From Cosby to Cooper

Something that really stuck out to me from class this week was when we looked at black representation on network television and I was actually surprised by how many black sitcoms their actually were prior to the 90’s and those are only the ones we looked at.  The question at the top of my mind at the end of class is, what happened?

Growing up I watched the Cosby Show, My Wife and Kids, The Fresh Prince, The Bernie Mac Show, and the Steve Harvey Show but most of those ended either around the mid-1990’s or early 2000’s and since then their haven’t really been many good African American sitcoms on TV.  When I look at the current TV sitcoms they mostly feature all white casts with the occasional black support characters.  To me this is television going back to the assimilation style of television we discussed where blacks were featured as characters on television but they were part of white culture.  Top shows like The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, and Arrested Development have almost no black characters in any of the episodes (except for Barneys brother on HIMYM), and it makes me wonder where all the black television actors went.  Granted there are still black sitcoms but they are not on the major networks or featured in Prime Time. 

In my research I found that there are a few attempts being made to bring back black sitcom in the up and coming television premiers like NBC’s Guys with Kids which will star Temptestt Bledsoe (The Cosby Show) but most of the black actors are starring in shows with a predominantly white cast.  Why is it that the black sitcoms that were so popular before the 90’s been reduced to local broadcast networks like WCIU and UPN?