When Amazon series Harlem premiered last December, its performance was immediately questioned on Twitter. User @GoddessGiselle_, moderator culture site with the slogan “Find your voice, be heard” request, “How many 4 black women do we need as friends?!?!” Her question has good reason – calling attention to the cut-and-paste framework sometimes lazily applied to Black TV stories and characters – but it also emphasizes an important change: the advancement, albeit insignificant, of Black storytelling in the current era of streaming.
After all, for something too much suggests that there was a surplus — and in a way, there was. Harlem just one series in an impressive cluster of Black-centered shows to hit streaming, network and cable platforms over the past two years, a series of shows that raise a question Critical to the future of images: What debt do Black viewers owe?
If the streaming-first era introduces a new approach to television viewership, modernizing our entire relationship with television and what we expect from it — time and places we view — the current and second eras, have doubled from the excess. Viewers are now gripped by an unimaginable wave of reality dramas, sports documentaries, comedies, hit dramas and limited series. It’s a dizzying pace and, somehow, amazing rewards. Because of all its overwhelming vastness, this period of fierce and gluttonous competition between Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon has opened a door. The highest black display on TV of all time.
Visibility doesn’t necessarily equate to progress. Recently UCLA . Research found that although Blacks, Latinx, and Asians were “accessing proportional representation” as leaders on cable and online scripted shows during the television 2019-2020, their number is still very few as writers, directors and presenters. Representation is more than just seeing yourself reflected; Not just one mirror, but many mirrors. It’s about nuance in all aspects of production. The richness created by streaming has led to about 500 series with original script premieres every year, many of which allow greater access to the Black experience. But that doesn’t mean much if those scenes weren’t created by creators who were able to channel the introspection, pulse, and acquired perspective into them. That’s what Black viewers are indebted to — an uplifting, omnidirectional portrait of Black life on TV on their terms.
It happened, however slowly. Implicit in @GoddessGiselle_’s tweet is the fact of a new normal creeping into the mainstream. In recent years, a number of original series have focused their stories around the theme of black sisterhood, since last year’s debut of Run the World (a fictional Starz TV series with echoes of Celibacy) and Selling Tampa (a short-lived reality show on Netflix about women working in real estate in Central Florida) about the return of Sisters, Twenty, Bigger, and First Wives Club (all on BET+). All told with varying doses of glamor and depth, each with an eye for opulent realism.
Featured Genre Not safe, which recently ended after five seasons on HBO but focuses deeply on the contours of Black female friendships, is part of this creative and commercial renaissance, if I had to pinpoint a start date. beginning, starting in 2016. Besides Atlanta (FX)Queen Street (OWN), and several other Black-led series, Issa Rae’s half-hour comedy debuts at a time when the television landscape is finally beginning to shift to narrative storytelling since, but not limited by the Negro’s point of view. That year, As cable efforts falter, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos announced a $6 billion investment in original programming. In a business as segregated as TV, to me, being flooded with content from celebrities like Ava DuVernay and Donald Glover, feels like an anomaly. It was also a turning point. A 2016 report released by the Writers Guild of America West reflect much: Despite the rise of black stories on TV, the number of black writers on TV has in fact fallen 7% since 2012. Advances have been made, but representation indeed, if such a thing exists, it is still a pipe dream.
