TV’s Drama About Blacks Is All Behind the Scenes

It’s an old story--television’s ultimate blacklisting or brownlisting.

Black sitcoms appear indelibly affixed to prime time, yet getting a family drama about blacks, or Asian Americans or Latinos, on the air remains the hardest of hard sells.

Take the case of current prime-time ratings champ CBS. It has vowed to widen its audience beyond Norman Rockwell folk to include more of the nation’s urban young, but in picking new series to open the 1994-95 season, the network omitted the worthy “Under One Roof,” a weekly drama that was developed by its own production arm and may lack only one prerequisite for prime time.

Whiteness.

“We haven’t passed on it,” said CBS spokeswoman Susan Tick.

“I’m very pessimistic,” said executive producer Thomas Carter (“Equal Justice”).

Television’s minstrels appear in multiple shades, and Fox’s new fall lineup includes an action show, “M.A.N.T.I.S.,” whose hero is black. When it comes to drama, however, TV seeks to seduce a rainbow of Americans with mostly a single color. Implicit here is that most programmers are ethnocentric, believing that non-whites will be riveted to whites in non-comedic situations, but not vice versa.

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Black families have been nearly invisible in family drama, a situation “Under One Roof” could help remedy. Its protagonists are the Langstons, a middle-of-the-middle-class black family living in Seattle. No drugs, no violence, no gangs, not even an absentee father. No major dysfunction, just a highly appealing family.

Although not faultless, the pilot for “Under One Roof” ripples with more promise than 90% of what presently passes for drama in prime time. Its humor is unforced, its conflicts between generations are genuine, and its interesting, endearing characters relate in ways that likely would earn them the empathy of real-life families.

Plus, the cast is first-rate. Joe Morton is Ron Langston, a former career military man trying his hand at business. Vanessa Bell Calloway is his wife, Maggie, who resumed school to get a nursing degree. James Earl Jones is Ron’s father, Neb, a cop who lives downstairs with a street youth he and his late wife took in. Joe and Maggie have two kids of their own, and Ron’s younger sister is also part of this likable extended brood.

Written by Martha Williamson, Michael Henry Brown and Paul Aaron (the latter two wrote HBO’s “Laurel Avenue”), the pilot’s teleplay has an edge while also projecting the kind of warmth and even teary poignancy that usually has network programmers bawling all the way to the bank. If ever a contemporary black family drama was going to make the schedule in the ‘90s, you’d think this would be it.

“Under One Roof” is not only absent from the fall lineup, however, it also received no backup order from CBS, said Carter, making it questionable even for mid-season emergence.

But CBS has not written all of its 1994-95 backup orders, and “Under One Roof” could still get one, spokeswoman Tick said. “It’s still in play here,” she said.

“I think their first concern is about the characters being black,” said Carter, who directed the pilot. “I think they’re also concerned that this is a very honest show. They’re a slave to gimmicks. We would have had a better chance to get it on the air if we had a tragedy that brings the family together.”

Carter said that it was CBS Entertainment President Peter Tortorici who (when still the division’s No. 2 executive) approached him about doing a “black show--he would have accepted a comedy--with a strong male figure” for CBS Productions. Carter said that when “Under One Roof” was screened for CBS executives in Los Angeles, “they loved it and thought the show was a slam dunk.” But when the pilot was viewed by network management in New York, he said, the attitude changed and “everything went askew.”

Equally askew is an industry that rarely finds room for blacks who live in the real world and don’t speak the language of one-liners.

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT: “Mmmm, I love garlic,” Katie Couric said last Wednesday morning, starting a cooking segment for NBC’s traveling “Today” program at a Boston seafood restaurant.

For Couric and “Today,” the grotesquely sadistic act that followed was just a big laugher. Inadvertently, though, they provided an educational service by erasing the abstraction and graphically showing the process by which some of the animals we eat arrive on our plate.

The fare was lobster.

No, not a lobster boiled alive in a pot of water, but something even yummier and rather more exotic. After heating the garlic in a pan and adding some crushed red pepper, the chef picked up the entree--a live lobster--and twisted off its claws as it writhed. A wincing Couric quickly turned away. “I can’t look. Hurry!”

But fine cuisine can’t be hurried. The chef then selected a large knife and, as Couric cringed, sliced the still-moving lobster in half. “Oh, what a way to go,” Couric said fliply.

Then the chef took the upper half of the still-moving lobster and began sauteing it in the pan. “Oh, it’s still moving,” Couric said, then wittily joked: “Can’t you give him sleeping pills or something before you cut him up?”

After the mirth subsided, it was time to add wine and tomato sauce in preparation for cooking the lobster for 10 to 12 minutes. Couric: “And we’ll be back in a moment to hear some music from the Boston Pops.”

Bon appetit. *

THE WORD: Although he does some goofy things from time to time, Phil Donahue can usually be counted on to be an effective devil’s advocate. On Monday’s episode of “Donahue,” though, he was overwhelmed and rendered inept by controversial Nation of Islam lecturer Khalid Abdul Muhammad.

Muhammad, a disciple and suspended aide of National of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, was the hour’s only guest. The invective-spewing verbal barrage by him and his boisterous followers, who were packed into the front of the studio, targeted all whites in general, all Jews in particular. Donahue and a few doddering audience members made some feeble attempts at rebuttal, but were no match for the relentless assault, and Donahue, in particular, ultimately appeared to give up.

Can you imagine Donahue not asking a loony white guy what he meant by urging God to erase all blacks? Or Donahue letting Ku Klux Klan members slander blacks virtually at will? It wouldn’t happen.