Obsessing Over Hollywood’s Racial Diversity

It’s been 50 years since the debut of “Star Trek,” which featured a then-startling ensemble cast of strong, empathetic male, female, and alien characters from the U.S., Scotland, Russia, Australia, Japan, Africa, and the planet Vulcan.

In its short run — and against the racially charged backdrop of the ’60s — the series bluntly confronted racism many times (in episodes “The Omega Glory,” “Patterns of Force,” and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”). “Star Trek” even boasts one of the first interracial kisses on television — which star William Shatner has said only got on the air because the cast deliberately flubbed a safer alternate scene nervous execs wanted.

CBS has come under fire since announcing its fall lineup, which features six new shows with six white leading characters.

The cast and stories of “Star Trek” may have been controversial at the time — but surely the networks have since gotten over such squeamishness.

After all, today’s network TV shows feature every race, color, creed, and orientation without blinking: Male and female characters, gay characters, bisexual characters, characters from every nation and ethnicity — not to mention tackling every related subject imaginable.

Not good enough, some critics say.

CBS has especially come under fire since announcing its fall lineup, which features six new shows with six white leading characters.

When grilled about it at a Television Critics Association press event, CBS Entertainment President Glenn Geller offered a weak response that didn’t help much: “We need to do better.”

He went on to defend CBS’ casting choices, pointing out the groundbreaking inclusion of Laverne Cox (from the award-winning Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black”) in “Doubt,” making her the first-ever transgender character on network TV.

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“In terms of leads, we’re definitely less diverse this year than last,” Geller said, “but in our ensemble diversity, we’re more diverse than last year.”

That’s precisely the problem, CBS’ critics fired back. They don’t want diverse casting; they want diverse leads —”as a remedy for the perpetuation of dominant male whiteness on our TV screens,” as Blavity.com’s Kadisha Phillips put it.

Gary Schneeberger, president of Hollywood PR firm ROAR, thinks this myopic focus pressures networks to favor quotas over compelling storytelling and acting.

“Their concern is finding quality programming, not meeting artificial quotas of any kind,” Schneeberger told LifeZette.

“Executives are limited by the shows studios have produced, and from that pool they have to pick what they think their audience will actually tune in to see. That’s an increasingly hard task in this era of competition with basic and premium cable and streaming services, which have fewer content restrictions.”

The disputed new series’ leads feature just such hedged bets. Although the casts are diverse, the leads feature comedy and TV veterans such as Kevin James, Dermot Mulroney, and Matt LeBlanc — actors CBS knows can carry a series, but who also happen to be white.

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Schneeberger, who has worked on projects with notables such as Fox commentator Sean Hannity, actress Roma Downey, and her husband, Emmy-winning producer Mark Burnett, thinks CBS’ critics are neglecting a critical point: Groundbreaking, successful series such as “Star Trek,” “All in the Family” and its spinoffs, “M*A*S*H,” “Orange Is the New Black” and many more have been lauded for tackling race, prejudice, war, and other difficult topics.

They didn’t win millions of devoted fans and shelves full of awards by meeting quotas, though. They did it by producing consistently brilliant, compelling stories with nuanced, believable characters.

“It’s ironic CBS is being singled out as racially insensitive,” Scheeberger said, “when, just last season, in ‘Supergirl,’ producers re-imagined Jimmy Olsen from the goofy white kid photographer in the comics and all previous films and TV shows into a serious, sexy African-American head of the newspaper art department.”

Everyone enjoys being represented and affirmed, and there’s no denying the influence and reach of network TV. Rather than counting leads and casting characters just to fill quotas, however, we’re all better served by challenging, engaging programming that finds the right person for each role.

“I’m sure CBS’ full ensembles for these shows will include plenty of diversity,” Schneeberger said. “And that’s a good and necessary thing — regardless of whose name leads the credits. And those decisions of filling out every role in the cast, we can only hope as viewers, are based on choosing the most talented actors and actresses to play the most interesting characters.”

Network TV, and public perception on the whole, has undoubtedly become far more sensitive to race and diversity. Maybe it’s time we start transitioning from sensitivity into more maturity.