TV and Diversity: Catching Up or Still Lagging Woefully Behind?
The News Is Not Good, Unfortunately, Given the Emmys’ Recent 20-Year Track Record
As someone who is among the “32% of the [United States] national population that is not white,” as National Hispanic Media Coalition director Alex Nogales puts it, I found Variety‘s alternatively insightful and depressing “Emmys Lag in Recognizing All Races” by Sandie Angulo Chen the most interesting entertainment-related article I’ve come across lately. According to the piece, television viewers may not have as much to celebrate as it would initially appear when it comes to the seemingly greater presence of diverse actors in wildly popular series.
In the spotlight these days, we have Battlestar Galactica‘s Edward James Olmos, Desperate Housewives‘ Eva Longoria, Grey’s Anatomy‘s Sandra Oh and Chandra Wilson, Heroes‘ Masi Oka, Lost‘s Naveen Andrews and Daniel Dae Kim, Ugly Betty‘s America Ferrera and Vanessa Williams, and The Unit‘s Dennis Hasybert, to name the more prominent minority thespians with legitimate chances of scoring an Emmy nomination in a major category for September’s 59th Primetime Emmy Awards.
Despite this apparent high visibility in recent years, however, the Emmys has a dismal record of rewarding talented minority actors, a fact that is easy to understand given that “[s]ince 1986, nonwhite actors have received only 51 nominations out of 840 possible slots in the top four acting categories for drama and comedy.” Such statistics remind me of the glass half full/half empty expression. Several dozen nods among less than a thousand total might represent a substantial number to some people, but to others like me, it’s just pathetic, particularly when you factor in the large percentage of minorities who typically comprise a sizable proportion of viewing audiences.
Yet, the main issue is not the lack of award recognition for minority actors and actresses, or their relatively small numbers in the casts of top-rated series. The dilemma instead involves the almost complete absence of minority individuals—aside from current Power Player Shonda Rhimes, of course, who created the hit medical drama Grey’s Anatomy—behind the scenes in the roles that are most crucial, but that viewers are largely unaware of: producers, directors, and especially writers. I cannot emphasize enough the need for more diverse writers.
Until the time rolls around when there are a representative number of minorities influencing television shows on both sides of the camera, the only way we’ll know if they’re achieving the levels of power of non-minority industry professionals is “[w]hen talented actors who are black and white and brown can be in something and it fails and they still get another shot and another and another,” according to Alfre Woodard, the most Emmy-nominated black American actress ever with fourteen nominations and four wins.
The nominations for the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards are presently scheduled to be announced on the morning of July 19, at which time the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences can take a stance by doing its part to begin rectifying the current disparity. After all, the television industry’s got to start somewhere, so why not make the presentation on September 16 the most diverse one in history?
Shonda Rhimes photo courtesy of Steve Granitz/WireImage.com
