By Tom Stempel.
A standard complaint about American television from the beginning that there are too few shows, especially comedies, that deal well with race. From 1951 to 1953 there was a show on CBS called Amos ‘n’ Andy with an all-black cast. It was based on a hugely successful radio show in the thirties and forties. On radio the main characters were played by the show’s white creators, but for television it was decided that blackface would be a little ridiculous. The show only lasted two seasons and was driven off the air by complaints of racial stereotyping. As a white child I thought it was funny, and seeing bits and pieces of episodes many years later, I still think it was funny and less objectionable than some movies of the period. But at the time it was the only show on the air with an all-black cast and groups such as the NAACP objected. CBS continued to syndicate the reruns of the show until the sixties, when it was pulled for good. You may be able to find it somewhere in the electronic universe.
In the sixties, Diahann Carroll became the first black actress to star in a sitcom in the 1968-1971 Julia. Her character was, as the old cliché goes, a credit to her race. The show was accepted not only by black audiences, but white audiences as well. The seventies brought more comedies starring African-Americans, although some, like The Jeffersons, seemed to me worse than Amos ‘n’ Andy in terms of stereotyped characterization, and not as funny to boot. In the eighties, The Cosby Show (1984-1992) managed to hit the sweet spot with American audiences. There was no question that the Huxtables were black, but they were relatable to everybody. And the show was funny.
Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff ‘Cliff’ Huxtable in The Cosby Show
Black-ish, which premiered last fall, was created by Kenya Barris. It is very much in the tradition of The Cosby Show, but with the racial element more to the front. Andrew “Dre” Johnson, the husband and father, is an ad man who has moved his family to a mostly white suburb and is now concerned that the kids may lose track of their blackness. So the franchise of the show is Dre trying to make sure the kids know their culture. One of the best episodes was “Martin Luther sKiing Day,” written by Lindsey Shockley. The Johnsons are going on their annual skiing vacation, but Dre is worried his kids are not as aware of King as they should be. So he is trying to push facts on them and show them racism is real life. He complains to the hotel that they were obviously given bad rooms because they are the only black family there. Then another black family walks in. On the road they are stopped by a white cop, who turns out to be the politest white cop they (or any of us) have ever met. O.K., so how does Shockley end the episode? They are on a bus to the slopes and the driver wants a woman with a snowboard to sit at the back of the bus, which causes one of Dre’s sons to give a speech on how snowboarders and skiers are equal. The monologue is sharp, surprising, and funny.
In “Andre From Marseille” (written by David Hemingson), Zoey, the older teenage daughter, has her first “serious” boy friend. At first it does not bother Dre that the kid is French, but it does bother him that he’s white. Dre’s co-workers, some white, some black, are upset that he does not see the real problem is that the guy is French. Zoey brings Andre (his nickname is also Dre) to the house, and the women in the house (Rainbow, the mother, and Diane, the smart-mouthed kid sister) love him; the men (Dre and his two sons) hate him. But later Andre drops Zoey. Dre assumes it’s because Zoey is black, and is about to tell off Andre, when he sees that Andre’s new girl friend is black. You can see here the way the writers use the racial dynamics in a comic way. Andre Jr., the oldest son, finds out that Andre dropped Zoey because she’s shallow. Dre bites the bullet and tells her. She’s so relieved, because she thought it was because she was ugly.
Marsai Martin as Diane Johnson and Jenifer Lewis as Ruby in Black-ish
Black-ish got off to an uneven start in the fall, but it has gotten better and more sure-footed as the season progressed. Anthony Anderson, the comedian, was a bit over the top as Dre in the opening episodes, but has pulled back a bit. Tracee Ellis Ross, as Rainbow, started out subdued, a nice counterpoint to Anderson, but they as he brought his tone down, she upped hers. They have now worked out a balance. The writers have also been good at developing the kids so they are not just generic children.
If blacks did not show up in television comedies in the fifties, Latinos showed up even less, with the spectacular exception of Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy (1951-1961). He only got the part (CBS wanted Lucille Ball to have a white husband, as she had on her radio show) because Ball would not do the show without him, her off-screen husband at the time. By the seventies there were sitcoms with Latino characters, some successful, like Chico and the Man (1974-1978), and some not. Phil Mishkin, a television writer I interviewed for my book on television writing, had written for All in the Family (1971-1992) and Happy Days (1974-1984) when he worked on a summer season show Viva Valdez in 1976. It was about a Mexican-American family living in East Los Angeles and it was a horrible experience for Mishkin. He and most of the writers were Jewish and the cast was Latino and there were constant arguments about the “authenticity” of the material. Mishkin says there is always an “us-against-them” aspect of any show. As he puts it, “It’s always, ‘Those writers are giving us bullshit that we can’t say.’ ‘Those damned actors can’t say our bullshit.’ But in that case it was also [the] ethnic mix. It seemed to give the right to say, ‘You Jewish writers don’t know what the hell you are talking about.’” They tried to get some Latino writers on the show, but as Miskin says, “It’s a profession writing comedy. It’s a tough one. Just because a guy is a good writer or a good Latino writer didn’t mean that he could do a good Latino comedy.”
Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo and Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo in I Love Lucy
Ugly Betty (2006-2010) was based on the Colombian soap opera and developed into a one-hour comedy-drama by Silvio Horta. The American version was more comedy than soap opera. Jane The Virgin is this season’s equivalent of Ugly Betty, but as developed by Jennie Snyder Urman from a Venezuelan telenovela, it is not simply a comedy, but a satire on telenovelas with their soap opera excesses. That is a tricky blend of tones to manage and Urman and her writers have managed it well. On the one hand, we find Jane adorable (and not adorkable, but truly adorable; she is not a manic pixie dream girl), but we laugh at the plotting extremes the show goes to. The writers have a narrator who is both funny and unctuous and who sets the tone. I am in constant awe of the way the writers balance the tonal elements, and they are helped by the great cast who seem to be on the same page as the writers.
A slightly more conventional Latino sitcom is Cristela, created by and starring Latina comedian Cristela Alonzo (Kevin Hench, an experienced writer and producer, is the co-creator). In the show Cristela is a young Mexican-American woman working her way, slowly, through law school. She has landed an unpaid internship at a prestigious Dallas law firm, but her family keeps pushing more traditional values on her. The tension over old values and new between generations of minorities has been a part of movie and television shows ever since the original Jazz Singer in 1927. “Hypertension,” written by Pat Bullard, has her sister Daniella supposedly worried about Cristela’s health, but in reality her concern is that Cristela is not slim and fashionable. Cristela is what author Alexander McCall would describe as “traditionally built,” and the show is all right with that. When Daniella gets Cristela to have her blood pressure taken, Cristela insists Daniella has hers taken too. You can see where that is going: Cristela’s is fine, but her sister’s is high. And at least so far Cristela does not have a boy friend, nor does she seem to feel the need for one.
Cristela Alonzo as Cristela
The way race is dealt with in the show is in the form of Cristela’s reactions: to her family and their old-fashioned values, and to the racial comments her boss at the law firm Trent makes. Trent is not a mean racist, just a rather stupid one. As the first season progresses, he has learned at least a little from Cristela.
There have been even fewer Asian-Americans on networks. In 1994 comedian Margaret Cho starred in a series, All-American Girl, created by Gary Jacobs based on Cho’s family. The show had the usual generational disagreements over values. Behind the scenes there were even more heated arguments between Cho and the network. The show was dropped after 19 episodes, but at least Cho got an HBO special out of it that hilariously recounted her adventures with network television. Mindy Kalling followed up Cho in 2012 with The Mindy Project, where she had more control over the show than Cho had over hers. This season we now have Fresh Off the Boat, based on the memoir of the same name by Eddie Huang about his years growing up as a teen in the nineties.
The show was controversial before it even premiered. A month before the premier Eddie Huang wrote a scathing piece about his problems with the show not being faithful to his book. You can read his rant here. (For a more objective look at the development of the show, read this article in the Los Angeles Times.) It is clear that Huang has not a clue how American television is created, nor is he clear on what can and cannot be shown in film terms. For example, one of his favorite scenes in the book is discovering macaroni and cheese for the first time. Here is how he writes about it in the article: “ I remember the first time I saw macaroni and cheese, as a guest in my friend Jeff’s home, thinking it was pig intestines cut into half-moons hanging out in an orange sauce. Jeff found it incredulous that I didn’t know what macaroni and cheese was, but it was formative; he got a taste of macaroni and cheese from my eyes, discovering how it felt to be gazed on and seen as exotic instead of being the one gazing.” O.K., how do you show what Eddie and Jeff are thinking, and how Jeff discovered “how it felt to be gazed on and seen as exotic instead of being the one gazing”? What do you have him say or do that tells us that? Not surprisingly, the scene was eventually dropped from the show.
The cast of Fresh off the Boat
Many of Eddie’s comments in the first part of the piece were the ones quoted around the country, if not around the world. He dumps on the Persian-American showrunner Nahnatchka Khan: “The network’s approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane.” He is ever harsher about the Asian American writer Melvin Mar. But if you read all the way to the end of his piece, you will discover that he sorts of likes the show and thinks at least some of what he was writing about got into it.
He is right in that there are some nice cultural details, but the problem I had with the show is more fundamental. It is just not funny. The showmakers seem to think that simply mentioning cultural differences is enough. It is not. In the pilot, written by Khan, Eddie takes a Tupperware container of Chinese food to school. White kids hate the smell of it, and he is fascinated by their Lunchables. O.K., you can see where the jokes are supposed to go, but they are not there. In the second episode, “Home sweet home- school,” written by Kourtney Kang, the mother is upset that the public schools are not tough enough, and starts her own Chinese Learning Center for the kids. Kang gets nothing much out of this, since the mother takes the kids off to the family business as a field trip.
To see how it should be done, look at the pilot of Black-ish, written by Barris. Dre is afraid his kids are not learning enough about black culture. He mentions to Bow that being bi-racial, she’s not really black. In real life, she would say something like, “Oh, yes I am.” What she says in the show is the single best line of the new season: “If I’m not black, then would someone please tell my hair and my ass?” That’s how you write funny about race.
I don’t normally run an employment agency for writers, but I cannot resist making a suggestion to Kahn and the staff of Fresh Off the Boat. While I was working on this item, we happened to see a new play at the East West Players, the primary Asian-American theatre in the country. The play was Washer/Dryer and was written by a young Indian-American playwright named Nandita Shenoy. It’s about an Indian-American actress who marries, in something of a hurry, a Korean-American guy, who has a real tiger mom. It’s not only about race, but about television commercials and the importance of real estate in New York City. Shenoy really brings the funny. I’m going to keep an eye out for her work whether Fresh does or not.
