Cancelled: One Viewer’s Trauma from a Legacy of Cancelled Shows of Color
At some point in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I subconsciously decided to limit what I watched on television to works centered around women of color. Ok, maybe it was subconscious at first, but it became conscious as I realized how good it felt. It wasn’t about allyship or anti-racism. It was about finding shows and movies that made me feel a sense of community when I was quarantining at home with just me, myself, and I (and my dog).
It began with a desperate need to watch Girlfriends in its entirety. Someone had asked me if I had grown up around a woman of color practicing law, and when I responded no, I took some time to reflect on the roots of my aspirations to practice law.
The first image that came to mind was Joan Carol Clayton. I remember the first time I saw Tracee Ellis Ross on screen. It was 2000, and I was in the 8th grade. Joan was unlike anything I’d ever seen on screen before. She was a beautiful and powerful Black attorney, working at a fancy law firm with cool friends and an exciting dating life. She was brilliant and curvy, charismatic and confident. Before Joan Carol Clayton entered my world, I had never experienced the feeling of identifying with a character on screen. Before Joan Carol Clayton, I stuck to books where I could imagine characters that looked like me and less like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears (#freebritney, but her rise to fame during my pre-teen years made a mess of my body image).
After my brief moment with Girlfriends, I would go away for my high school years to a boarding school where television became limited to DVDs that we could watch on our laptops. Enter four years of Friends, and only Friends. At the time, my friends and I spent our Saturday nights gleefully watching DVD after DVD of every episode we had in the dorm, hoping that somehow we could be as cool and connected as this carefree group of 20 somethings living their best lives in NYC. When I was alone, I would lift up my shirt to compare the size of my portly body to Rachel’s and Monica’s flat tummies. Upon noting the significant disparity, and realizing the impossibility that I would ever be as tiny as any of the women on Friends, I would make sure to visit the bathroom to purge anything superfluous I had eaten that day. The next day I would go through the same process: fawn over Friends with my friends, look at myself in the mirror loathingly, and purge.
What I didn’t know at that time (and should have known) was that there was a show out there with people that I could identify with, a show with 6 friends living in New York City with deep connections and wildly enviable adventures, but with more substance (and more color). It wouldn’t be until the summer of 2020 — 2 decades later — that I would experience the fullness of Living Single, from the laugh-so-hard until you cry banter, to the sincere discussions on discrimination and race, to the fearless approach to telling the truth about the cost of life in NYC as a single 20 something. No sugarcoating. Pure joy. Pure humanity. Pure life. Characters that I could admire endlessly without having to satisfy the implicit requirement that I loathe myself in the process of my fandom.
I would not watch another series centered around people of color until a college professor in 2007 would require me to watch the series Ugly Betty in a multimedia Latinx American studies course. My mind struggled to understand how Betty Suarez of Queens could be the center of attention for a show with multiple seasons. She did not have the body size or the typical physical characteristics that I had come to associate with leading ladies on screen. She was shorter, curvier, and less concerned with how she looked and more concerned with what she could accomplish. She put her family first and her job second, which resonated with my experience of family. She was bullied because she looked different than the models around her, another experience I understood from my childhood of being bullied for being different.
Betty Suarez, the star of Ugly Betty, was like me. And, she was confident in her skin.
Ugly Betty, quite simply, was the best thing that had ever happened to my TV screen. To me, Ugly Betty seemed too good to be true; but, to Hollywood, Ugly Betty was, in fact, too different to stay. As soon as I fell into the embrace of the world of Betty Suarez, the series would face a shortened lifespan and imminent cancellation.
An article from The Independent reflecting on the show’s descent into the cancellation best details Hollywood’s inability to receive such a groundbreaking show:
“Between the 2007 writer’s strike, which brought the TV industry to a standstill, and the 2008 financial crash, the show was finding its feet at a time when ABC was having to make big cuts. This message seemed in opposition to the high production values, sleek sets and couture costumes of Ugly Betty’s Mode magazine and its employees.
‘There was a lot of upheaval with our show,’ Vanessa Williams tells me, on the phone from New York. ‘We were supposed to be in New York and shot the pilot in New York, then they moved us out to LA. So we moved out to LA and then there was the writer’s strike, and then after the strike we came back, and then they moved us back to New York.’
The team reportedly did everything to scale back production, at one point switching from shooting on film to video to save money. But it wasn’t enough, and after being moved back to the Friday night “death slot” and from Channel 4 to E4 in the UK, the news came in that Ugly Betty was to be axed after four seasons, airing its final episode on 14 April 2010.”
“Ugly Betty, 10 years on: the Noughties show that struck a blow against TV’s beauty myth,” by Isobel Lewis (The Independent, April 13, 2020).
After Ugly Betty, I would cruise the glorious paths of Shondaland, imbibing every episode of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal like the bloodthirsty fangirl that I was, desperate for any representation on television with women that didn’t look like the girls that had bullied me growing up (just imagine the original Mean Girls and you’ll have a pretty good picture of my childhood). No, I wasn’t a Black woman lawyer or a badass doctor or DC fixer, but the characters created by Shonda Rhimes felt like home in a way I never felt when I watched Friends and their white sitcom brethren.
Over the years, I would take note of shows centering the experiences of Black women, Latinx women, immigrant women, gay women, but never in an intentional way. Sure, I watched The Mindy Project as a series at least a handful of times. Sure, I rewatched Ugly Betty probably twice as much. Sure, I knew the lines from every Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy episode like the back of my hand. But, my gravitation toward these shows was under my own radar.
Then the pandemic hit. After being asked about how I first realized I wanted to be a lawyer, I realized I never had a chance to finish Girlfriends as a teenager. I never finished Joan Carol Clayton’s story; and, suddenly, I needed to make sure I knew her complete story. I also needed to feel some sense of belonging during this period of deep isolation.
This need arose sometime in June 2020. In June 2020, DVDs were the only way to watch the complete Girlfriends series. Certain episodes were available on various streaming services, but nowhere could I find the entire saga of Joan, Maya, Lynn, and Toni unless I bought the DVD collection, and a DVD player.
The obvious decision, of course, was to go old school and buy the DVDs and a new DVD player. For $41.64, I purchased the entire Girlfriends series on DVD. For another $31.82, I got a simple DVD player. Everything came in 2 days. After a little bit of tinkering, I was off and running on my new series binge.
For weeks, I slowly watched disc after disc revealing the emotional lives of Joan and her friends, Maya, Toni, and Lynn as I self-quarantined with my dog. Without regular business meetings and seeing my friends, the Girlfriends became my girlfriends. Their stories gave me something to look forward to after working from home everyday, transforming my reality from the uncertainty of the pandemic to the certainty of the Girlfriends and their love for one another. As I wrapped up Season 7, I excitedly inserted the disc for Season 8, to find that one of the show’s main characters — Toni Childs, played by Jill Marie Jones — was simply gone.She wasn’t in the opening credits. She wasn’t in the first episode of Season 8. Toni was just gone.
I pushed through my confusion at why Toni was gone, resisting the urge to google her abrupt departure from the show until I after completed the series.
But, I, like every other fan of Girlfriends, never completed the series. After all the anticipation of 8 seasons, after letting these stories enlighten my daily pandemic existence, I realized I was on the final DVD in the series set. I started Episode 13 of Season 8 excitedly, eager to see what would become of my Girlfriends who had given me so much laughter and joy over the course of the series, especially during the dark early days of the pandemic.
What I didn’t know was that there would be no finale. There would be no tribute to the complex and emotionally rich stories of these four Black women. There would be no nostalgic look at the 7 seasons prior or mending of broken friendships. There would be no happy ending. There would be no ending at all. We, the audience, are left hanging for eternity, wondering what happens to our beloved Girlfriends.
My feathers ruffled by the disrespectful non-conclusion to Girlfriends, I looked for something new to showcase my screen. Hulu suggested Living Single to me, and I decided to give it a shot and, again, into love I fell. Queen Latifah became my mentor. She ran a successful magazine in New York City, and she did it unapologetically. She could make a business work, overcome financial pitfalls, manage her employees, and have a successful dating life. She was #goals. Then, there were her friends — all of whom I would love to befriend. The characters on Living Single had a set-up like Friends; but, there was a big difference. The big difference? Not that the casts were of entirely different racial backgrounds. The big difference was substance. Conversations about money and budgeting. Conversations about race and succeeding in male-dominated workplaces as a Black woman practicing law. Conversations about sexual harassment. Conversations about history. Conversations about preserving the arts. Conversations about real life stuff. Not who kissed who at Central Perk. Not just who stalked the naked guy or who gained 5 pounds. The focus of Living Single was on authentically representing what life in NYC would look like for a group of 20 somethings. (I must leave my discussion on the glaring similarities in several Friends storylines that aired well after Living Single for another article, as there are many.)
Again, as I progressed to the end of the series, one of the show’s principal characters — Kyle — mysteriously disappears for a job in London in the final Fifth season. No more ballads by Mr. Barker. No more delightfully heated exchanges between Kyle and Max. Another beloved character gone. I would later learn that T.C. Barker — the actor who had portrayed Kyle — was fired for pushing back on Warner Brothers reallocation of their resources to support — wait for it — their new hit Friends. The fifth season of Living Single would rush to its end, pushing the characters into neat and hollow endings. Kyle would return for the final episode, but Regine, another principal character on the show, would not.
As if I had not scarred myself enough with rushed or inexistent conclusions to fantastic television shows by and for people of color, I then started One Day at A Time. A hilarious and sincere depiction of a Cuban American family living in Miami, One Day at a Time was my rebound series from the heartbreak of Living Single; but, it was cancelled after three seasons on Netflix, brought back by Pop for a fourth season, which was shortened and cancelled. By season three, I fully felt like a member of the Alvarez family, hugging the parallels between their story and my own family’s immigrant experience. While One Day at a Time did get a series finale that closed the stories of its characters, a show of its caliber should have had a longer run. Like Living Single and Girlfriends, One Day at a Time seamlessly wove together themes of culture, identity, race, and gender in an approachable and lighthearted way. These shows did not stick to instant one-liners like Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City, all of which relied on whiteness to relieve them from discussing real life issues; rather, Living Single, Girlfriends, and One Day at a Time, like so many shows created by and for communities of color, assumed the obligation to represent the real complexities of human life and American society.
Why don’t we value works created by and for people of color? Why don’t we value the audiences that love these works by providing complete stories, stories with an actual ending?
A sad theme emerges from the struggle to stay supported by their home networks from Living Single to Girlfriends to to Half and Half to The Mindy Project to One Day at a Time — all excellent, groundbreaking television shows that took seriously their obligation to represent the truth of an untold experience while bringing joy to audiences, and that theme is this: Hollywood loves its big, ugly white button to cancel works created by Black, Brown and people of color in favor of whitewashed versions of the same BIPOC creations. Not only does Hollywood not care about honoring the value of these important works, Hollywood definitely doesn’t care about the audiences who love the characters in shows centered around experiences of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and/or Latinx communities or preserving the creations of BIPOC artists.
The list of shows that never got a fair shot is even longer: Telenovela starring Eva Longoria, Selfie starring John Cho, Lovecraft Country starring Jurnee Smollett, AJ and the Queen starring and created by RuPaul, Ashley Garcia: Genius in Love, The Baker and The Beauty, and High Fidelity starring Zoë Kravitz.
When we finally get the works that speak to those of us in the margins, we are essentially led to believe that we can trust that the story we are told will have an ending that honors the time that we spend with these characters. Until the past year, that trust was something I took for granted. But, after watching series after beloved series come to a screeching halt, and researching what had happened behind the scenes thereafter, it is apparent that capitalism has cancelled so many works of art that speak to authentic experiences in Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx communities. It’s hard to fight the feeling that Hollywood’s frequent rejection of shows and movies by BIPOC creators featuring casts of color is not a tacit rejection of who I am and my own story.
As we all celebrate Mindy Kaling’s triumphant second season of the wonderful Never Have I Ever, I can’t stop that little voice in the back of my mind from saying, “Don’t love it too much — it could get cancelled at any moment for something…whiter.”
Perhaps I may have viewer’s PTSD. Will I ever not worry that a show by and for people of color that I’ve fallen in love with is going to be cancelled because it is simply not close enough to whiteness to be cared for by Hollywood? Probably not. Too many of the characters that I love were denied conclusions to their stories. The sting of being repeatedly slapped in the face never quite goes away.
How do we solve the problem? I personally don’t understand why more white people aren’t exposed to shows created by people of color. I also don’t understand why my original algorithm before I start watching almost always suggests white and Indian shows to me. If you open my original Netflix profile that I never really used, you see a lot of white shows and a lot of Indian show suggestions. If you open my Netflix profile that I use regularly that I maintain my dog’s name, the suggestions range from Black shows to Indian shows to Nollywood movies to Korean comedies. Needless to say, I really, really love my current Netflix algorithm, but I wonder — what if white people saw the same homepage that I see. Would that not encourage them to watch the stories created by Black, Indigeneous, Latinx, and Asian creators? Would that not encourage the white viewer to expose themself to stories outside their own, where they could understand differences and note commonalities between communities and cultures? Or, is it simply most profitable for Hollywood to limit white viewers to movies and shows that promote Black stereotypes, white saviorship, and/or the notion of “the magical Negro,” as discussed by Roxanne Gay in her book Bad Feminist.
Not everyone is an activist, but lots of people watch television. In this day and age, a majority of the shows and movies that we watch are delivered to us by streaming services that take on an obligation to suggest viewing options to us. My educated guess is that the suggestions are based on our viewing history; but, what if the algorithm noted what a person’s Netflix agenda was missing?
I don’t have the answers, but I know this — white people should be watching more works created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian creators; and, communities of color should be watching works created by other communities of color with the same attention and excitement as works that come from their own.
Yes, non-Black viewer, you can watch shows created by a Black person for Black communities, enjoy it, and not culturally appropriate it — I believe in you. I have no other choice but to believe in your ability to support and cherish works created by people who don’t look like you, not in a weird white savior way, but because there are many excellent works of art in film and television created by BIPOC creators that are not only wonderful to watch but bear material, positive consequence to the progress and betterment of our society. I know you can do it.
Shows about characters of color created by creators of color can reveal rich stories, and histories, of communities that have been without a storyteller. Without solidarity among communities of color and their allies when it comes to picking what to watch, amazing shows like Never Have I Ever, The Upshaws, Gentefied, Family Reunion, and Dear White People will always be at risk of cancellation and breaking the hearts of those who have fallen in love with these characters who validate our untold stories. Viewership must be conscious.
How do we encourage everyone to watch less Tiger King and more Black is King?
