Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard in Fox's 'Empire'
One of the big talked about issues with last night's telecast of the Oscars was diversity in the film industry, but it's one that also hangs over television. In the 1970s and '80s, shows like
The Jeffersons,
Sanford & Son,
Good Times, and
The Cosby Show attracted broad audiences and were huge ratings hits. However, since 1991 and the
Cosby spin-off
A Different World, there
hasn't been a TV series with a predominantly African-American cast in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings. Also of note, all of the TV series I just mentioned were half-hour sitcoms. One could probably count on two hands the number of dramas with a primarily non-white cast, let alone considerations of how successful those series performed when they made it to air.
This TV season has seen new shows like ABC's Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat pull in strong ratings, but it's the success of Fox's Empire that's turned some heads. Created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong, Empire is basically King Lear and The Lion in Winter meets Dynasty and Dallas. It tells the story of a dying hip-hop mogul who wants to bequeath his fortune to one of his children and the power struggle that creates. Since its January debut, Empire has garnered record ratings and been hailed as "harnessing the power of black viewers."
But while Empire's success is interesting to analyze, it also points to how diversity is covered in media and how, in itself, can be part of the problem. Whether or not TV as a whole is multi-ethnic is more than just counting up the number of actors and actresses to see if there's parity. The true problem is that white actors are considered a "default" and any deviation from that default is considered special and noteworthy to the point of reclassifying something as a "black show," or a "Hispanic/Latino show," or a "women's show" if a majority of the cast has a skin tone with a high enough melanin count or lacking a penis.
Follow beneath the fold for more.
Last September, when ABC's How to Get Away with Murder premiered, Alessandra Stanley wrote a long piece in the New York Times that argued the show's producer, Shonda Rhimes, was an "angry black woman" and ostensibly most of her TV series are based around that idea through specific characters (e.g., Annalise Keating on How to Get Away with Murder, Olivia Pope on Scandal and Dr. Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy). Because of how reductive and offensive that point of view is when you boil a person's work down to the color of their skin and sharing the same sex and skin color with some of her characters, Stanley's article was widely ridiculed, even by Rhimes herself.
But that entire episode points to something about how people perceive television shows.
Scandal has an African-American female lead, Kerry Washington, and it's popular among African-Americans, but it's not a "black show." In fact, none of the ABC block of ShondaLand TV series are designed to appeal to just a specific audience. They're just shows with multi-ethnic casts where an actor's race most of the time doesn't really matter to the story the series wants to tell. It's critics, viewers, network executives, and advertisers that need to assign specific things to the specific people that are specifically supposed to watch and care about it. And a lot of times, even while doing that the assumptions are wrong, don't match reality, and make no sense.
African Americans actually watch 37 percent more television than any other demographic, and are more active in social media circles like Twitter than other groups. Basically, it's a situation where a part of the audience consumes a disproportionate amount of a product and is also more likely to create positive buzz for it, but the people who make the product don't take that demo into account when programming their shows. For example, other than Sunday Night Football and a few other blips along the way, NBC has been a ratings disaster over the past decade. Critic Andy Greenwald made a comment recently about how it says something that NBC decided it would rather do live stage productions to capture ratings than try to appeal to African-American audiences through shows similar to Empire.
Allison Williams as Peter Pan in 'Peter Pan Live!'
So why does this happen? There are a lot of theories.
- Consolidation: FCC regulations used to require television broadcasters and television production companies to be owned by separate entities (i.e., the fin-syn rules). In the mid-'90s, those rules were done away with, new networks flourished, but mergers and acquisitions put more production control in the hands of broadcasters. Decisions about programming became more of a corporate decision about getting the right "look" for selling advertising in network programs, instead of an independent production house trying to put out what they think is the best product or idea.
- The 18-49 Demo: The raw ratings don't really matter to most television executives. What does matter is the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, since that is what most advertisers care about and is thought to be the group most likely to be influenced by advertising. Network television has increasingly, year after year, been more and more concerned with chasing this specific demographic, and there's an argument that in doing so "rich white people who would spend the most money on products wanted to see more white people, ideally affluent as well." For a show like Fox's Empire, 62 percent of the show's audience is 18 to 49 and African-American. And contrary to the above argument, African-American buying power is estimated to be $1.5 trillion annually.
- Racial Empathy Gap: There have been more than a few studies measuring how people perceive pain inflicted upon African Americans. In those studies, both non-whites and whites were less likely to empathize with the extent of pain experienced by blacks. This is significant not only for tragedies like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, but also to how we perceive characters in a story. Many TV and film executives argue that white audiences can't empathize with black characters and that is significant enough reason to tailor casting decisions to white actors.
From Andre Seewood at
Indiewire:
A vast majority of White people don’t like Black movies because they lack the empathy necessary to identify with Black characters which in turn affects their ability to “suspend disbelief” and surrender to the narrative of a Black film. What has been called the Racial Empathy Gap in various sociological studies conducted by researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca and the University of Toronto Scarborough have revealed that,” The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one’s own race.” This study found that the degree of mental activity when White participants watched non-White men performing a task was significantly lower than when they watched people of their own race performing the same task. “In other words people were less likely to mentally simulate the actions of other-race than same-race people.”
When we watch a film we are watching images of people doing tasks in the pursuit of a goal to change a circumstance and it stands to reason that if the threshold of empathy in Whites is higher when watching non-Whites perform certain tasks because of the Racial Empathy Gap, then if the Whites are watching a Black film such a high empathy threshold would make the suspension of disbelief difficult and attenuate the pleasure of their viewing experience.
However, whether the
success of shows like
Empire and other properties might signal things are changing, only time will tell.