Writing Duo Adds Spice to Television’s White-Bread Diet

They spoofingly call themselves Rice and Beans, this senior writing team for the NBC sitcom “Empty Nest.”

The “rice” is Chinese American Vince Cheung, 38; the “beans,” Mexican American Ben Montanio, 35.

And with less than 4% of all network writers belonging to racial and ethnic minorities, the duo may be TV’s only mixed minority team, according to Zara Taylor, executive administrator for employment diversity at the Writers Guild.

That uniqueness doesn’t exactly make Cheung and Montanio comfortable. Cheung remembers all too well growing up in L.A. with the nickname “Odd Job.” Montanio still remembers his shock the day in school he realized that a cartoonish Mexican character he had always laughed at on the show “Quick Draw McGraw” was taken by his classmates to be an accurate representation of himself.

They met in 1988 at ITC Productions, where Cheung was a development executive and Montanio oversaw the nuts and bolts of production. Thrown together to do script rewrites, they discovered they liked it and quit their jobs to pursue writing full time. They worked on “Growing Pains,” “Night Court” and “Roc” before joining “Empty Nest” last June.

Even with the title of supervising producers, however, they remain two notches below where the real power resides on most series--the executive producer.

“If minority writers created shows (which got on the air), TV would look different,” Montanio says. “The change would be subtle. But it would be noticeable. But if you’re just a writer on staff, your power is limited. You don’t have much say in the way the show will be shaped or the themes explored.”

Thus, the casual viewer would be hard-pressed to guess that “Empty Nest” is supervised by minority writers. With the exception of one black cast member, the show’s ensemble--who were all in place before Cheung and Montanio came aboard--is white. And even though the series is based in Miami, which has a huge Latino population, Latino culture merely seeps in around the edges of “Empty Nest.”

They do what they can--Montanio recently substituted a Latino man on crutches for the stereotypical Latina woman with five children, for example--but for the most part they are unhappy with television’s portrayal of minorities.

What Montanio wants to do is write about “everyday (Latinos) who hold down honest jobs, the ones who work at the bank, the ones who work at the post office . . . Television needs to reinforce (viewers’) respect for Latinos, instead of giving such a narrow opinion of them.”

Cheung concurs that stereotypes are still pervasive. Asian American males, he says, are too often portrayed as “kung-fu fighters, engineers or computer nerds,” and too rarely as, say, romantic leads.

“I’m embarrassed by what I see on TV,” Cheung says. “TV tells me that if I’m not sitting behind a computer terminal or if I’m not a cook, I don’t exist. But I do exist. TV just won’t reflect that.”

Indeed, although insisting that a writer’s biggest strength comes from writing what he knows, Montanio finds that he routinely must ignore his own first-hand experiences. What he knows is that the moment he leaves the studio lot, he may be mistaken for an illegal alien, that despite holding a highly prized job in a competitive industry and speaking flawless English, he is still often treated as a second-class citizen.

What he knows, too, is that writers hired after him have risen higher and gotten richer. “In the years we’ve been writing, we have no hard evidence that discrimination is a factor. But we’re never sure what the executives are saying behind closed doors,” Montanio said.

(According to the Writers Guild, from 1987 to 1991--the last period for which such figures were compiled--minority writers earned $10,000 a year less than their white male counterparts.)

Montanio suspects that this de facto anti-minority message has been heard. Although he has been flooded with “an ocean” of scripts by would-be television writers, he has seen less than 10 scripts from Latinos in five years. The number of scripts Cheung has seen from Asian Americans is only slightly higher.

They are heartened, however, by the arrival on ABC this season of “All-American Girl,” a comedy about a Korean American family. Cheung thinks it still reflects a mainstream view of a minority culture, but he is glad it’s on and credits that accomplishment in part to Ken Mok, an Asian American executive at ABC whom he says helped shepherd it through the network development maze.

Montanio says he doesn’t know of any Latino Ken Mok-types at the networks. But, he argues, “it’s the responsibility of the top network programming executives, the people who buy the shows, to familiarize themselves with the Latino community. And if they aren’t willing to do it, they should hire someone who will.”

Montanio and Cheung hope that the country’s changing demographics will make TV executives more receptive to minority-themed shows. It’s a point the pair stress to them when pitching ideas for such programming: that the Latino and Asian American populations are growing, that they watch a lot of television and that they have purchasing power that should appeal to advertisers.

“We watch TV. We’re your viewers. You need to include us, too,” Montanio says.

“And we have to realize this and empower ourselves,” he adds of the minority communities.

“Let’s not complain that TV doesn’t reflect us. We need to tell each other that we can do this, that we can write, we can produce, that we can create.”