Diversity dearth comes from top down

[Photo: ABC] Steven Bochco’s newest series, the courtroom drama Philly, gets off to a rough start in the diversity department, with an all-white core cast and a pilot whose major bad guys are all black.

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By ERIC DEGGANS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 26, 2001

It was a question Steven Bochco didn't want to hear.

We were at a press conference for his new show, ABC's legal drama Philly, at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in July. I stood to ask Bochco a pointed question about why every major defendant in the show's pilot is black.

Hadn't the production team considered the impact of race when casting those bad-guy characters?

No, Bochco said flatly, blowing me off in front of a roomful of fellow TV critics and moving on to the next question.

But afterward, Dayna Bochco wanted me to know that her husband's response wasn't exactly on the level.

Mrs. Bochco, who serves as president of Steven Bochco Productions (and did so before marrying the producer last year), insisted that they had paid attention to the race of actors playing criminals.

She said she and her husband debated the issue many times with director-partner Kevin Hooks, a former star of the TV show The White Shadow, who is black.

"It's just so frustrating, because we really do think about these things," said Mrs. Bochco, adding that her husband probably felt insulted by my question considering his track record, including co-creating CBS' failed black-centered hospital drama, City of Angels, and handing Esai Morales one of the meatiest roles a Hispanic actor will play this fall, Lt. Tony Rodriguez on NYPD Blue.

"I mean, it's not like we're f--ing Friends, with no black people up there," she said. (Though Philly's four core characters are white, a black investigator gets a few lines.)

This is what happens when you try to talk about race and television in Hollywood.

On one side stand critics, advocacy groups such as the NAACP and La Raza -- and many viewers -- frustrated that network television in the 21st century still doesn't better reflect the diversity of our nation.

On the other side, you have network officials, advertising firms, producers and others among Hollywood's elite, swearing on a stack of Bibles that they care about ethnic and racial diversity and are bewildered about why they haven't achieved it yet.

So who's right? And why can't you even talk about it in the belly of the beast without someone like Steven Bochco losing it?

Series creator-producers "want complete and total creative control," said Paula Madison, general manager of Los Angeles NBC station KNBC and the network's vice president of diversity.

"It's a job to have to expand your horizons," added Madison, the first black woman to run a TV station in any of the nation's five biggest television markets. "And when we, who are perceived as "the suits,' come in and say . . . we want our programs to reflect society today . . . they come back saying, "Just leave me alone and let me create.' "

How successful the networks have been this year seems to depend on your perspective.

The NAACP recently blasted the networks for too-slow progress in diversifying on-screen and off, saying no person of color has the ability to "greenlight" a series at any network, two years after the four biggest outlets signed agreements promising to diversify their operations.

A week later, New York advertising firm Initiative Media produced a report saying 21 percent of the characters or actors in this season's new shows will be black, Hispanic or Asian, a 2 percent rise from two years ago.

That's slow but significant progress to Stacey Lynn Koerner, the analyst who prepared the report: "Change takes time. . . . You can't just fire 20 percent of your staff and replace them with (people of color)," she said. "You know how hard it is to get a show on the air and get the right formula (for success)."

But that sounds an awful lot like spin doctoring to Felix Sanchez, president of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, based in Washington, D.C.

"The real issue for me is lead roles," said Sanchez, who released a report Aug. 15 noting that just two out of 100 faces on prime time network TV are Hispanic. "(Hispanics) are about 12 percent of the population now, but when you look at lead roles, we're less than 2 percent. Even less, if you don't count (actors) who are Hispanic by birth and Irish by trade."

It's true: Dark Angel's Jessica Alba, The West Wing's Martin Sheen, Wolf Lake's Lou Diamond Phillips and UC: Undercover's Jon Seda are all Hispanic or biracial, yet none plays a character who is Hispanic.

And non-Hispanic character actors such as Will & Grace's Shelley Morrison and Dharma and Greg's Lillian Furst roll out the stereotypes while playing maids on two high-profile network comedies.

"NBC is great (about diversity) when it comes to the service sector," said a laughing Sanchez, noting that the only permanent minority characters in both The West Wing and Will & Grace are servants. "But from the Latino side, it's not like we're saying the glass is half full or half empty. For us, there's only a few drops in the glass at all."

The bottom line: If you factor out all the reality TV game shows -- which always feature one or two people of color -- 32 new series are coming this fall.

Every network but ABC -- five in all -- features one show in which a person of color stars as the lead or the lead character in an ensemble (MTV's Bill Bellamy, who is black, is the best-known face in a five-member ensemble for the WB's new comedy Men, Women and Dogs, for example.)

But the vast majority of shows with characters of color feature them in supporting roles (of 20 such shows coming this fall, about half feature minorities in cardboard, sidekick-type parts).

Only five feature minority actors who are not black. And nine new shows have no significant characters of color (including Bochco's Philly, which takes place in a city where 50 percent of the population is black, Hispanic or Asian).

So why can't network TV -- in an age when black- and Hispanic-centered series such as Soul Food, The Chris Rock Show and Resurrection Blvd. are lighting up cable TV -- do better?

Reason One: Hollywood's egos.

Some people just can't admit they don't get it.

Case in point: When comic Sarah Silverman appeared on Late Night With Conan O'Brien in July, she joked about writing "I love Chinks" on a form to get out of jury duty. Though O'Brien did the mea culpa dance with the press after the comment aired, saying they should have bleeped out the word, he later told the New York Observer, "I was okay with the joke . . . because it's a really smart joke."

Had Silverman used a similarly colorful slur for black or Hispanic people, would O'Brien have understood the backlash better?

Sanchez said such lapses happen because so few minorities work as writers, producers or network executives.

"(Series) creators have to visualize diverse stories, writers have to incorporate the characters, and casting directors have to present modern images," he said. "Entire networks still have no Latinos (in major positions), and this is after two years of hard-hitting negotiations."

Reason Two: Consider on whom these shows are really based.

Bill Lawrence, who co-created the ABC sitcom Spin City, said there's one reason his new hospital comedy Scrubs has two major characters of color -- a Hispanic nurse and a black surgical intern -- who are complex, well-drawn figures.

They're based on his friends.

"Writers, if they're doing their job, are writing from their own experience," said Lawrence. "I have friends who I consider the most open-minded people, but their show has white characters because one is (based on) the guy's wife, the other is his best friend he grew up with, and he's trying to write them."

Stephen Engel (Just Shoot Me, Mad About You) admitted that NBC "suggested" that he cast black actor Dondre T. Whitfield as an agent on his new sitcom Inside Schwartz, a change made after the show's original pilot was filmed.

He said some producers may seem resistant to such changes because "There's a million land mines you can step on when you're doing a pilot, and one you can control is casting. You have to field the best team you can, because if it doesn't work, (the network) is going to come around and (blame) me."

Still, Lawrence also admitted that writers and producers need prodding to consider new alternatives. "Somebody has to be courageous enough to step up and change the business," he said. "And if you're doing a cop show or a hospital show -- the most multicultural places of work you can find -- shame on you for not making the cast as diverse as life really is."

Reason Three: This takes continued effort.

Like Bochco, some producers seem to have trouble with the idea that real diversity is never a goal that you reach -- it's a constant process of striving to weed out unfair portrayals and equalize casting.

Sanchez expects pressure from the NAACP and other advocacy groups to continue, as activists struggle to broaden the the issue beyond a black/white dynamic and convince industry types that embracing minority characters doesn't mean rejecting white viewers (now about 70 percent of the TV audience).

"Every day, we have to keep reminding people that this issue is broader -- that diversity is broader than black and white America," he said. "When you refuse to push the envelope to a greater cultural ambience, then you get nothing."

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