible for their demise?

There was a period after NBC premiered Sanford and Son in 1972 when networks, inspired by the program’s ratings boon, hungrily sought out Norman Lear-produced series featuring an occasionally argumentative African-American patriarch. Thus, CBS’s Good Times and The Jeffersons (which is still the longest running black sitcom) were born. The growing market for minority casts extended through the ’80s and ’90s, when networks continuously scrambled to cash in on the next stage of black sitcom evolution. NBC hit ratings gold again with A Different World, the culturally significant monolith Cosby Show which bridged color-sensitive audiences when it earned five seasons worth of number-one Nielsen ratings, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. ABC scored with Diff’rent Strokes and Family Matters; CBS bought Family Matters and developed Cosby. You get the picture.

At some point in the early ’90s though, just as Fresh Prince was cresting in ratings, the three major networks shut down their black sitcom production trade. Maybe the abrupt stop was due to a focus group determining that the “trend” had been exhausted or just that the networks rode their plotlines into the airwave graves. Whichever the cause of death, Fox, the WB and UPN snatched up the carcasses and resuscitated them with fresh writers and talent over the late ’90s and early ’00s for notable hits like Living Single and The Bernie Mac Show.

Then in 2006, the genre hiccuped again when WB and UPN, the most supportive networks of African-American sitcoms, merged into the CW. After the CBS/Warner unit aired Everybody Hates Chris, the network’s programming ran lily white (One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, Melrose Place and 90210) despite the successes of its more diverse parents.

Since The CW’s homogenization, black sitcoms have mostly been exiled to the cable ghettos. BET airs the shows for its largely African-American audience, and TBS has discovered rich ratings with Tyler Perry’s House of Payne. But what happens to the sitcoms when TBS runs out of gas with House of Payne and BET’s declining viewership results in network disintegration, especially considering the increase in cost-efficient reality programming? The prognosis is simple: The African-American sitcom is the latest host for network parasites and will not have long before it is pronounced dead.

No major network is going to give time to a how which is minority heavy. They're too scared. The only time they give minority shows a chance is if they have nowhere to go but up and they want to try to get early success. FOX was more than happy to produce shows which were about black people, but as soon as they started becoming "respectable" due to stuff like the X-Files, the black faces went away.

As trite as it was, it's still a shame that the story the press used to sell about Gray's Anatomy - oh look at all these different races together - was blown to pieces by the ugly Isaiah Washington dramas and then the Katherine Heigl dramas, the Brooke Smith dramas. The media coverage turned away from racial integration to backstage chaos. If the talk had stayed towards integration, then more shows might try to cash in on the idea.

Back in the 60s, writers like Agnes Nixon KNEW TV was not integrated, America was not well integrated, and she wanted to do something about it. Today, we get the whole, "Everything's fine! What are you talking about???" backlash, and defensiveness, any time anything is brought up. We either get corny PSAs, tokens, or nothing at all. And any time a minority character does appear on the show, the cries of agenda and PC and jumping on a bandwagon start. In the eyes of many, it's "brave" to have a show which revolves around young, pretty, heterosexual white people.

I am not trying to be daft here, but scared of who exactly. African Americans share a large percentage of the viewing audience and I doubt that they will be offended if there is some representation of self. Unfortunately even with the attempts at OLTL African Americans are still regelated into the background or isolated from the gen population of the canvas. The Evans had no thought going into the development of this family just throw family members on screen when the need arises, I am still trying to figure out what is behind Sean's anger with his brother. Even with the amount of AA on the show, they still go through the same thing lack of screentime, lack of development, no connection/interaction to core families or characters, no A storylines or even lead in B stories.

It does seem like some state that they add them to the show to appease and then cart them away.

Who can forget ABC's last stab at an Asian family - the AMC story with "Henry and the Chins" (literally, they were named the Chins) who ran a Chinese restaurant! WTF!

The Chins were just one of Rayfield's horrific time as HW and his random slew of new characters with no connections to anyone on the show (oh I forgot, we got a scene whee Dr Joe said he'd been eating lunch at the Chinese restaurant for YEARS!). the main story was Henry wanted to be a musician but his parents were pressuring him to a doctor--which is a total cliche story but also one with some truth to it. That said everything about the characters and stories was a mess. (I miss the Santos on AMC--though maybe not perfect...)

However re primetime shows I'm not gonnabe too quick to jump on ABC--they still strike me as more often than not better at diversity than the other networks (I'm not counting cable here, by any means)

That's because of several reasons:

1: Lesbian SL's have limited appeal to audiences. Straight women aren't usually interested in them, gay men aren't most of the time, straight men aren't unless dildos are involved. A soap's target audience just won't watch a Lesbian SL for the most part. But straight women will watch a gay man SL all over the place. And straight women and gay men are the primary audience of soaps.

2: Becuase of the homophobia within the black community, soap are afraid to write a gay black character. Just like they are afraid to write a black man involved with a white woman, because of the threats the writers and actors get.

I think it's misconceptions such as these that keep the soap community from moving forward. Not that these are anyone's expressed interests, but it seems to be what's accepted from television networks or what we're giving into because, "that's just the way it is." When in most cases, it isn't. Is this what BF was talking about when he spoke about "training viewers"?

"lily white", "ghetto", "white washed" are just a few criticisms expressed that seem to go against people's idea POC. Even for the young actors, there seems to be no room/time to grow- annoying/needs an acting class- there is alot of responsibility and some hard criticism to meet as a POC. But this doesn't just sit with the community, the writers don't seem to understand that there is no way that one, even two characters is going to appeal to an entire audience. Even RJ on OLTL was met with criticism. Is there a reason the Williamsons, Vegas, and the Gannons couldn't exist on the show? When did "too many POC" equal "not enough white people"? They are quickly ushered off and into the back burner, never to catch up with the core of the show.

Which is why the mere sprinkling of characters here or there will never hold as a complete success. We hold diverse characters to standards no one on daytime has to deal with. But these networks seem to enjoy catering to small mindedness, and that's exactly what they get.

Otalia took off. It just shows that good writing and great chem is what soap fans want in a love story.

I am currently finding diversity on soaps to be a really big problem. I have been trying to cast the role of an Asian female in her late 20s/early 30s and there is nobody on the daytime landscape for me to select except from the girl who plays Kelly on GH, and I cant find any workable footage of her for my opening, so she's out. There should surely be more than ONE Asian female on contract out of the 7 daytime dramas on the air but evidently not. I never really paid attention to diversity as an issue in daytime but when you look at it closely the situation is pretty ridiculous.