How sad. This video is from about 15 years ago yet it could apply to daytime tv today and the politics backstage

This is sad when the President is African-American and you still can't get African-Americans on tv.

2008 had alot of black people on AMC. I also loved how they attempted to revive the Fryes before that. They had a big story and was used quite a bit.

AMC still has a relatively good amount of minorities but they need to give the Hubbards more story.Hopefully the new writers are interested in them.

Interesting topic - especially since I am hoping to attend a screening tomorrow night here in Brooklyn, at the BAM Rose Cinemas, of Bill Gunn's 'avant-garde black soap' "Personal Problems," filmed in 1980. Bill Gunn was a pioneering black filmmaker in the '60s, '70s and '80s who is best known for a horror picture called "Ganja & Hess," and his films are screening at BAM all weekend. "Personal Problems" was co-written by poet Ishmael Reed and is described by Reed as "an avant-garde soap opera...which permitted black producers, a black director, black actors, and black writers and actresses to have control over their work."

Apparently "Personal Problems," which I think may be a lot of compiled footage from a TV pilot rather than a cinematic feature (info is murky), followed the story of a young black nurse and her husband, a transit worker, with the nurse supporting her family while working in a hospital in Harlem, where they shot on location. Naturally, "Personal Problems" was not picked up by any network.

Here's another description courtesy of the University of California:

There are two genuine American creations: the blues, and the soap opera. Personal Problems, conceived by Oakland-based writer Ishmael Reed, is a black soap opera unfolding in the melancholy of a blue note. Enlisting legendary Bill Gunn (Ganga & Hess) as director, Reed and producer Walter Cotton sketched out an improvisatory scenario exploring the moody tribulations of a group of Harlem residents. Exhausted by big city life, Johnnie (Verta Mae Grosvenor), a nurse from South Carolina, is the heart and hearth of the affair. Around her spin her husband Charles (Walter Cotton), a transit worker; Father Brown (Jim Wright), and a circle of friends and neighbors. The Browns are unsentimental in their dealings with economic dead-ends, freeloading relatives, and capricious love. Director Gunn plays it on the outside with the cast, allowing scenes to find their own syncopations-very different from the edited affluence of Days of Our Lives. Reed's down-to-earth drama is not an anti-soap; rather, it's a naturalistic expansion of the form, adding ethnicity to the language of the everyday. And, like the blues, Personal Problems sings of the survivors. --Steve Seid

It'll be interesting to see how it is, and exactly what the format is. The limited information available suggests that they did try to shop the original material around to the networks, or it may have simply been a stand-alone piece of video art. Assuming I can get a ticket I'll post again.

Edited March 31, 201015 yr by Vee