A show of diversity

Cable stations such as Nickelodeon and Showtime heed the call for more portrayals of minorities on television. But dramas that focus on Latino and black families walk a thin line with viewers.

By ERIC DEGGANS

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 26, 2000

He's on the verge of a major career triumph, but Dennis Leoni remains a little cautious.

Not about his new series. Get the writer-producer talking about his latest creation -- Showtime's Hispanic-centered drama Resurrection Boulevard -- and you'll see a fatherly pride in this ambitious but flawed show about a Mexican-American clan for whom boxing is the family business.

Instead, Leoni's biggest worry, as he debuts one of TV's first English-language, Latino-focused dramas at 10 tonight, isn't racist viewer reaction or apathy from couch potatoes who don't share his passion for Hispanic culture.

It's the reaction of other Latinos -- already concerned about the stereotypes evoked in a gang-style shooting in the first episode, and wary of a series that casts Cuban Elizabeth Pena and Puerto Rican Michael DeLorenzo as Mexican-American siblings.

"It reminds me of (Margaret Cho's 1994) series All-American Girl, where Asian Americans finally got a series and people started quibbling over whether this actor was Japanese or Korean. . . . It was pennywise and pound-foolish," says Leoni, a second-generation Mexican American who grew up in Tucson, Ariz.

"I understand that I'm going to take heat on several fronts," he adds, urging those who might criticize to judge the show on its artistic merits. "But we need to hang together as a family of Latinos and we'll be stronger together. Our basic show is about family, and all families are stronger if they stay together."

Such are the thorny issues that arise as TV programmers tackle a subject that has stymied producers, writers and actors since the small screen's inception:

Race.

Curiously, it's not a struggle network TV often faces. In the racially segregated TV world of the 21st Century, Frasier and the pals from Friends rarely hang in Moesha's neighborhood.

But a few cable outlets are willing to go where the networks aren't, scheduling an ambitious slate of series focused on African Americans and Hispanics -- partly to fill a void left by broadcast networks that have continually stumbled on diversity issues.

Besides Resurrection Boulevard, Showtime also debuts a series version of the black-oriented family drama Soul Food, bowing at 10 p.m. Wednesday (it's part of the channel's 10 Sharp lineup, featuring new episodes of original series every weeknight at 10 p.m.).

On July 23, Nickelodeon will premiere The Brothers Garcia, a kid-friendly, Wonder Years-style show that claims to be the first series featuring an all-Latino cast and creative team.

Meanwhile, HBO has tapped writer-producer Nelson George (The Chris Rock Show) to develop an anthology series for next year based on true stories about race collected from people across the country. And Nickelodeon on Oct. 8 debuts Taina, a drama about a 14-year-old Puerto Rican girl torn between her traditional family and dreams of a singing career.

It's a rush of minority-centered programming that may right many wrongs -- as long as the shows offer quality and profits. It's also material that cable TV, with its focus on niche markets, can offer more easily than network TV broadcasters.

At Showtime and HBO, where black and Hispanic viewers number up to a quarter of their subscribers, such shows aren't just good social moves, they're good business.

"If we provide a real, emotionally involving experience of a culture that has been denied a spot on the TV dial for 50 years, you can become the number one viewing experience for that audience," says Mark Zakarin, executive vice president of original programming at Showtime Networks. "They're getting something from Showtime they can't get anywhere else."

And as America becomes more diverse, the issues explored in these shows could also become the next great creative frontier for TV.

Imagine a crucible where notions of race and ethnicity are explored in the same way All in the Family and Maude explored race, class and feminist issues during the heady days of the mid '70s, when networks had TV audiences to themselves.

"Why not have a workplace comedy . . . (where) the black character is more complex and explains why he gets angry when white co-workers (mistake him) for another black worker?" says Taina creator Maria Perez-Brown. "When it comes to really telling the truth about how we are living, that's where network TV always comes up short."

Reinforcing stereotypes

TV's habit of marginalizing and ignoring people of color, an issue that has simmered for years, exploded into the mainstream last year, as the broadcast networks advanced a slate of new shows almost devoid of minority characters.

The numbers said a lot. A recent Screen Actors Guild survey found just two percent of roles in 87 series surveyed last year featured Latino actors, though Hispanics make up more than 11 percent of the nation's population.

Black actors were slightly overrepresented, but half their roles were found in situation comedies (compared to 30 percent of white actors' parts); 44 percent of the African-American characters were found on the two smallest networks, UPN and the WB.

Inspired by complaints and threats of boycotts from the NAACP, The National Council of La Raza and others, the four major broadcast networks signed agreements earlier this year aimed at helping diversify shows on both sides of the camera.

But in their book The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America, communications professors Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki say broadcast TV networks develop series assuming that the largely white mainstream TV audience won't accept shows with more than one or two minorities in the cast.

"It's a symbolic form of affirmative action . . . with the sense that you can't present more than a certain number of black people without losing white viewers," says Rojecki, of the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Writer David Mills saw it while working on NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street, one of network TV's most diverse shows before its cancellation last year. Two of Homicide's strongest characters were police detectives played by black actors Yaphet Kotto (Lt. Al Giardello) and Andre Braugher (Detective Frank Pembleton).

"The white producers believe, to this day, that's why the show wasn't that big a hit," says Mills, who most recently co-authored the screenplay for HBO's gritty urban drama The Corner. "They believe that white folks in Terre Haute, Indiana, didn't want to tune in and see Andre Braugher being smarter than everybody else."

Airing on Friday nights when their target audience of smart, urban viewers was elsewhere might also have hobbled Homicide, but Mills has a point.

Rojecki and Entman's book, based on 10 years of polling and survey studies, concludes modern-day TV images subtly reinforce a racial hierarchy with white people on top and black characters distanced -- either as disconnected bosses (Lt. Arthur Fancy on NYPD Blue) or as paragons of success, unhampered by racism.

The result, Rojecki says, is a TV picture that discourages social intimacy and reinforces stereotypes among white viewers who have little contact with people of color.

Minorities in the mainstream

Into this void step a number of ambitious cable TV projects, focused on telling stories about the shape of life for minorities in modern-day America.

Leoni's Resurrection Boulevard explores such issues through the Santiago family, a clan living in East Los Angeles. In the pilot, the family's hopes are pinned to middle son Carlos (DeLorenzo), a contender for the middleweight crown.

Throughout the pilot, Leoni shows off a wide range of characters, from domineering patriarch and trainer Roberto (Tony Plana), who works in an auto repair shop, to youngest son Alex (Nicholas Gonzalez), a premed student at UCLA. Appearances by Cheech Marin, Paul Rodriguez and Suddenly Susan co-star Nestor Carbonell boost the star quotient.

Still, the drama, which heats up once DeLorenzo's character is seriously injured, can be predictable and awkward despite its attempts to show many facets of Hispanic life in America.

But Leoni fears the most criticism will likely come over his depiction of young neighborhood thugs -- stereotypical gang members whose taste for casual sex and violence fuel the debut episode's most dramatic moments. "There's a certain faction of people who believe you shouldn't show stereotypes . . . (but) gangs are a reality of life in Los Angeles," he says, noting that such characters are not glorified in his show. "When you do a show that's real, you have to deal with these people."

Aside from mostly Latino casts, both Resurrection Boulevard and Nickelodeon's Brothers Garcia share the approach of featuring Hispanic culture in subtle ways.

On Resurrection, it's the occasional bursts of Spanish phrases and salsa music playing at a family celebration. On the family comedy The Brothers Garcia, it's the extra-hot salsa Dad eats at dinner and loving Spanish nicknames Mom has for her four children.

"I want to show America that Latino families are like everyone else," Leoni says. "These people are culturally specific, so there will be Latino food and pinatas. But as an American of Mexican heritage, I know (TV viewers) need to see a family like theirs and know they have dreams and needs just like everyone else."

Developed for a youthful audience, Brothers Garcia is a pleasant, if slight, TV comedy, featuring John Leguizamo as an adult narrator reflecting on his youthful adventures.

With early storylines focusing on a schoolgirl crush and sibling rivalry, the series offers a middle class, mainstream world view punctuated occasionally by its characters' ethnicity.

"For 50 years now, people have been asking, "How do you get Latinos on TV?' We just put 'em on . . . there's universal themes that touch us all," says Jeff Valdez, creator and executive producer of The Brothers Garcia.

"Nickelodeon knows . . . kids don't see those boundaries," Valdez adds, citing the channel's track record of advancing shows with minority stars, including Gullah Gullah Island and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. "People always talk about how we need to educate our children, but maybe we need to let our children educate us."

Author and screenwriter Nelson George decided to let viewers educate him while developing a new anthology series focused on race relations in the 21st century for HBO.

Earlier this year, he asked people to submit their stories about race through e-mail and letters; the best eight to ten tales will be dramatized in an anthology miniseries similar to HBO's Subway Stories.

"I'm hoping to focus on people in their 20s who grew up with the (benefits of the) civil rights movement . . . the black security guard at the white department store, or the white fireman working in the black neighborhood," says George, who has written extensively on race and pop culture.

"My hunch is that (this generation) sees race differently," he adds. "They share interracial dating, marriage, a blending of rap culture with the mainstream. . . . And maybe they're the most hostile, because of that intimacy."

In the end, the producers agree it is too early to tell whether these minority-centered shows are the tip of a trend, or a grand experiment that won't last long.

And they all acknowledge the difference between victory and failure lies in showing both cable and network TV outlets they can make profits by doing the right thing.

"Ultimately, the TV industry is a business of money . . . and there's a huge, untapped market of viewers out there for these shows," says Perez-Brown of Taina, which begins production in late summer at Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando. "If they see you can make money by telling stories that are true and on target . . . that's when things will explode."

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