On a YouTube nostalgia binge recently, it occurred to me how many of the TV shows I grew up watching were African-American themed: “The Jeffersons,” “Amen,” “227,” “The Cosby Show,” “A Different World,” “Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” “Family Matters,” “Martin,” “Moesha,” “Sister Sister,” and probably some more I’m forgetting.
These weren’t specifically sought out; they were just widely popular shows. At some point, however, towards the late '90s or early 2000’s, the number of such shows I was aware of seemed to dry up.
Is my impression true, or have my viewing habits just changed? If the former…why? Is the idea of a “black sitcom” passe? (Shows I like now, like “Community” have multiracial casts.) Is it because the television landscape is much more fractured now than it was in the past? The one modern show I can think of (though I see it was canceled late last year) was “Meet the Browns”, though I’ve never watched it.
Thoughts on those questions, or appreciation of African-American sitcoms past or present are welcome.
ETA that “Everybody Hates Chris” was pretty recent, and a good show.
They didn’t dry up, they just flourished on WB and UPN (now the CW). Tyler Perry produces several of them. This has the unintended side effect of letting the Big Four concentrate on the more coveted white demographic without looking like racists.
We have DirectTV and get a channel called Centric, which is all-black programming, all the time. Tons of shows–new sitcoms, old stuff like the Cosby show…it’s a very interesting channel.
I suspect that if you’re using the Guide instead of the up and down arrows to channel surf, you’re just not bumping into the current shows as much. Back when I didn’t have cable (last couple of years) and therefore no guide, we were channel surfing the old fashioned way and saw lots of them.
I can think of only 5 of them currently being aired and they’re all on cable. And they all range from meh to awful. The Game gets a fair amount of praise for not being awful. It’s watchable. The last black sitcoms that I think were actually good, though, were Everybody Hates Chris, the Bernie Mac Show and maybe Girlfriends, none of which air anymore.
So given all the choices and channels, is prime-time comedy de facto re-segregating…? What was the last black sitcom on one of the broadcast channels to attain mainstream success?
The Bernie Mac show was a great show. I loved the gimmick of him talking straight to America especially when he was upset about the kids. Good stuff.
For a long time I hated Tyler Perry, and for no real reason, just because he was everywhere all the time for a while. Then one day I was home sick and I was watching TBS and Tyler Perry’s House of Pain came on and I didn’t feel like getting up to get the remote so I just left it on and I really liked it. Then they played another episode and I loved that one too. Then TBS played Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns and I loved that as well.
Now I DVR House of Pain episodes. And seeing this:
I am going to find it and start DVRing the Bernie Mac show.
Can I say another LIKE for Centric? Some of their programming is…questionably about AA interests(The A Team reruns, Shaka Zulu) but it is at least interesting! They played Shaka Zulu uncut! (my wife went ohhh thats why I remember that thing being so popular when they played it here among men )
It wasn’t a sitcom, but I loved the heck out of In Living Color. It could be silly and hit-or-miss, but when it was good it was spot-on. When it was in its prime, everyone was quoting the show the next day. In particular: “Men On Film”.
No, this is backwards. The Big Four concentrated on the more coveted white demographic, so the upstarts like WB and UPN churned out a bunch of them when they were just starting up because they figured that was a demographic that was being under-served, and it would provide a stable audience to get them through the lean beginning years. After they survived those initial years, they dumped the black sitcoms as well. (Fox is part of the Big Four, but they did something similar when they first started out.)
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