Grateful Plug: Ray Richmond Discusses ‘The White Cloud That Hangs Over the Emmy Awards’
Now You See Them, and They Still Don’t Get Enough Props
It’s just a fact of life that it takes a mass publication like The Hollywood Reporter to get the word out about some sensitive and/or hidden issues, so I have no problem plugging a recent post from the publication’s television journalist Ray Richmond in his consistently engaging Past Deadline blog (and I compliment him genuinely—I’m a longtime regular reader). Taking a lead from another enlightening Hollywood Reporter article, Sandie Angulo Chen‘s “Emmys Lag in Recognizing All Races,” I posted about the issue of TV, diversity, and award recognition at the end of May. Richmond now offers further clarification of the situation with a timely post that is first and foremost an argument for why super-talented Tichina Arnold (Martin, One on One) should receive an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy nomination for her definitive work in The CW’s most funny and worthwhile sitcom Everybody Hates Chris. She plays Rochelle Rock, the no-nonsense mother figure in the two-year-old series inspired by the Brooklyn, New York, childhood of funnyman-actor Chris Rock.
“The White Cloud That Hangs Over the Emmy Awards” is an interesting read for anyone who cares about the enduring quality and legitimacy of the television medium—you know, stuff like Jericho fans’ recent victory bringing their fave series back from the small-screen dead, or the current glut of subpar reality series dominating what seems like every network’s schedule, at the expense of higher costing yet better quality scripted programs, many of which end up canceled before they can build a decent audience and, even worse, replaced by yet more of those aforementioned irksome reality debacles. Richmond presents clear information regarding people of color’s history of non-success in the TV industry when it comes to scoring the major awards that often lead to major clout and more major roles.
Careful to point out that the realities are not always an effect of direct and deliberate discrimination, Richmond’s article still manages to show how different the current state of largely superficial diversity on television appears when you take a magnifying glass to the cold, hard data. For example, if Arnold were to get (extremely, unbelievably, earth-shatteringly) lucky and receive an Emmy nod in the Best Comedy Actress category, she would be the first “minority” woman so honored since Phylicia Rashad of The Cosby Show was nominated and lost in 1986. In case no one’s counting, that’s twenty-one years ago, or one year more than two decades.
As a fan and frequent TV watcher, I must admit that it’s disheartening, to say the least, to walk around my present New England neighborhood just outside of Boston—a region that has an infamous reputation, true or not, for self-enforced homogeneity—and see more diversity of all kinds than I do on a wildly popular television show like Friends or Seinfeld, both of which are allegedly set in the epitome of United States diversity, my original hometown of New York.
If nothing else, I hope some of the people whose votes help determine the prestigious industry accolades, such as the Emmys, get a good whiff of both Chen and Richmond’s spot-on articles.
Related Post: TV and Diversity: Catching Up or Still Lagging Woefully Behind?
Tichina Arnold photo courtesy of The CW
