TV’s Shame: Lack of Dramas on Black Life

So Oprah Winfrey’s new ABC drama about black residents of Chicago, “Brewster Place,” didn’t make it.

By itself, that’s no tragedy. It flopped in the ratings, won’t be back this fall--and maybe it wasn’t exactly classic TV.

But there’s a larger issue involved--much larger:

How many years will we now have to wait again for a network series about a black family and community life without the usual sitcom buffoons?

Plenty of TV dramas about white families fail. Yet here comes CBS in the fall with still another, “The Hammersmiths,” about a clan in the Northwest.

But if dramas about black families fail in the ratings, the networks fall back on their dreadful, unspoken belief that white viewers don’t want to watch a series about black reality.

It is statistical racism, plain and simple.

This fall will find such white family dramas as “Life Goes On,” “thirtysome-thing” and “The Hammersmiths” in prime time. There are no weekly dramas built around black families.

It is part of a shameful chapter in American television--the serious depiction of family life almost exclusively from a lily-white point of view.

In fact, in the entire history of network TV, you can almost count on the fingers of one hand the number of black family drama series.

Do you remember, for instance, NBC’s “Harris and Company”? That was way back in 1979. Bernie Casey starred as a blue-collar worker, a widower who moved from Detroit to Los Angeles with his five children to build a new life. It was a lovely series--and lasted less than a month.

Then there was CBS’ “Palmerstown, U.S.A.,” which played for a few months in 1980 and a few more in 1981. It was about the friendship of two 9-year-old boys--one black, the other white--and their families in the South during the Depression. Also lovely and responsible, it was produced by Norman Lear and author Alex Haley.

Here and there, other depictions of black family life have been attempted in snippets. In 1973, for instance, NBC’s “Tenafly” debuted with a fine black actor named James McEachin as a private eye who also had a solid family life. It lasted for a season as one of four rotating elements of the network’s “Mystery Movie” series.

In 1979, meanwhile, James Earl Jones arrived in CBS’ “Paris” as a cop with an understanding wife. It really wasn’t much of a family drama, and it was gone in less than four months anyway.

There is no shortage anymore of black performers in key roles in drama series--from “The White Shadow” to “L.A. Law” to “In the Heat of the Night,” where Howard Rollins plays opposite Carroll O’Connor.

And black prime-time images, while still hardly satisfactory in terms of realism, at least have ventured beyond stereotypes in significant series.

CBS’ “Tour of Duty” performed a notable public service in reminding viewers of the enormous role of blacks in the military during the Vietnam War.

Another CBS series, “Frank’s Place,” offered Tim Reid as a professor who inherits a Creole restaurant in New Orleans--and while it was part drama, part comedy, it represented a wonderful freeing-up of black stereotypes of the past on TV.

There is a cable channel called Black Entertainment Television, which gives a more diverse picture of black life than one finds on the networks.

Yet because of network mind-sets and statistical racism, the images of blacks on TV have come far more over the years from sitcoms than realistic dramas. While there is nothing wrong with good comedy, bigots may find this emphasis reassuring because, in a sense, it reinforces ancient show-business stereotypes of blacks essentially as entertainers, rather than as human beings.

Others among us, white and black, would just like to see the black American experience translated into realistic family dramas that remove TV’s cloak of invisibility from this crucial part of U.S. life.

There has never been a black head of programming at any of the Big Three networks, which may well explain the long-existing mind-sets.

And in fact, this exclusion of blacks from most high TV management positions is part of a pattern that has impeded proper representation of blacks on screen in various roles. No black has ever headed a network news division. None of Los Angeles’ major TV stations is run by a black. None of these stations has a black news director. And there is only one regular weeknight anchor on any of the city’s leading TV stations who is black, Pat Harvey of KCAL, Channel 9.

You can’t help thinking that Winfrey, with her natural gifts as an actress, might well have succeeded in prime time by taking the sitcom route. Yet you also can’t help admiring her for trying to do what should be done, and what isn’t being done--bringing a different dimension of blacks to the home screen.

Bill Cosby, because of his enormous acceptance, has turned his sitcom into a new dimension all its own, elevating black role models in a way that happily destroys some of the stereotypes of the past.

But the overwhelming number of successful black shows in prime time over the years have been comedies--”The Jeffersons,” “Amen,” “A Different World,” “227,” “Good Times,” to mention just a few.

The coming season brings several new twists. Whoopi Goldberg, in a carry-over comedy from this spring, headlines CBS’ “Bagdad Cafe,” with Jean Stapleton. Fox’s new sitcom, “True Colors,” is about a black man and white woman who marry.

With realistic black drama series non-existent in prime time, as though the networks were writing a revisionist history of America, probably the most insightful series on blacks during the key viewing hours is Fox’s wonderfully hip and satirical new comedy revue, “In Living Color.”

In short, while blacks have come a long way on TV since Cosby broke important barriers in “I Spy” in 1965 and Diahann Carroll followed suit in “Julia” in 1968, there is still a long way to go.

And, ironically, the audience measurements that led to statistical racism may now provide a way out of the dilemma. Just this week, the Nielsen ratings firm said that it is expanding its coverage of minority audiences.

This is important. Jesse Jackson, among others, has said in past years that minorities were underrepresented in the ratings, partly because poll-takers feared going into tough ghetto areas.

A. C. Nielsen Jr., before retiring as head of the firm, acknowledged that this fear was a factor. He also acknowledged that minority representation in the ratings was lower than the census percentage it supposedly reflects because sponsors wanted the numbers weighted that way.

With more minority viewers now being counted, and with surveys showing that black women are heavy TV watchers, network programming may well feel the impact. If prime time can accommodate that white family in the Northwest in “The Hammersmiths,” then surely it has room for a black family drama set in South-Central Los Angeles.