This Tuesday marks the climactic season finale of TV’s best-ever reality show: the US presidential race. Though these quadrennial surrealist spectacles always get riveting towards the end, 2008’s super-historic edition has arguably out-wowed them all.
For the past two years, the United States of America’s exercise in extreme electing has played out on our TV screens, smashing ratings records while delivering so many jaw-dropping twists and hairpin turns — Hillary’s defeat, McCain’s ignominy, Caribou Barbie and Great Depression II: Financial Bugaboo, supported by a cast of radical preachers, domestic terrorists, pregnant teens and tax-dodging unlicensed plumbers — that it’s practically taken for granted at this point that a black dude is on the cusp of winning the election and becoming the most powerful person in the world.
One of the offshoots of Obama’s campaign is that racial issues have surged to the forefront of TV news in a manner otherwise reserved for social catastrophes like the LA Riots, the O.J. Simpson trial and Hurricane Katrina. It’s not just that pundits are pouring over McCain’s coded race baiting and Rush Limbaugh’s overt bigotry. Black journalists and analysts are all over our TV sets and addressing issues that go beyond Obama’s candidacy itself.
This summer, CNN scored a ratings smash with its Soledad O’Brien-hosted doc Black in America which discussed poverty, unemployment and single-parenthood to “open doors to dialogue and understanding.” It prompted one of CNN’s own anchors, Don Lemon, to candidly discuss on-air how his light skin is a result of his black great-grandmother being raped by a white man. It was an inspiring if painful display of honesty in a medium that’s previously been all too eager to ignore bitter truths in favour of easy stereotypes.
Win or lose, Obama’s already brought change to TV news.
Black Entertainment Television
The newest black “newsman” to appear on CNN is comedian D.L. Hughley. His interviews in Black in America led to his own satirical show, D.L. Hughley Breaks the News, a mix of stand-up, interviews and Daily Show-style field reporting.
Last week’s debut was admittedly uneven as Hughley found his feet, but his visit to a southern Sarah Palin rally was hilarious. He also tracked down the black woman who beat Palin in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant, and he helpfully parsed McCain’s sole campaign talking points down to a single, thinly veiled message: “You realize he’s black, don’t you?” Hughley even broke actual news by getting Bush’s ex–press secretary Scott McClellan to endorse Obama.
For a dumber version of D.L.’s show, try David Alan Grier’s Chocolate News, a faux 60 Minutes that sees the former In Living Colour comic similarly riffing on current events while begging blacks to “not do anything stupid” until after November 4th.
Both of these news comedies capitalize on Obama’s omnipresence in the real headlines, yet, perhaps strangely for this day and age, sitcoms and dramas centering on African-Americans are TV rarity. Back in the 1970s, black Americans could see their experiences mirrored on TV, be it in the projects (Good Times) or the middle class (The Jeffersons). A decade later The Cosby Show was TV’s most popular program; the ’90s spawned hits ranging from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters to The Arsenio Hall Show.
Somewhere after Cosby, network execs must’ve suddenly decided that the masses wouldn’t watch a “black” show. Aside from HBO’s The Wire, only upstart network UPN hired black casts (including The Hughleys, after ABC axed it) and most were dropped after it became The CW, which now only includes Girlfriends spinoff The Game and the Chris Rock-produced Everybody Hates Chris, both stranded in little-watched, Friday-night slots.
This fall, not a single new black-led series was launched. Perhaps if American voters launch a black man into the Oval Office the networks will realize airing a black sitcom doesn’t equal narrowcasting.
D.L. HUGHLEY BREAKS THE NEWS AIRS SATURDAYS, 10PM ON CNN; CHOCOLATE NEWS AIRS THURSDAYS, 10:30PM ON COMEDY NETWORK.