2021.09.13 黑人电视的不成文规定

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INHERITANCE
NOT ENOUGH HAS CHANGED SINCE SANFORD AND SON
The unwritten rules of Black TV

By Hannah Giorgis
SEPTEMBER 13, 2021
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I. “You Can Hear a Pin Drop”
carl winslow, the protagonist of the ’90s sitcom Family Matters, wore his badge with honor. On the show, about a middle-class Black household in Chicago, Winslow (played by Reginald VelJohnson) loved being a police officer almost as much as he hated seeing the family’s pesky neighbor, Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), popping up in his home. Carl was a quintessential TV-sitcom cop, doughnut clichés and all. In one scene, he announces that he’s just had the worst day of his life: “I was in a high-speed car chase and ran out of gas.” The humor did not always break new ground.


The cast of Family Matters was predominantly Black, but the series was written and conceptualized mainly by white people. A 1994 episode, “Good Cop, Bad Cop,” illustrates the degree to which a Black writer could be sidelined, even on a show about a Black family. In the episode, Carl’s teenage son, Eddie (Darius McCrary), storms into the house, visibly upset about a run-in with the police. Yet Carl insists that Eddie’s account of being harassed and forced to the ground doesn’t add up: “That’s unusual procedure—unless you provoked it.” Carl’s response is jarring. He may be Officer Winslow when he’s on duty, but he’s still a Black father—one who ought to know how police in America often treat young Black men. Eddie walks away angry.


Felicia D. Henderson, a Black producer and screenwriter who worked on Family Matters from 1994 to 1996 before moving on to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Soul Food, and Empire, recalls the tension in the writers’ room when the episode was being workshopped. Television shows are typically written by a staff that collaborates on scripts; trading ideas and criticism around a table is an integral and sometimes raucous part of the process. Yet there’s a hierarchy in the room: The senior writers hold sway and the showrunner is ultimately in charge. Family Matters was no different. Then a junior writer, and one of only a few Black staffers on a team of more than a dozen, Henderson was at first hesitant to weigh in when a white writer tossed out the possibility of Carl responding the way he did. But the line felt wrong to her, and she spoke up. “I just said, ‘Well, no Black father would tell his Black son that,’ ” Henderson told me recently. “And the room got silent. I mean, you can hear a pin drop.” The white showrunner defended the line, and it went in. “It was clear in the room and in the moment that I had offended them,” Henderson recalled. “Like, ‘What, are you saying—we’re racist?’ No, but I am saying that’s not realistic.”

“Good Cop, Bad Cop” ends with Carl confronting the officer and reconciling with Eddie. Viewers get the kind of safe conclusion that wraps up a “very special episode”: Eddie was right to be upset, because some police officers really are racists. Last year, a month after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, the Family Matters cast reunited on Zoom to look back at the story line from 25 years ago. “When they wrote the episode, we didn’t realize it would be so revealing and telling today,” VelJohnson said.

Revealing and telling, yes, but maybe not in the way he thought. For Henderson, working on Family Matters offered an introduction to a defining feature of her long career in Hollywood. Negotiated authenticity is the phrase she uses to describe what many Black screenwriters are tasked with producing—Blackness, sure, but only of a kind that is acceptable to white showrunners, studio executives, and viewers.

Still from 'Family Matters' with characters Eddie Winslow, Steve Urkel with arms extended, and Carl Winslow in uniform.
From left to right: Eddie Winslow (Darius McCrary), Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), and Carl Winslow (Reginald VelJohnson) in Family Matters. The sitcom’s cast was predominantly Black, but the series was written and conceptualized mainly by white people. (ABC / Everett Collection)
The nature of the “negotiation” that Black writers must conduct has shifted over the years. Half a century ago, just getting Black characters on TV was a hurdle, and Black screenwriters were few. Today, as more networks and streaming platforms advertise the Black shows they’ve lined up—you’d be forgiven for thinking that every month is Black History Month—it is tempting to believe that Black performers and writers now have a wealth of opportunities, including wide creative latitude for those who make it to the top. This era of “peak TV,” in which the entertainment landscape is saturated with more high-quality series than ever before, has been a boon in some respects. According to data collected in UCLA’s 2020 “Hollywood Diversity Report,” an annual study of the entertainment industry’s progress, or lack of it, nearly 10 percent of lead roles on TV were filled by Black actors, likely the closest the industry has ever come to proportional representation (which would be about 13 percent). Shonda Rhimes, as titanic as any creative figure in the industry, is the force behind several of the most successful series in recent memory, ratings juggernauts such as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder. Kenya Barris, the creator of Black-ish, has produced comedic series that take on deadly serious issues of race while appealing to a diverse group of viewers.

Yet for all the strides that figures like Rhimes and Barris have made, the power in the television industry still rests mostly in the hands of white executives. The UCLA diversity report revealed that less than 11 percent of broadcast scripted-show creators, less than 15 percent of cable scripted-show creators, and less than 11 percent of digital scripted-show creators come from any underrepresented racial group. (These groups, taken together, make up roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population.) At Netflix, for which Rhimes produces shows and Barris did until recently, only 12 percent of scripted-series creators are people of color—this from a study commissioned by Netflix itself. According to a 2017 survey of the industry as a whole, 91 percent of shows are led by white showrunners. Too often, as Henderson put it to me, “it’s still white people determining what the Black experience is and then hiring Black writers to ‘authenticate’ it.”

Listen to Hannah Giorgis discuss this story with the TV writer Susan Fales-Hill on The Experiment podcast.


Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

Since its invention, television has shaped this country’s self-image. To the extent that we share notions of “normal,” “acceptable,” “funny,” “wrong,” and even “American,” television has helped define them. For decades, Black writers were shut out of the rooms in which those notions were scripted, and even today, they must navigate a set of implicit rules established by white executives—all while fighting for the power to write rules of their own.

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II. Othello in Watts
the history of significant black representation on television is a short one. The medium’s racial progress has been like that of most other American industries: slow, cyclical, uneven. In the early years, Black Americans turned on their TV sets and found themselves written out of the American story—or, worse, appearing only as caricatures. Not long ago, I came across a photograph of the 1963 March on Washington that made clear how starved Black audiences were to see their lives depicted on TV. In the photo, a protest sign, referring to the popular program Lassie, reads: look mom! dogs have tv shows. negroes don’t!!

That wasn’t completely true. In the 1950s and ’60s, African Americans like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. headlined variety shows. But the discontent expressed in messages like that March on Washington sign spoke to something bigger than token representation: a belief, at least among the middle class, that most existing television shows didn’t account for the political or cultural interests of Black people. At the time, comedies and dramas with Black writers and actors were virtually nonexistent. The few early roles available for actors of color drew on offensive stereotypes and outright minstrelsy—Amos ’n’ Andy, which aired from 1951 to 1953, was the most notorious example. White television executives were reluctant to sign off on story lines that featured Black people in complex roles or depicted them as a central part of American society. TV advertising was aimed at the white middle class.


In 1968, NBC debuted Julia, starring Diahann Carroll as a single mother raising a son while working as a nurse. Julia was the first middle-class Black woman to be featured as the lead character in a prime-time series, and given the show’s conceit—she had been widowed when her husband was killed in Vietnam—it might have offered a pointed commentary on the politics of the moment. In practice, however, the series stuck to easy laughs about family life, rarely touching on race except to make jokes that Carroll in a memoir characterized as “warm and genteel and ‘nice.’ ” The show’s creator, Hal Kanter, was white, and as he told Ebony in 1968, he wanted “entertainment,” not “agony.” In a cover interview for TV Guide, published eight months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Carroll acknowledged the show’s shortcomings. “At the moment,” she said, “we’re presenting the white Negro. And he has very little Negro-ness.” She would later tell Kanter that the stress of playing a role so far removed from the Black life she knew had made her physically ill.

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Not until 1972 did a network attempt something more daring. That year, Norman Lear, the creator of the hit series All in the Family, and the producer Bud Yorkin launched Sanford and Son, an adaptation of the BBC’s Steptoe and Son. The show starred the Black actors John Elroy Sanford (better known as Redd Foxx) and Demond Wilson as father-son junk dealers Fred and Lamont. The Sanfords were hardly the archetypal family next door. They lived in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood that existed to most non-Black viewers as the focal point of the 1965 police-brutality protests that escalated into a week of violence. The series regularly addressed the racism its characters faced as Black men navigating a post-civil-rights-era America, and the passage of time has not blunted its edge. In one episode, Lamont, who dreams of the stage, is preparing to act in Othello. He has the title role—the dark-skinned “Moor.” A white woman plays Desdemona. When Fred stumbles on a rehearsal of the play’s murderous climax, he pulls his Black son and the white woman apart. He isn’t reassured when he’s told that it’s just a play. “Well you better have the National Guard standing by,” he warns.

For many Black viewers, seeing that kind of exchange between father and son in prime time was thrilling, a fact that Lear picked up on when he looked out at his studio audience. By then, he had been working in television for two decades; he knew firsthand how white most of those audiences were. The live audience for Sanford and Son was different. “There’s no experience like standing behind an audience composed like that—half Black, or half Black and brown, but all kinds of people—and watching them laugh hard, like, belly laugh,” Lear, who is 99, told me recently. “I’m very confident that added time to my life.”

Sanford and Son soared to the top of national ratings, challenging the long-held industry assumption that white audiences wouldn’t tune in to a series about Black characters. To some degree, this was a function of Lear’s earlier successes: Fred Sanford drew easy comparisons to Archie Bunker, the blue-collar patriarch of All in the Family. Both characters were cantankerous middle-aged men; both tossed around racial slurs and misogynistic commentary. Some of the humor has not aged well. Still, the later series, which ran for six seasons, exposed the prime-time audience to Black performers and Black modes of comedy. Foxx didn’t regularly write for the show, but Sanford’s incisive commentary on the indignities and joys of Black life in America worked so well thanks to his training as a stand-up comedian, with a style and sensibility the writers could channel. “He was a lounge act in Las Vegas, and we happened on him and couldn’t get over how much he belonged on television,” Lear recalled. Sanford brought the creative genius of Black comics to viewers who would never set foot in the kinds of clubs where Foxx and his peers performed. The show later pulled in the writing skills of other Black comics, including Paul Mooney and Richard Pryor, and employed Ilunga Adell, one of the first Black writers to work full-time on a network series.

3 video stills: Lamont and Fred Sanford clasping hands and laughing; Julia and her son talking; George and Louise Jefferson talking in their living room
Julia (Diahann Carroll, middle) was the first middle-class Black woman to be featured as the lead character in a prime-time series. The Norman Lear–produced shows Sanford and Son (top) and The Jeffersons (bottom) proved that series with predominantly Black casts could be hits. (Everett Collection; RGR Collection / Alamy; Columbia TV / Everett Collection)
Sanford and Son made possible the spate of Black sitcoms that followed, including others from Lear. The Jeffersons had a direct All in the Family connection: George (Sherman Hemsley) and Louise (Isabel Sanford) owned a dry-cleaning chain in Queens and had lived next door to the Bunkers. Their own series saw them shine, as business success allowed the couple to move from Queens to that “deeeeluxe apartment in the sky,” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Black writers on the series included Sara Finney-Johnson, who would go on to co-create the sitcom Moesha, and Booker Bradshaw, an actor who later wrote for Good Times and The Richard Pryor Show.


Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons proved that series with predominantly Black casts could be hits. Yet white executives continued to view Black shows as too much of a gamble. They didn’t want to risk losing a large, affluent white audience by appealing to what they dismissed as a smaller, poorer Black one. Television therefore remained almost entirely white; to be a Black writer or actor in the TV industry of the 1970s was to face exclusion at nearly every turn. When it came to staffing creative teams, the presumption was that white writers could write anything at all, but Black writers could contribute only to Black shows.

III. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t
the 1980s produced little programming that focused on Black performers, and few of the shows lasted more than a single season. At the time, JET magazine published a weekly list of every Black appearance on television, a list that generally showed African Americans playing “comic support” or “minority sidekick” roles. The August 13, 1984, issue included the following: Kim Fields as the precocious Dorothy “Tootie” Ramsey on The Facts of Life, Roger E. Mosley as the helicopter pilot T.C. on Magnum P.I., Tim Reid as Lieutenant “Downtown” Brown on Simon & Simon, and Paula Kelly as the public defender Liz Williams on Night Court.


The lack of opportunities can partly be explained by the waning dominance of sitcoms, where Black writers and actors had made some inroads. Some of the explanation is cultural. Ronald Reagan was president. Family Ties, with its former-hippie parents raising a conservative son, was a reverse All in the Family, but there was no Sanford-style counterpart. On both Diff’rent Strokes, which ran from 1978 to 1986 on NBC, and Webster, which ran from 1983 to 1989 on ABC, Black youngsters (played by Gary Coleman and Emmanuel Lewis, respectively) were essentially rescued from poverty by rich white families, a parable of trickle-down harmony. The Blackness of the two boys existed in opposition to the white affluence surrounding them.

The Cosby Show was the great exception. Today, Bill Cosby’s name is synonymous with his crimes: The 84-year-old actor was convicted of felony sexual assault in 2018 and sentenced to a prison term of up to 10 years. (Earlier this year, he was released from prison after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction.) But The Cosby Show remains a touchstone. It was one of the few television shows in the 1980s with a predominantly Black cast. It was also hugely successful—among the highest-rated shows in the history of the medium.

Cosby told one producer: “We’re leaving all of the racial issues up to Newhart.”
By the time he developed his eponymous show, Cosby was a beloved comedian, and had co-starred with Robert Culp in the 1960s drama I Spy, a show whose international settings provided a convenient topical distance from civil-rights protests and urban strife in the U.S. Given this background, Cosby had far more control than other Black creators and performers in the industry. He envisioned his new series as a portrait of a family that any American could relate to. “I want to show a family like the kind I know: children who are almost a pain in the neck, and parents who aren’t far behind,” he told TV Guide in 1984. The series presented a rare vision of upper-middle-class Black life on TV. Cliff Huxtable (Cosby), a doctor, and his lawyer wife, Clair (Phylicia Rashad), lived in a Brooklyn brownstone and guided their children toward aspirational excellence—television’s very own Du Boisian “Talented Tenth.”

Cosby’s determination to depict an affluent Black family was radical in its way. For one, it challenged viewers who could only conceive of a Black household that looked like Fred and Lamont Sanford’s junk-strewn living room—or, at best, the bootstrapping success of the Jeffersons. But it also pushed back on a pernicious idea that had taken hold among television executives and critics alike: that Black programs must not only be compelling creative productions—good TV shows—but also somehow manage to capture Black life in a way that white people deem “realistic.” Susan Fales-Hill, one of just a handful of Black writers on Cosby’s creative staff, recalls a white Viacom executive dismissing the Huxtables as not representative of Black life: “Yeah, it’s a good show, but this family is not Black; they’re white.” When Fales-Hill asked him what made them white, the executive said, “Well, look at that house they live in.” Fales-Hill replied, “My mother grew up in Brooklyn in a house that looked a lot like that, taking violin lessons while her sister took piano lessons.”

The writer John Markus, who is white and was an executive producer on Cosby, remembers the show’s star explicitly pushing back against the expectation that his show be “Black” in a way that conformed to the perceptions of people who aren’t. Cosby also resisted the demand that a series about Black Americans be about race. The characters occasionally made references to global events, such as anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, but they were rarely seen having experiences with homegrown racism, despite living in a deeply segregated city. An episode that aired close to Martin Luther King’s birthday didn’t dwell on the politics of the holiday, instead marking the occasion more subtly: A squabble over borrowed clothing is exposed for its pettiness when the family becomes transfixed by King’s “I Have a Dream” speech playing on the Huxtables’ TV set. At the start of the second season, Markus told me, journalists “wanted an answer to the question ‘When will the show get into issues like multiracial dating—like, when are these kids going to date a white; when are you going to do that story?’ And at some point I said, ‘I’ve got to go talk to Bill about this,’ and I went to his dressing room. He didn’t even hesitate. He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘You go back to each one of them and tell them we’re leaving all of the racial issues up to Newhart,’ which was the whitest show on the planet.”

White executives weren’t alone in thinking that Cosby was an unrealistic representation of Black life. The series elicited barbed reactions from some Black critics as well. Ostensibly a “positive” image of a Black family, the show was criticized for inviting white viewers to believe that racial progress had already been achieved. “As long as all blacks were represented in demeaning or peripheral roles, it was possible to believe that American racism was, as it were, indiscriminate,” the Harvard historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a 1989 column in The New York Times. “The social vision of ‘Cosby,’ however, reflecting the minuscule integration of blacks into the upper middle class (having ‘white money,’ my mother used to say, rather than ‘colored’ money), reassuringly throws the blame for black poverty back onto the impoverished.”

Gates’s critique and the white executive’s incredulous reaction to the Huxtables’ lifestyle reflected the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma that Cosby writers faced: Be Black, but not too Black. Or: Be Black, but not like that. White writers were never whipsawed this way. The characters on Three’s Company or Cheers were not expected to convey some universal white experience. As even Gates allowed, the problem was bigger than Bill Cosby: “It’s not the representation itself (Cliff Huxtable, a child of college-educated parents, is altogether believable), but the role it begins to play in our culture, the status it takes on as being, well, truly representative.” A television landscape with a single prominent Black series gave viewers a single perspective on Black life.

At first, the Cosby spin-off A Different World seemed unlikely to escape this bind. The show followed Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) to Hillman College, the fictional historically Black institution that Cliff and Clair Huxtable had attended. When that series was first conceived, it focused just as much on a white student at Hillman (and the bias she experienced) as it did on Denise. Only later did the premise change, with Denise becoming the central character and her white roommate, an aspiring journalist played by Marisa Tomei, taking a supporting role. Throughout its first season, A Different World depicted a college atmosphere that failed to capture the spirit and nuances of HBCU life. Jasmine Guy, who played the snobbish Whitley Gilbert, remembers an early script in which students called professors by their first names. “My father taught at Morehouse,” Guy told me. “There’s just no way.”

The tone changed when Debbie Allen, an alumna of Howard University, was brought on as executive producer and director. “When Debbie came on board,” Susan Fales-Hill told me, “she was the one who really shook it up.” Allen was a formidable presence. While Cosby’s show largely ignored issues of race, Allen told Cosby that people on her show needed to talk about Blackness and about the issues of the day. “I almost fell off my chair,” Fales-Hill recalled, “when he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ”

Still of Whitley Gilbert in profile talking with Dwayne Wayne, with sunglasses flipped up
Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy) and Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) in the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World. Though it never occupied the place in popular culture that Cosby did, it was far more radical, exploring racism, AIDS, and homelessness. (Carsey-Werner Co. / Everett Collection)
Under Allen, A Different World went all the places its progenitor wouldn’t. The series never occupied the place in popular culture that The Cosby Show did. But it was far more radical, subtly altering the trajectory of television—both through its handling of race and through the opportunities it gave to Black writers who have shaped the industry in the decades since.

A Different World explored racism, AIDS, homelessness, and rape, grounding its treatment of these subjects in the experiences of characters who varied in personality, appearance, and social status. Denise, of course, came from a comfortably upper-middle-class family. Her other roommate, Jaleesa Vinson (Dawnn Lewis), had enrolled at Hillman at the age of 25, after a failed marriage; she was typically shown working at a job. Guy’s Whitley Gilbert was the daughter of well-to-do Hillman alumni; she had arrived at school with the express intention of finding a husband. Other characters included the playboy Ron Johnson (Darryl M. Bell), the freewheeling activist Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer), the athletic graduate student Walter Oakes (Sinbad), and Whitley’s eventual romantic interest, the lovable nerd Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison). “What I loved about doing A Different World was the diversity of Black people that we had on the show,” Guy told me. “So none of us felt the burden of being all things to all people.”

This isn’t to say that the series avoided the scrutiny of white executives. Fales-Hill remembered an encounter with the network over a scene in which Whitley and Dwayne were arguing about the Amistad, the slave ship whose Black captives took control but were eventually apprehended and put on trial. She recalled, “The network came to us and said, ‘You know, can’t Whitley and Dwayne be arguing about their date on Saturday night?’ ”

One writer recalled white colleagues looking her way and asking, “Does that sound right to you?,” as though there were a single way to be, or to sound, Black.
In 1992, Allen and the show’s writers wanted to take on the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King. For the white executives to whom Allen, Fales-Hill, and the other writers reported, the riots were dangerous narrative territory. The Los Angeles that the executives knew best looked very different from King’s Los Angeles; they saw the riots as an ugly chapter in the city’s history, something to get past, not memorialize. Eventually, Allen and Fales-Hill persuaded the network to let them write a two-part episode that directly addressed the riots. Fales-Hill remembered having an ominous feeling after the meeting—as if it had been a Pyrrhic victory. “They backed off, and she and I left that meeting going, ‘Okay, Thelma and Louise—we’ve driven off the cliff here.’ ”

The two-part episode, “Honeymoon in L.A.,” opened the show’s sixth season. Whitley and Dwayne are on their honeymoon in Los Angeles, and the couple is separated just as the city erupts. Whitley, ever the sheltered southern belle, takes refuge in the luxury-goods section of a department store; at one point, she pretends to be a mannequin. Dwayne, meanwhile, unwittingly helps some looters. Thirty years later, some of the dialogue feels trite or didactic; Sister Souljah makes a guest appearance to inform Whitley that “they can beat us, kill us, do whatever they wanna do—and get off, just like they always have.” But for Allen, the writers, and the cast, the episode was an important reflection of the reality that Black people, especially young Black people, around the country were experiencing. Getting such raw material onto prime-time television meant affirming that pain—and showing white viewers how the verdict had reverberated across Black households. At the end of the sixth season, the series was canceled.

IV. “Under-Paid Negroes”
the writers who came through A Different World went on to create some of the most prominent Black sitcoms of the ’90s, a period that proved to be a golden era for the form. Among these alumni were Yvette Lee Bowser, the force behind Living Single (the first prime-time TV show created by a Black American woman), and Cheryl Gard, a producer of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Those series ran on Fox and NBC, respectively, and won the wide audiences that more traditional broadcast networks could still command. Opportunities for other Black creators came from the newer networks UPN and The WB. An early example of the market fragmentation that was to come, these new outlets were less concerned with bringing as many viewers as possible to national advertisers. Rather, they were content—in their first few years, at least—to reach specific demographic groups and build intense loyalty.

Read: How the ’90s kinda world of Living Single lives on today

By the late ’90s, UPN and The WB had evening slates full of Black shows and employed a disproportionate share of the writers of color in the television industry. In 1996, UPN debuted Moesha, starring the R&B singer Brandy Norwood. With her dark skin and braids, the title character of Moesha was—and still is—a rarity in the coming-of-age subgenre. (While Moesha was on the air, and for several years afterward, Brandy’s photo seemed to be tacked up on the wall of every Black beauty salon in America.) The WB was home to family shows such as The Parent ’Hood and Smart Guy, which mostly served up earnest lessons and tender moments, though they occasionally took on weightier issues such as substance abuse and racism in sports. In 1995, the network also picked up Sister, Sister from ABC, a teen comedy co-created by the writer and director Kim Bass.

For Black writers, especially those who’d previously worked only on series with white showrunners, these new opportunities were a revelation—a chance to learn the craft in a space where at least some of the others in the room understood the lives of the characters they were tasked with depicting. During the season that they worked together on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Felicia Henderson and Larry Wilmore were the only Black writers on the show, which had been created by a white couple, Susan and Andy Borowitz. When we spoke, Henderson recalled that much of her job amounted to answering a single question: “Is that what Black people do?” She remembers white colleagues on another show looking her way and asking, “Does that sound right to you?,” as though there were a single specific way to be, or to sound, Black. Henderson would reply, “I was at a meeting of the All Black Writers Who Know What All Other Black People Think just last night …”

Henderson later went to work on Moesha—a very different atmosphere. Working under the creators, Sara Finney-Johnson, Vida Spears, and Ralph Farquhar, Henderson at last felt the creative freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself: “They made the decision that the room would reflect the people who knew the experience of the star.”

Working in such an environment required a trade-off, however. As the share of the audience claimed by the traditional Big Three networks continued to erode, TV was becoming less a single country than a collection of neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods where Black writers were welcome were shabbier than the white ones. The pay scale on many Black shows left something to be desired. A 2007 report released by the Writers Guild of America, West, found that the gap in median annual salary between white and Black writers was nearly $15,000 in 2005. The grim joke among Black writers and performers was that UPN stood for “Under-Paid Negroes.”

Stills from 'Sister, Sister' and 'Moesha'
By the late ’90s, UPN and The WB had evening slates full of Black shows like
Sister, Sister (left) and Moesha (right). The short-lived networks employed a
disproportionate share of the writers of color in the industry. (R. Cartwright / Paramount Television / Everett Collection; PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy)
Black writers who tried to work on shows that weren’t pitched to Black audiences ran into a familiar double standard: White writers could—and did—work on Black shows. But Black writers on white projects remained rare. Kim Bass recalled being asked by a white executive to rewrite the screenplay of a buddy comedy—with the caveat that he touch only the Black character’s dialogue. Another executive once worried that Bass couldn’t “write white.”


In 2006, after years of struggling to make money and attract audiences, UPN and The WB were dissolved in a merger. The move coincided with the early days of peak TV, when cable networks, which by the turn of the century were reaching some 65 million homes, began producing an array of sophisticated series that have been compared to great cinema and even high literature. But few of these shows afforded more opportunities to Black writers or performers than many of the prestige broadcast series had. The Sopranos on HBO, Dexter on Showtime, Mad Men on AMC—these were shows created and performed primarily by white talent. Even HBO’s The Wire, which explored the drug trade in Baltimore and provided ample roles for Black actors, was scripted primarily by white writers. (The series creator, David Simon, has said that the late writer David Mills referred to himself as the “lone Negro” in the writers’ room.) Most Black writers didn’t have the luxury of wringing their hands over “representation” or “authenticity,” however. They were worried about their livelihood.

V. The Shonda Effect
on a recent morning, I sat down with Kim Bass at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where he sometimes meets with independent producers who have the power to finance his projects. We talked over breakfast about the ways in which Hollywood has shifted when it comes to Black America, a set of changes that Bass, 65, could not have imagined when he first broke into the business.


During the heyday of Black sitcoms, Bass created two multiseason series built around Black characters: Sister, Sister and Kenan & Kel, which made the young comedians Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell into beloved figures. (Thompson, long a fixture on Saturday Night Live, now also has his own series, Kenan, on NBC.) Sister, Sister, which ran from 1994 to 1999, revolved around twins who were adopted by different parents as infants and then encountered each other unexpectedly as teens. Bass recalled describing the character Ray (Tim Reid), the adoptive father of one of the twins, as a successful businessman whose name graced his company’s headquarters. A white executive insisted that no one would believe a Black man could be a millionaire. Ray’s corporate business would have to become a limousine service.

Read: The unsung legacy of Black characters on soap operas

In part because of his landmark ’90s productions, Bass told me, he hears from a lot of aspiring Black screenwriters, who at last have a significant cadre of Black creators they can reach out to for career advice. For Bass and for others who elbowed into the industry at a time when there were far fewer opportunities, mentoring a new generation of talent is both a responsibility and a challenge. “I feel for each and every one of them,” Bass said. He tries to help as much as he can, but he noted another reality: “If I spent my time focused on what everyone is trying to get me to do, well, I wouldn’t have time to do what I do.”


Some of the biggest changes Bass has seen in the industry are tied to the success of one woman: Shonda Rhimes. Rhimes came to television from the movies; she wrote her first TV pilot for ABC in 2003. The network didn’t move forward with that series, about female war correspondents, but it did take an interest in her next idea: a drama set in a Seattle hospital. Grey’s Anatomy became an immediate hit—it is still on the air after an astonishing 17 seasons—and one of the rare major network shows led by a Black showrunner. It follows a diverse group of doctors navigating chaos both medical and interpersonal. The staff of Seattle Grace Hospital rarely deals with capital-I Issues of race or gender; more often, they are just trying to keep their patients alive and their relationships afloat. Grey’s Anatomy isn’t a “Black show”—it is a mainstream hit that has made careers (Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh, Jesse Williams). By 2014 Rhimes had three shows airing back-to-back on Thursday evenings on ABC: Grey’s Anatomy; the political drama Scandal, starring Kerry Washington; and the legal mystery How to Get Away With Murder, starring Viola Davis. For a time, Rhimes was producing roughly 70 hours’ worth of television annually and generating more than $2 billion a year for Disney, which owns ABC.

Rhimes has spoken about her dislike of the word diversity, noting that her emphasis on creating complex characters of color, especially women, shouldn’t be thought of as something out of the ordinary. It is merely a reflection of the world around her. But by television standards, Rhimes’s approach—demanding a multiethnic ensemble in her writers’ room as well as on-screen—was remarkable, and had observable consequences. In the years following her breakaway success, the industry green-lit a wave of new series by and about people of color, a seismic change that has been called “the Shonda effect.”


One of those series was Black-ish, created by Kenya Barris. The show centers on Dre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) and his biracial wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), as they raise their children in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. If the milieu resembles that of The Cosby Show, the similarities end there. Its writers’ room has been staffed mostly with people of color. And from its inception, in 2014, the series has tackled social issues head-on, mining family-friendly yet acerbic humor from subjects such as gun control, class inequality, and the question of who can use the N-word.

Peter Saji wrote for Black-ish and went on to co-create the spin-off Mixed-ish, about Rainbow’s childhood. Earlier in his career, Saji had written for other series with less diverse writers’ rooms, and he recounted for me an incident that typified the experience. On his first day on a series, a veteran white writer told a joke in which the punch line was a white woman calling a Black performer the N-word. To Saji, it felt like a test, as if his reaction would determine whether he’d be welcome in the room. “That was like my Jackie Robinson moment, right? Like, I just got cleated—how do I take this? ” he remembered thinking. He didn’t voice his discomfort. “In that moment, I felt like, I understand psychologically what you’re trying to do. And as fucked-up as it is, the onus is on me to do well and not blow this opportunity for everyone that’s coming behind me.”


By contrast, the Black-ish writers’ room was, in Saji’s words, his Hollywood HBCU. Saji felt he had space to hone his craft and to dramatize the challenges he and others in the room had faced in their personal and professional lives. The series also responded, in something like real time, to the world around it. In 2016, it aired an episode titled “Hope,” in which the family learns of the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer. The incident is fictional, but the script evokes the real-life deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland; Barris has said that the episode was inspired by his struggle to explain the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to his own children. Dre and “Bow” differ over how to help their children process the shooting—and the eventual acquittal of the police officer. Dre insists that the police are an instrument of systemic racism, and the couple’s children “need to know the world that they’re living in” as young Black people. Bow tries to find a way to condemn the violence while preserving their children’s innocence so they can “be kids for a little while longer.” Barris’s sensibilities are idiosyncratic, and the series doesn’t always achieve its aims (or land its jokes). But “Hope” is a “very special episode” that manages, despite some awkward moments, to tackle a serious issue without making the entire viewing experience feel like a lesson, or a sermon.

Read: Black-ish and how to talk to kids about police brutality


Compared with the handling of police brutality in Family Matters two decades earlier, “Hope” looks like a great leap forward. Yet Saji noted that “Hope” could happen only because earlier shows had introduced white viewers to the subject. Many of the writers of Black-ish were aware of the work that shows such as A Different World and even Family Matters had done to clear some of that space for their own series. The treatment of police violence in Family Matters may have been far from perfect, Saji observed, but “I know the kinds of fights they would’ve had to have to even do that.”

VI. “Don’t You Have Enough?”
despite the acclaim Black-ish earned for its unflinching treatment of race—no less a TV critic than Michelle Obama told Anderson it was her favorite show—Barris felt constrained by ABC and its parent company, Disney. In one instance, he was asked—and agreed—to put aside a story line based on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates outside the Harvard professor’s home. In 2017, Barris produced an episode—“Please, Baby, Please”—that explored the fear many Black Americans felt following the election of Donald Trump. The episode was shelved after a weeks-long battle that eventually involved Disney CEO Bob Iger himself. Barris and ABC framed the decision as an issue of “creative differences,” but some in the industry believed the network objected to the episode’s positive treatment of the quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who had been kneeling during the national anthem before football games to protest police violence against Black Americans. (ABC denied this explanation.) Barris ultimately left ABC for Netflix with three years left in his network contract.


Even Rhimes, the most successful showrunner of her generation, eventually came to feel stifled by network television. Last year, she told The Hollywood Reporter that her later years with ABC had been filled with conflict over content, budgets, and even her support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the breaking point came in 2017, when a Disney executive balked at her request for an additional pass to Disneyland. “Don’t you have enough?” he reportedly asked. Soon after, Rhimes signed a nine-figure deal with Netflix.

Stills from the shows 'Scandal,' 'Black-ish,' and 'Insecure'
The success of Shonda Rhimes shows like Scandal (top) helped pave the way for series like Black-ish (middle) and later Insecure (bottom). Yet even as Black writers and producers have been afforded more opportunities, they continue to hit the same walls. (Danny Feld / ABC / Everett Collection; Kelsey McNeal / ABC / Everett Collection; Lisa Rose / HBO / Everett Collection)
There’s a reason Black writers and producers are heading to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other streaming platforms: The business model of streaming doesn’t depend as heavily on ratings. In essence, these platforms are selling gift baskets of content; all they need is for subscribers to want one thing in the basket. Darnell Hunt is a professor and dean at UCLA and the lead author of the “Hollywood Diversity Report.” “When you buy a subscription to Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever it is,” he told me, “you get everything they offer. So from their perspective, the broader their portfolio of titles, the better. If they have a show that African Americans really, really like in a cultlike fashion, and no one else likes, the show may be retained anyway if it draws in enough Black subscribers who might not otherwise subscribe to the platform.”


From Rhimes, of course, Netflix hoped for a demographic-spanning hit, which it got in the form of Bridgerton. The Regency-era romance series, based on the novels by Julia Quinn, is the platform’s most popular original show ever, pulling in viewers from an astounding 82 million households in its first 28 days on the site. From other Black writers and producers, however, the company is happy to have a series that has the niche appeal of a ’90s-era Black sitcom. Indeed, streaming services have been snapping up the distribution rights to series from that decade. Last summer, Netflix announced that it would be streaming a collection of Black sitcoms from the ’90s, Sister, Sister and Moesha among them. Hulu put new emphasis on its “Black Stories” hub, which features shows such as The Jeffersons, Living Single, and Family Matters. In August 2020, the Disney-owned streaming service even aired the Trump-themed episode of Black-ish that had been too hot for ABC three years earlier.

And yet Black writers and showrunners say they still hit the same old walls. Issa Rae first attracted industry interest after her YouTube series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl became an unexpected hit. In that low-budget comedy, which premiered in 2011, Rae plays a woman named J who makes it through the drudgeries of her post-college life in Los Angeles in part by rapping to herself in a mirror for confidence boosts. The show was delightfully silly and drew a large, dedicated audience. Rae’s J wasn’t a hypersexual reality star; she wasn’t the silent or sassy best friend of a white protagonist. She was, like the Different World and Living Single characters before her, just a young Black woman trying to figure herself out. But when Rae was approached about turning the viral hit into a television series, she was continually told by non-Black Hollywood executives that her stories weren’t truly reflective of Black experiences. Perhaps they doubted that huge numbers of educated Black women existed (Rae is a Stanford graduate) or were worth catering to. Perhaps they wanted to stress just one facet of Blackness that resonated with them, rather than portraying fully rounded Black characters. At the time, Rae was “deathly afraid of losing an opportunity by being a bit too authentic”—too much the person she actually was.


From the May 2018 issue: An interview with Issa Rae

In the end, Rae was able to portray those fully rounded characters; she had amassed enough influence by then. Her friendship-focused HBO dramedy, Insecure, which finished filming its fifth and final season earlier this year, follows two Black women in L.A. as they navigate the romantic and professional pitfalls of their late 20s and early 30s. The women certainly contend with racism and sexism in their lives, but, crucially, those issues aren’t the focus of the series. Some of the best episodes came in the fourth season, when Issa (played by Rae) and Molly (Yvonne Orji) drift apart in the painful, all-too-common way of early-30s friendships. The show’s emotional center of gravity is the love (and sometimes the enmity) they have for each other. Their falling-out sometimes feels more dramatic than most real-life disputes among friends—this is, after all, television—but Insecure accomplished the rare feat of being a series that depicts Black life without pathologizing or feeling burdened by it.

Decades ago, Black visionaries were up against both market forces and corporate resistance. But demographics have changed, and so has popular taste.
In some ways, Rae’s early experience is typical for Black writers today. Many TV viewers first met Lena Waithe when she played Denise on Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. Waithe wrote one of the show’s most popular episodes, in 2017, based on her own coming-out story, and it would win her an Emmy. By then, she’d begun to produce The Chi, a drama for Showtime set in her native Chicago. It was a great opportunity, but like Rae, Waithe found that her vision was circumscribed by the executives to whom she had to answer. “Nobody knew who I was, and there were still a lot of men—a lot of white men—who were in charge, and I just didn’t have any power,” Waithe says of her earliest days working on the show. “And then I won an Emmy and then all of a sudden they’re like, ‘Okay, you can be in charge now.’ ”


The creator of Julia, Hal Kanter, had demanded entertainment, not agony. Fifty years later, Black writers and producers are more likely to encounter the opposite problem. The Black stories that studios, networks, and streaming platforms feel most comfortable adding to their slates require writers to explore—and sometimes re-create—racial traumas. Following the killing of Michael Brown, a cottage industry of police-brutality dramas popped up. Fox had Shots Fired, which begins with a Black police officer shooting an unarmed white college student; in Netflix’s Seven Seconds, a white police officer fatally strikes a Black teen cyclist with his car. Rae relayed the experience of a fellow Black writer with a series in the works: “In the development process, they just kept on increasing the trauma to make it feel like it was worth watching,” she told me. Racist violence as a plot device hasn’t been restricted to realist dramas; it extends into genre works as well. The Spike Lee–produced Netflix sci-fi film See You Yesterday follows a young Black science prodigy who creates a time machine—in order to save her brother, who was killed by a police officer. And then there’s the new horror anthology series Them on Prime Video. The show follows a Black family that moves into a white neighborhood in the 1950s; its animating terror is the lengths white people will go to in order to preserve housing segregation. When the trailer was released in March, many Black viewers groaned. Why are Black characters always subjected to racism, even in genre productions? Can’t we have a Black Jeepers Creepers?


“When we’re still telling stories that are so focused on trauma, we’re actually still telling stories about white supremacy,” Tara Duncan, the president of Freeform, Disney’s young-adult-targeted cable network, told me when we met for coffee in New York City’s West Village recently. “We’re not talking about what our lives are like and how we see the world and our hopes and dreams and goals and imagination. We’re still talking about what life looks like in proximity to whiteness.”

In May, Duncan also became the president of Onyx Collective, Disney’s new content brand for creators of color. She is one of the few Black executives in an industry that remains dominated by white men. A 2021 study by McKinsey found that the bulk of opportunities afforded to Black offscreen talent comes from shows with at least one Black person in a senior role. In other words, the work of bringing on people from historically marginalized groups routinely falls to people from those same marginalized groups. Black people who do make it into the business are shouldering the burden of diversifying the entire industry. Yvette Lee Bowser, who recently developed and produced the Harlem-centric ensemble dramedy Run the World, takes that responsibility seriously: “That’s one of the reasons I started creating shows. I could actually create my own work environment and kind of dictate the DNA of the room and the experience that people were having in the room.”


But for all the prominence of Shonda Rhimes and Kenya Barris, as well as Tyler Perry, who heads his own studio in Atlanta, only 5 percent of TV showrunners are Black, according to the McKinsey study. As for the executive suite, Duncan and the new chair of Warner Bros. Television Group, Channing Dungey, are the exceptions. “Most everywhere else you look, it’s a white male,” UCLA’s Darnell Hunt observed. The handful of Black people with real power can’t undo decades of inequity.

Perhaps for the first time, however, an alignment of forces may now be bending toward something better. Decades ago, Black visionaries were up against both market factors and corporate resistance—not a fair fight. But demographics have changed, and so have public opinion and popular taste. For cable shows in particular, ratings among all young viewers, not just those reflecting Black, Latino, or Asian households, are at all-time highs for shows with “majority minority” casts—shows such as Insecure, Donald Glover’s Atlanta, and the Mindy Kaling–produced coming-of-age series Never Have I Ever. The television shows driving consistent interactions on Twitter and Instagram—a new coin of the realm in the industry, now that so much TV watching occurs on so-called second screens—are those with casts and writers’ rooms that more closely resemble the diversity of America.

To succeed in the country as it’s evolving, traditional networks and streaming platforms will need to do more than release statements about their commitment to principles of diversity and inclusion, or to aggregate their “Black Stories” or present viewers with a “Black Lives Matter Collection.” For changes to last, executives and other industry power brokers need to continue investing in creative visions that don’t match their own. They’ll have to cede the terms of “authenticity,” and any negotiations over it, to the Black creators whose voices have too long been ignored. Otherwise, they risk rendering themselves obsolete, a prospect that may motivate even those unstirred by the goodness of their hearts.


This article appears in the October 2021 print edition with the headline “The Unwritten Rules of Black TV.”

*Lead image: Illustration by Danielle Del Plato; sources: CBS / Getty; Elizabeth Sisson / Showtime / Everett Collection; ABC Photo Archives / Walt Disney Television / Getty; Carsey-Werner Co. / Everett Collection; Mitch Haaseth / ABC / Everett Collection; Globe Photos / Zuma Press / Alamy; Richard Cartwright / ABC / Everett Collection; NBCUniversal / Getty; 20th Century Fox / Everett Collection; NBC Productions / Photo 12 / Alamy; Everett Collection; Joe Viles / Paramount Television / Everett Collection; Andrew Semel / Warner Bros. Television / Everett Collection

Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic.





遗产继承
自《桑福德和儿子》以来，变化还不够大
黑人电视的不成文规定

作者：汉娜-吉奥吉斯
9月13日，2021年
分享

I. "你能听到针掉下来的声音"
90年代情景喜剧《家事》的主人公卡尔-温斯洛(Carl Winslow)很荣幸地佩戴着他的徽章。在这部讲述芝加哥一个中产阶级黑人家庭的节目中，温斯洛（Reginald VelJohnson饰）喜欢当警察，几乎就像他讨厌看到家里讨厌的邻居史蒂夫-厄克尔（Jaleel White饰）突然出现在他家里一样。卡尔是一个典型的电视情景喜剧警察，甜甜圈的陈词滥调和所有。在一个场景中，他宣布他刚刚经历了他生命中最糟糕的一天："我在一次高速追车中没油了"。幽默并不总是有新的突破。


家庭事务》的演员主要是黑人，但该剧的编剧和构思主要由白人完成。1994年的一集《好警察，坏警察》说明了黑人作家被排挤的程度，即使是在一个关于黑人家庭的节目中。在这一集里，卡尔的十几岁的儿子埃迪（Darius McCrary）冲进屋里，对与警察的冲突明显感到不安。然而，卡尔坚持认为，埃迪关于被骚扰和被迫倒地的说法并不符合事实。"这是不寻常的程序--除非是你挑起的。" 卡尔的回答让人感到震惊。他在执勤时可能是温斯洛警官，但他仍然是一位黑人父亲，他应该知道美国的警察经常如何对待年轻的黑人男子。埃迪生气地走了。


费利西亚-D-亨德森（Felicia D. Henderson）是一位黑人制片人和编剧，他在1994年至1996年期间参与了《家庭事务》（Family Matters）的制作，之后又参与了《贝莱尔的新鲜王子》（The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air）、《灵魂食物》（Soul Food）和《帝国》（Empire）的制作，他回忆起在编剧室里讨论这一集时的紧张情况。电视节目通常是由工作人员合作编写剧本的；在桌子上交换意见和批评是这个过程中不可或缺的一部分，有时甚至是喧闹的一部分。然而，在这个房间里有一个等级制度。高级编剧掌握着主导权，而节目主持人则最终负责。家庭事务》也不例外。亨德森当时是一名初级编剧，也是十几名团队中仅有的几名黑人工作人员之一，当一名白人编剧抛出卡尔可能做出的反应时，她起初犹豫不决。但她觉得这句话不对，于是她说了出来。"我只是说，'嗯，没有一个黑人父亲会对他的黑人儿子这样说'，"亨德森最近告诉我。"然后房间里变得很安静。我的意思是，你可以听到一根针掉下来。" 这位白人节目主持人为这句话进行了辩护，然后它就进去了。"亨德森回忆说："在房间里，在那一刻，很明显我冒犯了他们。"比如，'什么，你是说--我们是种族主义者？不，但我是在说这是不现实的。"

"好警察，坏警察 "以卡尔与警官对峙并与埃迪和解而结束。观众得到了那种安全的结论，为 "非常特别的一集 "做了总结。埃迪的不安是正确的，因为有些警察真的是种族主义者。去年，在乔治-弗洛伊德被明尼阿波利斯警察杀害一个月后，《家事》剧组在Zoom上重聚，回顾了25年前的故事线。"VelJohnson说："当他们写这一集时，我们没有意识到它在今天会有如此大的启示性和说服力。

揭示和讲述，是的，但也许不是他想的那样。对亨德森来说，在《家庭事务》中的工作为她在好莱坞漫长的职业生涯中提供了一个决定性的特征的介绍。协商的真实性是她用来描述许多黑人编剧所承担的任务的短语--当然是黑人，但只能是白人编剧、工作室主管和观众所能接受的那种。

家庭事务》剧照，剧中人物埃迪-温斯洛、伸开双臂的史蒂夫-厄克尔和穿着制服的卡尔-温斯洛。
从左到右。家庭事务》中的埃迪-温斯洛（Darius McCrary）、史蒂夫-厄克尔（Jaleel White）和卡尔-温斯洛（Reginald VelJohnson）。这部情景喜剧的演员主要是黑人，但该剧的编剧和构思主要由白人完成。(ABC / Everett Collection)
多年来，黑人作家必须进行的 "谈判 "的性质已经发生了变化。半个世纪前，仅仅让黑人角色上电视就是一个障碍，而且黑人编剧也很少。今天，随着越来越多的网络和流媒体平台宣传他们已经排好的黑人节目--你可以理解为每个月都是黑人历史月--这很容易让人相信，黑人演员和编剧现在有大量的机会，包括那些成功上位的人有广阔的创作空间。在这个 "电视高峰 "时代，娱乐界比以往任何时候都有更多高质量的剧集，这在某些方面是一个福音。根据加州大学洛杉矶分校2020年 "好莱坞多样性报告 "中收集的数据，这是一项关于娱乐业进展或缺乏进展的年度研究，近10%的电视主角由黑人演员担任，这可能是该行业有史以来最接近比例代表制（约为13%）。珊达-兰姆斯(Shonda Rhimes)是该行业任何创意人物中的佼佼者，她是近期最成功的几部电视剧的幕后推手，如《实习医生格蕾》、《丑闻》和《逍遥法外》。Black-ish》的创作者肯尼亚-巴里斯（Kenya Barris）制作的喜剧系列，在吸引不同观众群体的同时，也挑战了致命的严肃种族问题。

然而，尽管像兰姆斯和巴里斯这样的人物已经取得了进步，但电视行业的权力仍然主要掌握在白人高管手中。加州大学洛杉矶分校的多样性报告显示，只有不到11%的广播剧本节目创作者、不到15%的有线电视剧本节目创作者和不到11%的数字剧本节目创作者来自任何代表不足的种族群体。(这些群体加起来约占美国人口的40%）。在莱姆斯制作的节目和巴里斯直到最近才制作的Netflix，只有12%的剧本剧创作者是有色人种--这是Netflix自己委托的一项研究。根据2017年对整个行业的调查，91%的节目是由白人编剧领导的。正如亨德森对我说的那样，很多时候，"仍然是白人在决定什么是黑人的经历，然后雇用黑人编剧来'鉴定'它。"

请听汉娜-乔吉斯在The Experiment播客中与电视作家苏珊-法勒斯-希尔讨论这个故事。


请听并订阅。Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

自发明以来，电视已经塑造了这个国家的自我形象。就我们对 "正常"、"可接受"、"有趣"、"错误"、甚至 "美国 "的共同概念而言，电视帮助我们定义了这些概念。几十年来，黑人编剧被关在编写这些概念的房间之外，即使在今天，他们也必须驾驭一套由白人主管制定的隐性规则--同时争取权力来编写自己的规则。

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II. 华兹的奥赛罗
在电视上有重要的黑人代表的历史是很短的。这一媒介的种族进步与大多数其他美国产业一样：缓慢、周期性、不平衡。早年，美国黑人打开电视机，发现自己被写进了美国的故事中，或者更糟糕的是，只作为漫画出现。不久前，我看到一张1963年华盛顿游行的照片，清楚地表明黑人观众是多么渴望看到电视上描述他们的生活。在照片中，一个抗议标语，指的是流行的节目Lassie，上面写着：看，妈妈！狗有电视节目，黑人没有！！。

这并不完全正确。在20世纪50年代和60年代，像纳特-金-科尔和小萨米-戴维斯这样的非裔美国人是综艺节目的主角。但是，像华盛顿游行标志这样的信息所表达的不满比象征性的代表权更重要：一种信念，至少在中产阶级中，大多数现有的电视节目没有考虑到黑人的政治或文化利益。当时，有黑人编剧和演员的喜剧和电视剧几乎不存在。早期为数不多的有色人种演员所扮演的角色采用了令人反感的刻板印象和赤裸裸的游吟诗人--1951年至1953年播出的《阿莫斯与安迪》就是最臭名昭著的例子。白人电视主管不愿意签署以黑人为复杂角色的故事线，也不愿意将他们描绘成美国社会的核心部分。电视广告是针对白人中产阶级的。


1968年，美国全国广播公司（NBC）首次推出朱莉娅（Julia），由迪亚汉-卡罗尔（Diahann Carroll）主演，她在做护士的同时抚养一个儿子。朱莉娅是第一个在黄金时段的电视剧中作为主角出现的中产阶级黑人妇女，鉴于该剧的构思--她的丈夫在越南阵亡后成为寡妇--它可能对当时的政治提供了尖锐的评论。然而，在实践中，该剧只停留在关于家庭生活的轻松笑料上，很少触及种族问题，除了卡罗尔在回忆录中所说的 "温暖、优雅和'好'"的笑话。 "该剧的创作者哈尔-坎特是白人，正如他在1968年告诉《黑檀》的那样，他想要的是 "娱乐 "而不是 "痛苦"。在小马丁-路德-金遇刺八个月后出版的《电视指南》封面采访中，卡罗尔承认该节目的缺点。"她说："目前，我们呈现的是白人黑人。而他很少有黑人的特点"。她后来告诉坎特，扮演一个与她所知的黑人生活相去甚远的角色的压力使她身体不适。

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直到1972年，才有电视台尝试更大胆的做法。这一年，热门剧集《家有儿女》的创作者诺曼-李尔和制片人巴德-约金推出了《桑福德和儿子》，这是一部改编自英国广播公司《娇妻》的剧集。该剧由黑人演员约翰-埃尔罗伊-桑福德（John Elroy Sanford）（即雷德-福克斯（Redd Foxx））和德蒙-威尔逊（Demond Wilson）主演，扮演父子俩的废品商弗雷德和拉蒙特。桑福德一家并不是典型的邻家小户。他们住在沃茨，一个对大多数非黑人观众来说是1965年警察暴行抗议活动的焦点的洛杉矶社区，抗议活动升级为一个星期的暴力事件。这部电视剧定期讨论其角色作为黑人男子在后民权时代的美国所面临的种族主义问题，而时间的流逝并没有削弱其优势。在其中一集中，梦想在舞台上表演的拉蒙特正准备演《奥赛罗》。他扮演的是标题角色--黑皮肤的 "摩尔人"。一个白人妇女扮演苔丝狄蒙娜。当弗雷德偶然发现剧中谋杀高潮的排练时，他把他的黑人儿子和那个白人妇女拉开。当他被告知这只是一出戏时，他并没有得到安慰。"他警告说："那你最好让国民警卫队待命。

对于许多黑人观众来说，在黄金时段看到父亲和儿子之间的这种交流是令人兴奋的，当李尔看着他的演播室观众时，他发现了这个事实。那时，他已经在电视界工作了20年；他知道这些观众中的大多数是白人的第一手资料。桑福德父子》的现场观众则不同。"没有什么经验能像站在这样的观众身后--一半是黑人，或者一半是黑人和棕色人种，但各种人都有--看着他们用力地笑，比如，笑得肚子疼，"99岁的李尔最近告诉我。"我非常有信心，这为我的生活增加了时间。"

桑福德父子》在全国范围内的收视率飙升，挑战了业界长期以来的假设，即白人观众不会对一部关于黑人角色的电视剧感兴趣。在某种程度上，这也是李尔早期成功的一个作用。弗雷德-桑福德很容易与《全家福》中的蓝领族长阿奇-邦克进行比较。这两个角色都是脾气暴躁的中年男子；他们都会对种族进行辱骂和厌恶女性的评论。其中一些幽默并没有得到很好的体现。不过，后来的这个系列节目，持续了六季，使黄金时段的观众接触到了黑人演员和黑人喜剧模式。福克斯并不经常为该节目撰稿，但桑福德对美国黑人生活的屈辱和欢乐的精辟评论非常有效，这要归功于他作为单口相声演员的训练，他的风格和感受力是编剧们可以引导的。"李尔回忆说："他是拉斯维加斯的一个酒廊演员，我们偶然发现了他，无法接受他在电视上的地位。桑福德把黑人喜剧演员的创造性天才带给了那些从未涉足福克斯和他的同行们所表演的那种俱乐部的观众。该节目后来吸收了其他黑人漫画家的写作技巧，包括保罗-穆尼和理查德-普赖尔，并雇用了伊伦加-阿德尔，他是第一批在网络剧中全职工作的黑人作家之一。

3张视频剧照。拉蒙特和弗雷德-桑福德握手言欢；朱莉娅和她的儿子交谈；乔治和路易斯-杰弗逊在他们的客厅里交谈
朱莉娅（Diahann Carroll，中）是第一个在黄金时段系列节目中作为主角的中产阶级黑人妇女。诺曼-李尔制作的节目《桑福德父子》（上）和《杰弗逊一家》（下）证明了以黑人为主体的剧集可以成为热门。(Everett Collection; RGR Collection / Alamy; Columbia TV / Everett Collection)
桑福德父子》使随后的一系列黑人情景喜剧成为可能，包括李尔的其他作品。杰弗逊一家》与《全家福》有着直接的联系。乔治（谢尔曼-赫姆斯利）和露易丝（伊莎贝尔-桑福德）在皇后区拥有一家干洗连锁店，并曾住在邦克夫妇的隔壁。他们自己的系列剧让他们大放异彩，因为商业上的成功让这对夫妇从皇后区搬到了曼哈顿上东城的 "空中豪华公寓"。该剧的黑人编剧包括萨拉-芬尼-约翰逊（Sara Finney-Johnson）和布克-布拉德肖（Booker Bradshaw），后者是一名演员，后来为《美好时光》和《理查德-普赖尔秀》写剧本。


桑福德父子》和《杰弗逊一家》证明了以黑人演员为主的系列剧可以成为热门。然而，白人高管们仍然认为黑人节目是一场太大的赌注。他们不想冒着失去大量富裕的白人观众的风险，去吸引他们认为是较小的、较穷的黑人观众。因此，电视界几乎完全是白人；在20世纪70年代的电视界，黑人作家或演员几乎每次都要面对排斥。当涉及到创作团队的人员配置时，人们认为白人作家可以写任何东西，但黑人作家只能为黑人节目作出贡献。

III. 做了就遭殃，不做就遭殃
20世纪80年代，以黑人演员为主题的节目很少，而且很少有节目能持续一季以上。当时，《JET》杂志每周都会公布一份黑人在电视上出现的名单，这份名单通常显示非裔美国人扮演着 "喜剧辅助 "或 "少数派助手 "角色。1984年8月13日的这一期包括以下内容。金-菲尔兹在《生活事实》中扮演早熟的多萝西-"嘟嘟"-拉姆齐，罗杰-E-莫斯利在《神枪手》中扮演直升机飞行员T.C.，蒂姆-里德在《西蒙与西蒙》中扮演 "市中心 "布朗中尉，保拉-凯利在《夜庭》中扮演公设辩护人莉兹-威廉姆斯。


缺乏机会的部分原因是情景喜剧的主导地位正在减弱，在那里黑人作家和演员已经取得了一些进展。一些解释是文化方面的。罗纳德-里根是总统。家庭纽带》的前嬉皮士父母抚养着一个保守的儿子，是《全家福》的翻版，但没有桑福德式的对应。在1978年至1986年在NBC播出的《Diff'rent Strokes》和1983年至1989年在ABC播出的《Webster》中，黑人青年（分别由Gary Coleman和Emmanuel Lewis扮演）基本上被富有的白人家庭从贫困中解救出来，这是一个涓流式和谐的寓言。这两个男孩的黑人身份与他们周围的白人富足相对立。

考斯比秀》是一个很大的例外。今天，比尔-考斯比的名字是他犯罪的代名词。这位84岁的演员在2018年被判定犯有性侵犯重罪，并被判处长达10年的监禁。(今年早些时候，在宾夕法尼亚州最高法院推翻定罪后，他被释放出狱）。但《科斯比秀》仍然是一块试金石。它是20世纪80年代为数不多的以黑人演员为主的电视节目之一。它也取得了巨大的成功--成为该媒体历史上收视率最高的节目之一。

考斯比告诉一位制片人。"我们要把所有的种族问题留给纽哈特"。
在开发他的同名节目时，科斯比已经是一位受人喜爱的喜剧演员，并与罗伯特-库尔普共同出演了20世纪60年代的电视剧《我的间谍》，该剧的国际背景为美国的民权抗议和城市纷争提供了方便的话题性距离。他设想他的新系列是一个任何美国人都能感同身受的家庭的写照。他在1984年对《电视指南》说："我想展示一个像我所知道的那种家庭：孩子们几乎是个麻烦，而父母也不甘落后，"。该剧在电视上展示了中上层黑人生活的罕见景象。医生克里夫-哈克斯塔布（Cliff Huxtable）和他的律师妻子克莱尔（Phylicia Rashad）住在布鲁克林的一栋褐房子里，引导他们的孩子追求卓越--电视上的杜波依斯式的 "天才第十人"。

考斯比决心描写一个富裕的黑人家庭，这在某种程度上是激进的。首先，它挑战了那些只能想象黑人家庭像弗雷德和拉蒙特-桑福德的破烂不堪的客厅一样的观众，或者，充其量是杰弗逊一家的成功。但它也反击了一个在电视主管和评论家中占据主导地位的有害想法：黑人节目不仅必须是引人注目的创造性作品--好的电视节目，而且还必须以白人认为 "现实 "的方式捕捉黑人生活。苏珊-法勒斯-希尔（Susan Fales-Hill）是考斯比创意团队中仅有的几位黑人编剧之一，她回忆说，维亚康姆公司的一位白人高管认为哈克斯特布尔一家不能代表黑人的生活，因此将其驳回："是的，这是个好节目，但这个家庭不是黑人；他们是白人。" 当法勒斯-希尔问他是什么使他们成为白人时，这位主管说："嗯，看看他们住的房子。" 法勒斯-希尔回答说："我母亲在布鲁克林的一所房子里长大，看起来很像，她在上小提琴课，而她的妹妹在上钢琴课。"

编剧约翰-马库斯是白人，是《考斯比》的执行制片人，他记得该剧的明星明确地回击了对他的节目以符合不是黑人的人的看法的方式成为 "黑人 "的期望。考斯比还抵制了关于美国黑人的系列剧必须是关于种族的要求。剧中人物偶尔会提到全球事件，如南非的反种族隔离示威，但他们很少看到有本土种族主义的经历，尽管他们生活在一个种族隔离严重的城市。在接近马丁-路德-金生日时播出的一集，没有纠缠于这个节日的政治，而是更巧妙地纪念这个节日。当一家人被Huxtables家电视机上播放的金的 "我有一个梦想 "的演讲所吸引时，一场关于借来的衣服的争吵暴露了其琐碎性。在第二季开始时，马库斯告诉我，记者们 "想知道一个问题的答案，'这个节目什么时候会涉及到多种族约会这样的问题，比如，这些孩子什么时候会和白人约会；你们什么时候会做这样的报道？在某个时候，我说，'我得去和比尔谈谈这个问题，'然后我去了他的更衣室。他甚至没有任何犹豫。他看着我的眼睛说，'你回去跟他们每个人说，我们把所有的种族问题都留给纽哈特，'那是地球上最白的节目。"

并不是只有白人高管认为科斯比是对黑人生活的不切实际的表现。该剧也引起了一些黑人评论家的尖锐反应。表面上看，这是一个黑人家庭的 "正面 "形象，但该剧被批评为邀请白人观众相信种族进步已经实现。"哈佛大学历史学家和文学评论家小亨利-路易斯-盖茨在1989年《纽约时报》的专栏中写道："只要所有的黑人都以贬低或边缘角色出现，就有可能相信美国的种族主义是不加区别的。"然而，'科斯比'的社会愿景反映了黑人融入上层中产阶级的微不足道的情况（拥有'白人的钱'，我母亲常说，而不是'有色人种'的钱），令人放心地将黑人贫困的责任扔回给贫困者。"

盖茨的批评和白人主管对Huxtables夫妇生活方式的难以置信的反应，反映了科斯比作家所面临的 "如果你做了就该死，如果你不做就该死 "的困境。成为黑人，但不要太黑。或者：要黑，但不能像那样。白人编剧从未被这样鞭打过。三人行》或《欢呼声》中的人物并不被期望传达某种普遍的白人经验。正如盖茨所允许的那样，问题比比尔-科斯比更大。"这不是代表本身（Cliff Huxtable，一个父母受过大学教育的孩子，是完全可信的），而是它开始在我们的文化中扮演的角色，它所具有的地位，嗯，真正的代表。一个只有一个突出的黑人系列的电视景观给了观众一个关于黑人生活的单一视角。

起初，科斯比的衍生剧《不同的世界》似乎不太可能摆脱这种束缚。该剧跟随丹妮丝-哈克斯塔布（Lisa Bonet）来到希尔曼学院，这是克利夫和克莱尔-哈克斯塔布曾经就读的虚构的历史性黑人学院。当这个系列最初被构思时，它把重点放在希尔曼的一个白人学生身上（以及她所经历的偏见），而不是放在丹妮丝身上。只是后来前提发生了变化，丹尼斯成为中心人物，而她的白人室友--玛丽莎-托梅扮演的有抱负的记者--则成为配角。在整个第一季中，《不一样的世界》描绘了一种大学氛围，但却没有捕捉到黑人大学生活的精神和细微差别。扮演势利的惠特利-吉尔伯特（Whitley Gilbert）的贾斯敏-盖伊（Jasmine Guy）记得早期的剧本中，学生对教授直呼其名。"我父亲在莫尔豪斯大学教书，"盖伊告诉我。"这是不可能的。"

当霍华德大学的校友黛比-艾伦（Debbie Allen）被请来担任执行制片人和导演时，语气发生了变化。"苏珊-法莱斯-希尔告诉我："当黛比加入时，她是真正震撼了它的人。艾伦是一个强大的存在。虽然科斯比的节目在很大程度上忽略了种族问题，但艾伦告诉科斯比，在她的节目中，人们需要谈论黑人问题和当时的问题。"法勒斯-希尔回忆说："当他说'是的，你是对的'时，我差点从椅子上摔下来。 "

惠特利-吉尔伯特与德维恩-韦恩交谈的侧面剧照，墨镜被翻转起来
惠特利-吉尔伯特（Jasmine Guy）和德维恩-韦恩（Kadeem Hardison）在《考斯比秀》衍生剧《不同的世界》中。虽然它从未在大众文化中占据过科斯比那样的位置，但它要激进得多，探讨了种族主义、艾滋病和无家可归问题。(Carsey-Werner Co. / Everett Collection)
在艾伦的领导下，《不一样的世界》去了它的祖先所不愿意去的所有地方。这部电视剧从未像《考斯比秀》那样在大众文化中占有一席之地。但它更为激进，巧妙地改变了电视的发展轨迹--既通过对种族的处理，也通过它给黑人作家提供的机会，这些作家在此后的几十年里塑造了这个行业。

不同的世界》探讨了种族主义、艾滋病、无家可归和强奸等问题，将对这些问题的处理建立在性格、外表和社会地位各不相同的人物的经历上。当然，丹尼斯来自一个舒适的中上阶层家庭。她的另一个室友Jaleesa Vinson（Dawnn Lewis），在一次失败的婚姻后，于25岁进入希尔曼；她通常在工作中出现。盖伊的惠特利-吉尔伯特是富裕的希尔曼校友的女儿；她来到学校，明确表示要找一个丈夫。其他角色包括花花公子罗恩-约翰逊（Darryl M. Bell）、自由活动家弗雷迪-布鲁克斯（Cree Summer）、运动型研究生沃尔特-奥克斯（Sinbad），以及惠特莉最终的浪漫情怀，可爱的书呆子德韦恩（Kadeem Hardison）。"我喜欢做《不一样的世界》的原因是我们剧中黑人的多样性，"盖伊告诉我。"因此，我们都没有感觉到成为所有人的负担。"

这并不是说该剧避免了白人高管的审查。法勒斯-希尔记得，有一次，惠特利和德维恩因为 "阿米斯塔德号 "争论不休，这艘奴隶船上的黑人俘虏控制了船只，但最终被逮捕并被审判。她回忆说："电视台来找我们说，'你知道，惠特利和德维恩就不能为他们星期六晚上的约会而争论吗？ "

一位作家回忆说，白人同事看着她，问道："你觉得这听起来对吗？"仿佛有一种单一的方式可以成为黑人，或者听起来是黑人。
1992年，艾伦和该节目的编剧们想报道洛杉矶的暴乱，那是在参与殴打罗德尼-金的警察被无罪释放后发生的。对于艾伦、法勒斯-希尔和其他编剧报告的白人主管来说，暴乱是危险的叙述领域。高管们最熟悉的洛杉矶与金的洛杉矶截然不同；他们认为暴乱是城市历史上丑陋的一章，是要过去的事情，而不是纪念。最终，艾伦和法勒斯-希尔说服电视台让他们写一集直接涉及暴乱的两部分内容。法勒斯-希尔记得在会议结束后有一种不祥的感觉--仿佛那是一场不折不扣的胜利。"他们退缩了，我和她离开会议时说，'好吧，塞尔玛和路易斯--我们已经驶离了悬崖。 "

由两部分组成的 "洛杉矶的蜜月 "拉开了该剧第六季的序幕。惠特利和德韦恩正在洛杉矶度蜜月，这对夫妇在城市爆发时被分开。惠特莉是个受保护的南方美女，她在一家百货公司的奢侈品区避难；有一次，她假装成了一个人体模型。与此同时，德韦恩在不知不觉中帮助了一些掠夺者。30年后，一些对话让人感到老套或说教；Souljah修女客串告诉惠特利，"他们可以打我们，杀我们，做任何他们想做的事，然后脱身，就像他们一直做的那样。" 但对艾伦、编剧和演员来说，这一集是对全国各地的黑人，特别是年轻黑人正在经历的现实的重要反映。将这样的原始材料搬上黄金时段的电视意味着肯定这种痛苦--向白人观众展示判决是如何在黑人家庭中产生反响的。在第六季结束时，该系列被取消了。

IV. "欠薪的黑人"
经过《不同的世界》的编剧们继续创作了90年代一些最突出的黑人情景喜剧，这一时期被证明是该形式的黄金时代。在这些校友中，有伊维特-李-鲍塞尔（Yvette Lee Bowser），他是《单身生活》（第一个由美国黑人妇女创作的黄金时段电视节目）的幕后推手，以及《贝莱尔的新鲜王子》的制片人谢丽尔-加德（Cheryl Gard）。这些剧集分别在福克斯和全国广播公司播出，并赢得了更多传统广播网络仍然可以获得的广泛观众。其他黑人创作者的机会来自较新的网络UPN和WB。作为即将到来的市场分裂的早期例子，这些新网络不太关心为全国广告商带来尽可能多的观众。相反，他们至少在最初的几年里，满足于接触特定的人口群体并建立强烈的忠诚度。

阅读：90年代的《单身生活》是如何延续至今的？

到90年代末，UPN和WB的晚间节目单中充满了黑人节目，并在电视行业中雇佣了不成比例的有色人种编剧。1996年，UPN首次推出Moesha，由R&B歌手Brandy Norwood主演。由于皮肤黝黑，留着辫子，《莫莎》的主人公是--现在也是--成长类节目中的一个罕见人物。(在《莫莎》播出时，以及之后的几年里，白兰蒂的照片似乎被贴在了美国每个黑人美容院的墙上）。世行是家庭节目的发源地，如《父母罩》和《聪明人》，这些节目大多提供了严肃的教训和温柔的时刻，尽管它们偶尔会涉及到更重要的问题，如药物滥用和体育中的种族主义。1995年，该电视台还从美国广播公司（ABC）接收了《姐姐，姐姐》，这是一部由编剧和导演金-巴斯（Kim Bass）共同创作的青少年喜剧。

对于黑人编剧来说，尤其是那些以前只与白人编剧合作的编剧，这些新的机会是一个启示--有机会在一个至少有一些人理解他们所负责描述的人物生活的空间里学习技艺。在他们一起为《贝莱尔的新鲜王子》工作的那一季，费利西亚-亨德森和拉里-威尔莫尔是该剧唯一的黑人编剧，该剧是由一对白人夫妇苏珊和安迪-博洛维茨创作的。当我们交谈时，亨德森回忆说，她的大部分工作相当于回答了一个问题。"这是黑人的工作吗？" 她记得另一个节目的白人同事看着她，问道："你觉得这听起来对吗？"仿佛有一种单一的特定方式来成为黑人，或者听起来是黑人。亨德森回答说："我昨晚参加了一个知道所有其他黑人的想法的所有黑人作家的会议......"

亨德森后来去了《莫莎》工作--一个非常不同的氛围。在主创人员萨拉-芬尼-约翰逊、维达-斯皮尔斯和拉尔夫-法夸尔的领导下工作，亨德森终于感受到了无需解释自己所带来的创作自由。"他们做出决定，房间将反映了解明星经历的人"。

然而，在这样的环境中工作需要权衡利弊。随着传统的三大网络所拥有的观众份额不断减少，电视正在成为一个单一的国家，而不是一个社区的集合体，而黑人编剧受到欢迎的社区比白人的社区更为简陋。许多黑人节目的薪酬水平还有待提高。美国西部作家协会2007年发布的一份报告发现，2005年白人作家和黑人作家之间的年薪中位数差距接近15000美元。黑人作家和表演者之间的严峻笑话是，UPN代表着 "低薪黑人"。

姐妹，姐妹》和《莫莎》的剧照
到90年代末，UPN和WB的晚间节目单中充满了黑人节目，例如
姐妹，姐妹》（左）和《莫莎》（右）。这些短命的网络雇用了
在这个行业中，有色人种编剧的比例过高。(R. Cartwright / Paramount Television / Everett Collection; PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy)
黑人编剧如果想在不是针对黑人观众的节目中工作，就会遇到一个熟悉的双重标准。白人编剧可以而且确实在黑人节目中工作。但黑人编剧参与白人项目的情况仍然很少。金-巴斯回忆说，一位白人主管要求他改写一部兄弟喜剧的剧本--但条件是他只写黑人角色的对话。另一位高管曾担心巴斯不能 "写出白人"。


2006年，在多年挣扎着赚钱和吸引观众之后，UPN和WB在合并中解散了。此举恰逢电视高峰期的早期，当时的有线电视网络在世纪之交已经覆盖了约6500万个家庭，开始制作一系列精致的系列节目，这些节目被比作伟大的电影甚至是高级文学。但这些节目中很少有比许多有声望的广播剧为黑人作家或表演者提供更多的机会。HBO的《黑道家族》、Showtime的《德克斯特》、AMC的《疯人院》--这些节目主要由白人人才创作和表演。即使是HBO的《窃听风云》，它探讨了巴尔的摩的毒品交易，并为黑人演员提供了大量的角色，其剧本也主要由白人作家编写。(该剧的创作者大卫-西蒙曾说，已故作家大卫-米尔斯称自己是编剧室里 "孤独的黑人"。） 然而，大多数黑人编剧并没有时间为 "代表性 "或 "真实性 "而绞尽脑汁。他们担心的是自己的生计。

V. 尚达效应
最近的一个早晨，我在比佛利山庄的四季酒店与金-巴斯坐下来，他有时会在那里与独立制片人会面，这些人有能力为他的项目融资。我们在早餐时谈到了好莱坞在涉及美国黑人时发生的变化，这一系列的变化是65岁的巴斯在刚进入这个行业时无法想象的。


在黑人情景喜剧的全盛时期，巴斯创作了两部围绕黑人角色的多季系列剧。姐姐，姐姐》和《凯南和凯尔》，使年轻的喜剧演员凯南-汤普森和凯尔-米切尔成为人们喜爱的人物。(汤普森长期以来一直是《周六夜现场》的固定演员，现在他在NBC也有自己的系列剧《凯南》）。姐姐，妹妹》从1994年到1999年播出，围绕着一对双胞胎，他们在婴儿时被不同的父母收养，然后在青少年时意外地遇到了对方。巴斯回忆说，其中一个双胞胎的养父雷（蒂姆-里德）是一个成功的商人，他的名字出现在公司总部。一位白人主管坚持认为，没有人会相信一个黑人可以成为百万富翁。雷的公司业务将不得不成为一个豪华轿车服务。

阅读。肥皂剧中的黑人角色的无名遗产

巴斯告诉我，部分原因是他在90年代的标志性作品，他听到很多有抱负的黑人编剧，他们终于有了一个重要的黑人创作者队伍，可以向他们寻求职业建议。对于巴斯和其他在机会少得多的时候挤进这个行业的人来说，指导新一代的人才既是一种责任，也是一种挑战。"巴斯说："我对他们中的每一个人都有感情。他试图尽可能地帮助他们，但他注意到另一个现实。"如果我把时间花在每个人都想让我做的事情上，那么，我就没有时间做我所做的事情了。"


巴斯在这个行业看到的一些最大的变化是与一个女人的成功有关的。尚达-兰姆斯。莱姆斯是从电影界来到电视界的；她在2003年为美国广播公司（ABC）写了她的第一个电视试验片。该电视网没有推进这部关于女战地记者的电视剧，但它对她的下一个想法感兴趣：一部以西雅图医院为背景的电视剧。实习医生格蕾》立即成为热门剧目--在播出了惊人的17季后仍在播出，而且是少有的由黑人节目主持人领导的主要网络节目之一。该剧讲述了一群不同的医生在医疗和人际关系方面的混乱中穿梭。西雅图格雷斯医院的工作人员很少处理种族或性别等重大问题；更多的时候，他们只是试图让他们的病人活着，让他们的关系维持下去。实习医生格蕾》不是一个 "黑人节目"--它是一个主流的热门节目，成就了很多人的事业（艾伦-蓬佩奥、桑德拉-吴、杰西-威廉姆斯）。到2014年，兰姆斯有三部剧在美国广播公司（ABC）的周四晚上背靠背播出。实习医生格蕾》（Grey's Anatomy）；由凯瑞-华盛顿（Kerry Washington）主演的政治剧《丑闻》（Scandal）；以及由维奥拉-戴维斯（Viola Davis）主演的法律悬疑剧《如何逃脱谋杀》（How to Get Away With Murder）。有一段时间，兰姆斯每年制作大约70个小时的电视节目，每年为拥有美国广播公司的迪斯尼公司带来超过20亿美元的收入。

莱姆斯曾谈到她不喜欢多样性这个词，指出她强调创造复杂的有色人种角色，特别是女性，不应该被认为是出格的事情。这只是她对周围世界的反映。但从电视标准来看，兰姆斯的做法--要求在她的编剧室和屏幕上都有一个多民族的组合--是非常了不起的，并产生了可观察到的后果。在她取得突破性成功后的几年里，电视行业掀起了一股由有色人种创作的新剧集的热潮，这一戏剧性的变化被称为 "香达效应"。


由肯尼亚-巴里斯（Kenya Barris）创作的《黑人》（Black-ish）就是其中之一。该剧以德雷-约翰逊（安东尼-安德森）和他的黑人妻子彩虹（特蕾西-埃利斯-罗斯）为中心，讲述了他们在一个以白人为主的中上阶层社区抚养孩子的故事。如果说这个环境类似于《考斯比秀》，那么相似之处就到此为止。其编剧室的工作人员大多是有色人种。从2014年开始，该剧就直面社会问题，从枪支管制、阶级不平等和谁能使用N字头的问题中挖掘出适合家庭的幽默。

彼得-萨基（Peter Saji）为《黑衣人》（Black-ish）撰稿，并继续与他人合作创作了关于彩虹童年的衍生剧《混血儿》（Mixed-ish）。在他职业生涯的早期，Saji曾为其他编剧室不那么多样化的剧集写剧本，他向我讲述了一个典型的经历。在他加入剧组的第一天，一位资深的白人作家讲了一个笑话，其中有一句话是一个白人妇女用N字来称呼一个黑人演员。对萨基来说，这感觉就像一个测试，似乎他的反应将决定他在这个房间里是否受欢迎。"那就像我的杰基-罗宾逊时刻，对吗？就像，我刚刚被劈头盖脸地骂了一顿--我怎么能接受这个？ "他记得自己在想。他没有说出他的不舒服。"在那一刻，我觉得，我从心理上理解了你所做的努力。尽管这很糟糕，但我有责任做好，不给我身后的所有人搞砸这个机会。"


相比之下，用萨吉的话说，Black-ish编剧室是他的好莱坞HBCU。萨吉觉得他有空间来磨练自己的技艺，并将他和房间里的其他人在个人和职业生活中面临的挑战戏剧化。该剧还对周围的世界做出了类似于实时的反应。2016年，该剧播出了题为 "希望 "的一集，其中一家人得知一名黑人男子被一名白人警察枪杀的消息。该事件是虚构的，但剧本唤起了现实生活中塔米尔-赖斯、埃里克-加纳和桑德拉-布兰德的死亡；巴里斯说，这一集的灵感来自于他努力向自己的孩子解释2014年迈克尔-布朗在密苏里州弗格森市被枪杀一事。Dre和 "Bow "在如何帮助他们的孩子处理枪击事件--以及警察最终被无罪释放的问题上存在分歧。德雷坚持认为，警察是系统性种族主义的工具，这对夫妇的孩子作为年轻的黑人，"需要了解他们所生活的世界"。鲍试图找到一种方法来谴责暴力，同时保留他们孩子的纯真，以便他们能够 "再做一段时间的孩子"。巴里斯的感觉是特立独行的，这个系列并不总是能实现它的目标（或开它的玩笑）。但 "希望 "是一个 "非常特别的情节"，尽管有一些尴尬的时刻，但它设法解决了一个严肃的问题，而没有使整个观看体验感觉像一堂课，或一场布道。

阅读：Black-ish和如何与孩子们谈论警察暴力问题


与二十年前《家事》中对警察暴力的处理相比，《希望》看起来是一个巨大的飞跃。然而，萨吉指出，"希望 "之所以能够发生，只是因为早先的节目向白人观众介绍了这个主题。Black-ish的许多编剧都知道《不同的世界》甚至《家事》等节目所做的工作，为他们自己的系列节目清除了一些空间。Saji说，《家事》中对警察暴力的处理可能远非完美，但 "我知道他们必须要有什么样的争斗才能做到这一点。"

VI. "你还不满足吗？"
尽管《黑衣人》以其对种族的坚定处理赢得了赞誉--电视评论家米歇尔-奥巴马告诉安德森这是她最喜欢的节目--但巴里斯感到受到了美国广播公司及其母公司迪士尼的制约。有一次，他被要求搁置一条基于亨利-路易斯-盖茨在哈佛大学教授家门口被捕的故事线，他同意了。2017年，巴里斯制作了一集--"拜托，宝贝，拜托"，探讨了唐纳德-特朗普当选后许多美国黑人的恐惧。在经历了长达数周的争论后，这一集被搁置，最终涉及到迪士尼CEO鲍勃-艾格本人。巴里斯和美国广播公司将这一决定归结为 "创意分歧 "问题，但一些业内人士认为，广播公司反对这一集对四分卫科林-卡佩尼克的正面处理，后者在足球比赛前的国歌声中下跪，抗议警察对美国黑人的暴力行为。(美国广播公司否认了这一解释。）巴里斯最终离开了美国广播公司，转投Netflix，他的网络合同还剩下三年时间。


即使是她这一代人中最成功的节目主持人兰姆斯，最终也感到被网络电视扼杀了。去年，她告诉《好莱坞报道》，她在美国广播公司的晚年充满了对内容、预算的冲突，甚至她对希拉里-克林顿总统竞选的支持。但突破点出现在2017年，当时一位迪斯尼高管对她要求增加迪斯尼乐园的通行证表示反对。据报道，他问道："你的东西还不够多吗？"。不久之后，莱姆斯与Netflix签订了一份九位数的协议。

丑闻》、《黑衣人》和《不安全》节目的剧照
丑闻》（上）等节目的成功有助于为《黑衣人》（中）和后来的《不安全》（下）等剧铺平道路。然而，即使黑人编剧和制片人获得了更多的机会，他们仍然会遇到同样的障碍。(Danny Feld / ABC / Everett Collection; Kelsey McNeal / ABC / Everett Collection; Lisa Rose / HBO / Everett Collection)
黑人编剧和制片人前往Netflix、Amazon Prime Video和其他流媒体平台是有原因的。流媒体的商业模式并不那么依赖收视率。从本质上讲，这些平台是在销售礼品篮的内容；他们所需要的只是用户想要篮子里的一样东西。达内尔-亨特是加州大学洛杉矶分校的教授和院长，也是 "好莱坞多样性报告 "的主要作者。"当你购买了Hulu或Netflix或Amazon Prime或任何东西的订阅时，"他告诉我，"你会得到他们提供的所有东西。所以从他们的角度来看，他们的节目组合越广泛越好。如果他们有一个非裔美国人非常非常喜欢的节目，而其他人不喜欢，那么这个节目可能会被保留下来，如果它吸引了足够多的黑人用户，否则他们可能不会订阅该平台。"


当然，Netflix希望从Rhimes那里得到一个跨越人口的打击，它以Bridgerton的形式得到了。这部摄政时代的浪漫系列剧是根据朱莉娅-奎因的小说改编的，是该平台有史以来最受欢迎的原创节目，在其上线的前28天，吸引了来自8200万家庭的观众。然而，从其他黑人作家和制片人那里，该公司很高兴能有一部具有90年代黑人情景喜剧的小众吸引力的系列。事实上，流媒体服务一直在抢购那个年代的系列剧的发行权。去年夏天，Netflix宣布它将播放90年代的黑人情景喜剧集，《姐姐，妹妹》和《莫莎》就是其中之一。Hulu重新强调其 "黑人故事 "中心，其中包括《杰弗逊一家》、《单身生活》和《家庭事务》等节目。2020年8月，迪斯尼拥有的流媒体服务甚至播出了三年前对美国广播公司来说太过火爆的《黑衣人》(Black-ish)中以特朗普为主题的一集。

然而，黑人编剧和节目主持人说，他们仍然会遇到同样的旧墙。伊萨-瑞(Issa Rae)在她的YouTube系列剧《尴尬黑人女孩的不幸遭遇》(The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)意外走红后，首次引起业界的兴趣。在这部2011年首播的低成本喜剧中，瑞扮演一个名叫J的女人，她在洛杉矶度过了大学毕业后的苦闷生活，部分是通过对着镜子对自己说唱来增强自信。这部剧是令人愉快的傻事，吸引了大批忠实的观众。瑞的J不是一个超性感的真人秀明星；她不是一个白人主角的沉默或时髦的好朋友。她就像之前的《不同的世界》和《单身生活》中的角色一样，只是一个年轻的黑人妇女，试图弄清楚自己的情况。但是，当蕾被要求将这一病毒式的热门作品变成电视连续剧时，非黑人的好莱坞高管不断告诉她，她的故事并没有真正反映黑人的经历。也许他们怀疑是否存在大量受过教育的黑人妇女（瑞是斯坦福大学的毕业生），或者是否值得迎合。也许他们只想强调与他们产生共鸣的黑人的一个方面，而不是描写全面的黑人角色。当时，Rae "死死地害怕因为太过真实而失去机会"--太过真实的自己。


来自2018年5月的杂志。对伊萨-雷的采访

最终，蕾能够塑造出那些全面的角色；那时她已经积累了足够的影响力。她的以友谊为重点的HBO剧集《Insecure》在今年早些时候完成了第五季也是最后一季的拍摄，讲述了洛杉矶的两位黑人女性在20多岁和30多岁时的浪漫和职业陷阱中的经历。这些妇女在生活中当然要与种族主义和性别歧视作斗争，但关键是，这些问题并不是该系列的重点。一些最好的剧集出现在第四季，当伊萨（瑞扮演）和莫莉（伊冯娜-奥吉）以痛苦的、30岁出头的友谊中最常见的方式渐行渐远。该剧的情感重心是他们对彼此的爱（有时是敌意）。他们的争吵有时感觉比现实生活中大多数朋友之间的争吵更有戏剧性--这毕竟是电视--但《不安全》完成了一项罕见的壮举，即成为一部描写黑人生活的电视剧，而没有将其病理化或感到负担。

几十年前，黑人的远见卓识是与市场力量和企业的阻力相对抗的。但是，人口统计学已经发生了变化，大众的口味也发生了变化。
在某些方面，蕾的早期经历对今天的黑人作家来说是典型的。许多电视观众第一次见到莉娜-怀特时，她在阿齐兹-安萨里的《无名之辈》中扮演丹妮丝。2017年，怀特根据她自己的出柜故事写了该剧最受欢迎的一集，并为她赢得了艾美奖。那时，她已经开始制作The Chi，这是一部为Showtime制作的电视剧，背景是她的家乡芝加哥。这是一个很好的机会，但像瑞一样，怀特发现她的视野被她必须回答的高管们所限制。"没有人知道我是谁，仍然有很多男人--很多白人男人--在负责，而我没有任何权力，"怀特说起她最早在剧中工作的日子。"然后我赢得了艾美奖，然后他们突然说，'好吧，你现在可以负责了'。 "


茱莉亚的创作者哈尔-坎特要求的是娱乐，而不是痛苦。50年后，黑人作家和制片人更有可能遇到相反的问题。电影公司、网络和流媒体平台感到最舒服的黑人故事需要作家探索--有时是重新创造--种族的创伤。迈克尔-布朗被杀后，出现了一个警察暴行剧的山寨产业。福克斯的《枪声》以一名黑人警察枪杀一名手无寸铁的白人大学生开始；在Netflix的《七秒钟》中，一名白人警察用车撞死了一名骑自行车的黑人少年。瑞转述了一位黑人作家朋友的经历，他有一部系列剧正在创作中。"她告诉我："在开发过程中，他们只是不断地增加创伤，以使其感觉值得观看。种族主义暴力作为一种情节手段并不局限于现实主义剧集；它也延伸到了类型作品中。斯派克-李制作的Netflix科幻片《昨日重逢》讲述了一个年轻的黑人科学天才创造了一个时间机器--为了拯救她被警察杀死的哥哥。然后是Prime Video上的新恐怖选集《他们》。该剧讲述了一个黑人家庭在20世纪50年代搬进了一个白人社区；该剧的恐怖元素是白人为了维护住房隔离而不惜一切代价。当预告片在3月发布时，许多黑人观众发出了呻吟。为什么黑人角色总是受到种族主义的影响，即使是在类型片的制作中？我们就不能有一个黑色的《吉普赛人》吗？


"当我们还在讲述那些如此关注创伤的故事时，我们实际上还在讲述关于白人至上的故事，"迪斯尼针对青少年的有线电视网络Freeform的总裁塔拉-邓肯告诉我，最近我们在纽约市的西村见面喝咖啡时。"我们不是在谈论我们的生活是什么样的，我们如何看待这个世界，以及我们的希望、梦想、目标和想象力。我们还在讨论生活在接近白人的地方是什么样子。"

今年5月，邓肯还成为Onyx Collective的总裁，这是迪士尼为有色人种创作者设立的新内容品牌。她是这个仍然由白人男子主导的行业中为数不多的黑人高管之一。麦肯锡2021年的一项研究发现，提供给黑人银幕外人才的大部分机会来自至少有一名黑人担任高级职务的节目。换句话说，从历史上被边缘化的群体中引进人才的工作经常落在那些同样被边缘化的群体中的人身上。能够进入这个行业的黑人正肩负着使整个行业多样化的重任。最近开发并制作了以哈林区为中心的合奏剧《奔跑吧！兄弟》的伊维特-李-鲍塞尔认真对待这一责任。"这是我开始创作节目的原因之一。我实际上可以创造我自己的工作环境，并决定房间的DNA和人们在房间里的体验。"


但是，根据麦肯锡的研究，尽管珊达-莱姆斯和肯尼亚-巴里斯以及泰勒-佩里在亚特兰大领导着自己的工作室，但只有5%的电视节目制作人是黑人。至于行政部门，邓肯和华纳兄弟电视集团的新主席钱宁-邓吉是个例外。加州大学洛杉矶分校的达内尔-亨特（Darnell Hunt）说："在其他地方，你看到的大多数人都是白人男性"。少数拥有实权的黑人无法挽回几十年的不平等。

然而，也许是第一次，各种力量的结合现在可能正朝着更好的方向弯曲。几十年前，黑人有远见的人要面对市场因素和企业的阻力--这不是一场公平的战斗。但人口统计学发生了变化，公众舆论和大众口味也发生了变化。特别是对于有线电视节目来说，所有年轻观众的收视率，而不仅仅是那些反映黑人、拉丁裔或亚裔家庭的收视率，对于拥有 "大多数少数民族 "演员阵容的节目来说，都达到了历史最高水平，如《不安全感》、唐纳德-格洛弗的《亚特兰大》以及明迪-卡林制作的成长系列节目《从未有过我》。在Twitter和Instagram上推动持续互动的电视节目--这是行业中的一个新领域，现在有如此多的电视观看发生在所谓的第二屏幕上--是那些拥有更接近美国多样性的演员和编剧室的节目。

为了在这个正在发展的国家取得成功，传统网络和流媒体平台需要做的不仅仅是发布关于他们对多样性和包容性原则的承诺的声明，或者汇总他们的 "黑人故事 "或向观众展示 "黑人生活问题系列"。为了让变化持续下去，高管和其他行业的权力经纪人需要继续投资于与他们自己的愿景不一致的创意。他们必须将 "真实性 "的条件以及关于它的任何谈判让给黑人创作者，因为他们的声音长期以来一直被忽视。否则，他们就有可能使自己被淘汰，这种前景甚至可能激励那些没有被善心所激起的人。


这篇文章出现在2021年10月的印刷版上，标题是 "黑人电视的不成文规定"。

*头条图片。插图：Danielle Del Plato；来源：CBS/Getty；Elizabeth S.A.T.。CBS / Getty; Elizabeth Sisson / Showtime / Everett Collection; ABC Photo Archives / Walt Disney Television / Getty; Carsey-Werner Co. / Everett Collection; Mitch Haaseth / ABC / Everett Collection; Globe Photos / Zuma Press / Alamy; Richard Cartwright / ABC / Everett Collection; NBCUniversal / Getty; 20th Century Fox / Everett Collection; NBC Productions / Photo 12 / Alamy; Everett Collection; Joe Viles / Paramount Television / Everett Collection; Andrew Semel / Warner Bros. Television / Everett Collection

Hannah Giorgis是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。