CBS Makes Its Fall Picks . . . But Omits One ‘Family’

Giving lip service to ethnic diversity sounds nice.

The true-life saga of getting a Latino drama series on network TV is proving as arduous, however, as it was for the endangered Guatemalan brother and sister in Gregory Nava’s acclaimed film “El Norte” to flee illegally across the U.S. border and make a new life for themselves in Los Angeles.

Latinos, despite being the nation’s fastest growing minority, remain nearly as alien in the loopy la-la of network prime time as Nava’s tragic young Guatemalans were in L.A. The antique wheezy, musty, creaky common wisdom is that dramas about people of color automatically repel white audiences.

No sir, just won’t tolerate ‘em.

Take “American Family,” the warm, uplifting, captivating, well-acted, finely crafted, sweet beauty of a series pilot that Nava has written, directed and produced for CBS in his first shot at network TV.

CBS apparently isn’t taking it, meaning that “American Family” may be another of those pilots viewers never get to see.

Although set mostly in the Boyle Heights section of oft-stereotyped East L.A., hear it from a Jew watching from the mostly white suburbs that its appeal and gangbanger-less values are universal. As Nava says, “If you tell the story of your village, you tell the story of the world. All movies and literature are an example of that.”

Happily, his urban village here is credible and seductive, his cast first-rate, the promise of his series unlimited with its generational conflicts and family solidarity as narrated by college student Cisco Gonzalez (Jay Hernandez), who wants to be a filmmaker. Cisco videotapes family gatherings to post on the Gonzalez Web site that he’s created.

Jess Gonzalez (Edward James Olmos) is the family patriarch, a Korean vet and East L.A. barber who is rigidly set in his conservative ways and resistant to change. So naturally he opposes leaving the homestead and moving with his loving, dutiful wife, Berta (Sonia Braga), to an upscale condo obtained for them by their physician son Conrado (Kurt Caceres) and daughters, Vangie (Rachel Ticotin), who lives in Brentwood, and Nina (Constance Marie), a pro bono attorney hoping to join the Washington staff of a local congresswoman. Also prominent are their Aunt Dora (Raquel Welch) and brother, Esteban (Esai Morales), an ex-con who took the robbery rap for his pregnant wife because he didn’t want her to give birth in jail.

Humor and tragedy mingle here, as they do in real life, and something dramatic happens near the end of the hour that shakes the family, alters lives irrevocably and draws everyone even closer together.

Perfection? Not quite. Much like “Mi Familia,” Nava’s rewarding 1995 feature on generations of rich barrio life, “American Family” is streaked by sentimentality. The TV pilot mostly earns its cleansing tears, though, and as your heart breaks when the hour rises to crescendos of emotion, you don’t feel manipulated.

In other words, what’s not to like?

This series should be on the air. Especially, given growing pressure on the TV industry by Latinos, along with other minority advocacy groups, to be more inclusive. Cable’s Showtime responded to the challenge with “Resurrection Blvd.,” its weekly drama about an East L.A. prizefighting family that premieres next month along with “Soul Food,” its series about African Americans.

Ole for the effort.

Yet somehow, amazingly, stunningly, absurdly--go figure--high-achieving “American Family” is not expected to make the fall schedule that CBS is ready to unfurl and start waving today like the Stars and Stripes. Even if the carrot of “possible midseason replacement” is dangled in front of Nava, it appears unlikely that “American Family” will ever surface on CBS.

Nava says he’s been informed that the “heads of the network don’t like” his series. You might call that a bad omen. Nor are Latino dramas known to be in the works at other networks, another indictment of an industry that, while in some ways smarter and more progressive than the movie business, continues to view change and social responsibility as harrowing.

“There’s never been a Latino [drama on prime-time TV] before, and they’re frightened of it,” said Nava, whose popular 1997 feature, “Selena,” gave him a level of marketability that surely accelerated his series development deal with CBS. “Their values are ingrained [regarding] what they think is commercial,” he said.

Nava is confident that his series is commercial. He bases that in part on the responses of audiences, mostly white, that screened his one-hour pilot in tests arranged by co-executive producers Robert Greenblatt and David Janollari that he said paralleled those held by CBS.

“I was at a testing facility where I saw the audience weeping,” he said.

Unlike “Resurrection Blvd.,” some of whose East L.A. characters are initially preoccupied with dodging harm in a cross-fire of homie violence that solidifies Latino stereotypes, the Gonzalezes of “American Family” are a clan for all seasons.

“I wanted to show how times have changed, how families have changed, how values between generations have changed,” Nava said, “but that despite all these changes, the strength of the family still persists. And this is remarkable to me in modern life.”

This culture is all but absent not only from network prime time, but also from newscasts, except for the obligatory annual trek into Latinodom by camera crews on Cinco de Mayo. Otherwise, gangbanging and mayhem are the prevalent Latino fare that Americans encounter on the news.

And what they would not find on “American Family,” which has the potential to be topical, moving and funny.

“People want to know us,” Nava said about Latinos. “Everything we are as Latinos is so hot. Our music, our culture. Everybody loves it. Our moment has come.”

Except on network TV. Now who’s weeping?

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.