Happy Black History Month, everyone. Enjoy it while you can, since it is the shortest month. There's a lot on TV this week, from the now-ubiquitous Bruce Jenner to Lance Bass to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to SNL at 40.
There's a new, terrific sitcom about Asians with an all-Asian cast, ABC's Fresh off the Boat, which got rave reviews from critics and Asians on social media, with some saying Eddie Huang (the show is based on his best-selling memoir) is "our Richard Pryor." The sitcom is the first Asian-American TV sitcom since Margaret Cho's All American Girl, which aired for one season in 1994. Fresh off the Boat follows the flashback reportorial style of comedy series like Everybody Hates Chris and The Goldbergs .
Then there's the measles drama, with the epicenter in California, where anti-vaccine lunacy is bringing back a disease that was eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. The Feb.5 episode of ABC's Nightline detailed via interviews with parents refusing to vaccinate (all young and white) that TV had driven their fears of vaccination, despite the science. One young mother told Nightline that she had seen noted anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model and former co-host of ABC's The View, talking about the issue, and it had "just terrified her." The measles outbreak has put babies and toddlers at risk because they are too young to get the MMR vaccine, and of course, people with HIV and immuno-suppressive illnesses. Pres. Obama has come out for vaccinations, as has Hillary Clinton, while Chris Christie, Rick Perry and Rand Paul have all made stupid anti-science statements, as is common in the GOP.
And there's NBC anchor Brian Williams "mis-remembering" that he wasn't in a war, like say, ABC's Bob Woodruff, who got part of his head blown off in 2006 by an IED while covering a story in Iraq and sustained a traumatic brain injury that required his re-learning how to speak and walk, or CBS's Kimberly Dozier, who was critically injured in Iraq by a car bomb that killed two members of her crew, as well as an American soldier. Dozier underwent 30 surgeries, plus skin grafts, during her recovery.
But back to Black History Month. While we know the object is celebration, it's also very much about illumining what's been elided from our collective history as a country. And that, of course, includes entertainment. The fall from grace of Bill Cosby, who was not only the first consistent black face on TV but also an omnipresent one, has been a source of commentary both within and outside of the black community. When prominent black men in entertainment like Chris Rock can't stop talking about the Cos, you know it's an issue. But Cosby has not been the face of blacks on TV in decades. While everyone remembers The Cosby Show with fondness, it debuted in 1984 and ended in 1992. It's nearly 25 years since it was on the tube. We can love the show in the past, we can appreciate Cosby's role in TV history, and we can move on to black actors who haven't been accused of 30 rapes.
One of the reasons Cosby has maintained his lionized status is because no one has ever replaced him. Between The Cosby Show and now, the closest TV has come to having an omnipresent black actor on TV is Kerry Washington, star of ABC's Scandal. Washington is everywhere. There's a 20-foot promo pic of her on the wall outside the ABC lot in Burbank, and she's that big everywhere else. A perennial talk-show guest, Washington is smart, funny, self-deprecating, gorgeous, a fashion icon. She was a movie star before she was a TV star, but she's only in her mid-30s and looks younger, which in Hollywood is important for actresses. She's been involved in politics: she campaigned for Obama in 2008, and in 2012 spoke at the Democratic National Convention. She's campaigned against violence against women, and is vocal in bringing attention to women and cancer.
This week she's on the cover of InStyle magazine, although you might not recognize her, since the cover photo made her many shades lighter, causing a furor on Feb .5 when the magazine went on sale. We don't have a problem with seeing Washington everywhere. We just want to see more black actors as visible as she is. It's not that there aren't black TV actors out there; we're seeing a lot of Viola Davis as well. It's that they are nearly always relegated to secondary roles. The place one sees black actors first and foremost on TV is next to a white star. The black sidekick is a consistent role for black actors, male and female.
David Oyelowo was snubbed by the Academy and did not receive an Oscar nomination for his commanding performance as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, arguably one of the most difficult roles of the year, as King is an American icon. While he has not spoke publicly about the snub, he has spoken out about the context of it, and what he said applies to TV as much as it does to film. On Feb.1 Oyelowo was on a Santa Barbara TV talk show saying that America really can only accept black actors in subservient roles. For us, one of the most egregious castings is Oscar winner Olivia Spencer as a nurse on Fox's Red Band Society. It's a role not much different from her role in The Help, for which she won the Oscar. Was there nothing else available for an actress of her caliber except a reprise of what she had already done?
African-Americans are 13% of the population, but only 5% of actors on TV. Women are dramatically underrepresented on TV: 52% of the population, but only 36% of roles on TV. Black women are underrepresented within that subset: only 2% of TV roles are held by black women, and sometimes it seems as if all of those are on three shows, all produced by black showrunner Shonda Rhimes.
In 2013, Washington was the first black actress to get an Emmy nomination in 18 years. It was Washington's first Emmy nomination, and the first time a black actress was nominated for Lead Actress in a Drama Series since the 1995 season, when Cicely Tyson was nominated for the short-lived NBC drama Sweet Justice. Diahann Carroll was the first nominee in 1963. But no black woman has ever won in the category. Yet Debbie Allen, who now both directs and co-stars on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, was nominated 19 times, and Alfre Woodard, who stars on NBC's State of Affairs, has been nominated 17 times. (Out gay director Paris Barclay, who has long been the face of black gay men behind the camera, has been nominated eight times.) These are depressing numbers a full 50 years since Bill Cosby became the first black to win an Emmy.
The success of Shonda Rhimes, who seems to have single-handedly brought black women into prominence on the TV landscape, has not created a ripple effect. While Rhimes' shows are models for diversity casting and include Asians, Latinos, and gays, blacks are still overwhelmingly sidekicks to white characters, with the only exceptions Rhimes' shows and a few BBC entries, like Luther, for which Idris Elba has been nominated for an Emmy, or Showtime's hilarious House of Lies, which stars Oscar nominee Don Cheadle, who has also been nominated for an Emmy for each of that show's three seasons.
Fox's comedy Brooklyn Nine Nine co-stars Andre Braugher, who has been nominated eight times for Emmys and won once for his role in Homicide: Life on the Street. On BNN, Braugher is doing double-duty as the show's gay character. Then there's Red Band Society, which is on its way out, co-starring Spencer. But why does the longest-running TV drama, NBC's Law & Order: SVU, have only one black actor in the ensemble cast when the show takes place in NYC, while the second-longest running TV drama, CBS' CSI, has not even one?
ABC debuts its answer to HBO's True Detective on March 5 with the much-anticipated American Crime, an anthology crime series created by African-American screenwriter John Ridley, who won the 2014 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. Ridley was the first African-American to win that award. Ridley has been writing for TV for more than 20 years, starting out on the sitcoms Martin and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Ridley was also a writer for out black lesbian comedian Wanda Sykes' show. But the pattern here is obvious: blacks have to already be stars to rise through the TV ranks.
On ABC's Nightline Feb. 6, Viola Davis spoke about the lack of roles for black women and women in her age group (she's about to turn 50). She also spoke about her role as Dr. Annalise Keating on the Rhimes-produced How to Get Away with Murder, created by out gay showrunner Peter Nowalk. Davis said, "I felt the only way that I could play Annalise is if I played her as a real woman. I feel that that's part of being a woman that people kind of throw in the trash heap when you see them on TV."
Black faces aren't any more visible on non-scripted TV. Larry Wilmore, whose The Nightly Show has been in the old Colbert Report spot on Comedy Central for a few weeks, is currently the only black late-night comedy host. Since Oprah left to start her own network, OWN, and Queen Latifah's short-lived daytime talk show was cancelled last year, the only black faces on daytime talk are Whoopi Goldberg on The View, Aisha Tyler and Sheryl Underwood on CBS' The Talk, and Wendy Williams on her show. There is, of course, BET, which has some superb programming, and OWN, which does as well. There are smatterings of black-driven animated sitcoms. But outside of the handful of shows we have noted here, blacks are still very much in the background of the TV landscape. We hope when we are writing about this next February, that will have changed. But for now Black History Month serves more as a reminder of what isn't than a celebration of what is when it comes to black visibility on the tube. TV really still is a straight white man's oeuvre, which considering that more women and people of color and gays watch TV than straight white men, isn't very smart on the part of the straight white male TV execs. Just saying.
Trans am
It was a high-visibility week for trans people on the tube, in no small part because of Bruce Jenner's 88-year-old mother telling the media that Jenner had informed her of Jenner's intention to transition. Jenner, best-known as an Olympic medalist and head of the Kardashian-Jenner reality-TV series clan, has been the subject of tabloid speculation for months as the former athlete underwent surgery to shave down an Adam's apple and appeared to have had other feminizing procedures. The Associated Press interviewed Jenner's widowed mother, Esther Jenner, 88, in Idaho on Feb.4, and she told the AP she had spoken to Jenner about the possible transition. "It was brief, and I said I was proud of him, and that I'll always love him," she said. "I never thought I could be more proud of Bruce when he reached his goal in 1976 [at the Olympics, where he won a gold medal in the decathlon], but I'm more proud of him now. It takes a lot of courage to do what he's doing."
The elderly Mrs. Jenner added, "It was a shock. It's hard to wrap your mind around it. But I am at peace with what he is and what he's doing." Until Jenner's rumored transition, the most public faces of transition have been Orange Is the New Black guest star Laverne Cox (who will be on Fox's comedy The Mindy Project, it was revealed Feb. 5), perennial talk-show guest Janet Mock, and reality-TV star Chaz Bono.
Meanwhile, the final season of Fox's Glee is doing a transitioning storyline. Coach Beiste, played by Emmy nominee Dot Marie Jones, who is an out lesbian in real life, is transitioning from female to male. The four-part story arc has Coach sporting a hipster-style beard and wearing a tie. Early releases of the scenes are both convincing and moving. Seeing the beloved Coach embraced by Sue (Jane Lynch) and students is definitely a several-hankie event.
Grey's Anatomy had a moment of lesbian visibility on the Feb. 5 episode, where a woman drug rep has a conversation with surgeon Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez). Callie thinks the rep is interested in her male colleague and tries to hook them up, but the woman says he's not her type. When Callie presses her, she says, "He has a penis."
Yep, that's a deal-breaker for lesbians. It was an example of how seamless these Rhimes shows are on lesbian and gay issues. On the Feb. 5 episode of How to Get Away with Murder, there was a moment where Colin said something that touched his boyfriend Oliver. Cue sudden intense kissing. As we said, seamless.
Speaking of seamless, we've ragged on Sean Hayes a lot in recent months for terrible forays on various TV shows. But we caught him guest hosting CBS' Late Late Show, and he was terrific. One guest was Dame Edna, who was hilarious and a perfect foil for Hayes. We think Hayes may have found his oeuvre. Someone float his name as a talk show host. He was terrific: funny, engaged, all that.
Finally, SNL is having their big 40th birthday celebration on Feb. 15 with many of the show's most famous alums returning for the special, among them Mike Meyers and Tina Fey. The show's creator, Lorne Michaels, told the Hollywood Reporter this week that he had few regrets over the four decades: that he had passed on some comics who turned out to be huge, including Steve Carrell, Stephen Colbert, Lisa Kudrow, Jim Carrey and Louis CK.
So for elusive sightings of black actors, non-stop speculation about Bruce Jenner, news anchors with memory problems and so much more, you really must stay tuned.