Black-Produced Programming: The “Quality” in Quality Television

One of the major challenges facing major networks in the 1980s was declining viewership. In order to combat this shift, networks began to vary their programming to cater to different audiences. The rise of independent stations and VCRs in the household made young, liberal, and well-educated viewers pull away from network television to consume content on their own time, chipping away at the networks’ share of the audience. With advertisers who were content with paying higher prices for the attention spans of liberally educated viewers, networks looked to quality television as a viable solution to this declining viewership. However, the focus on quality established a dichotomy between good and bad television, pitting young liberals with urban sensibilities against white rural Americans. Although traditional family sitcoms like The Cosby Show proved to be more commercially viable than the quality dramas targeted at in-the-know youth, the initial project of producing quality television was firmly rooted in classism and has since dictated the types of stories that are told on the silver screen.

At the forefront of television’s shift to quality was HBO, which characterized by its promotional slogan “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO,” had used its privileged position in pay cable to differentiate itself from other television providers (Jaramillo 584). In setting itself apart from other cable networks, HBO sent a clear message that the premium cable network would feature highly diverse, realistic, genre-bending, and aesthetically driven content.

Mara Brock Akil’s early-2000s sitcoms Girlfriends centered the narratives of well-to-do women who talk mess over brunch and mimosas, take jabs at each other’s dismal love lives, and parlay their talents into lucrative careers, all while speaking in a twang specific to African American communities. For instance, Golden Brooks who stars as Maya Wilkes on Girlfriends is a former assistant to her best friend Joan (played by Tracee Ellis Ross), divorced single mother, and the most working class of the group, yet she is able to publish a self-help book to critical acclaim and date high-profile athletes (without help from her elite friends). In some ways, HBO’s Insecure, created by and starring Issa Rae, is a fresh spin on Girlfriends, but the characters in Insecure are less developed than the four women we came to know and love in 1997. While both shows consider the conflicts inside and outside black culture, viewers who tune in every Sunday to watch Insecure pledge allegiance to #TeamIssa or #TeamLawrence, but are hardly made to grapple with the idea that Issa and Lawrence’s failing relationship is a symptom of the gentrification, latent clinical depression, and poverty that has come to characterize South Central LA and many Afro-diasporic communities. While Girlfriends left even more critical gaps for Insecure to fill in, both shows center working-class black women who speak African American Vernacular English yet are legitimized as a result of their extensive college degrees, successful careers, and refined upbringing. They are hardly messy or rough around the edges.

While shows like Girlfriends and Insecure have amplified the stories of black content creators who often find themselves on the margins of the film and television business, bootstrap ideology continues to find its way into black-produced programming. Atlanta on FX stars Donald Glover as Earnest “Earn” Marks, a Princeton dropout who managing his cousin Paper Boi’s budding rap career. Earn never interfaces with any of his former Princeton classmates, nor does he leverage his elite network of contacts to grow his cousin’s career. However, it does sit in the viewer’s subconscious that Earn is smart, resourceful, and shows promise — Princeton said so when it admitted him into the prestigious Ivy League university. If Princeton is never central to the storyline, why then is Princeton (re: white adjacency) conveniently used by the writers as a tool to legitimate and point to Earn’s human capital? Perhaps it is an apt assessment of the massive student loan debt college graduates take to obtain those lofty degrees. Still, quality television and the cultural elitism that characterizes its production continues to inform modern critics’ opinions about what constitutes good and bad television. People of African descent are hardly monolithic, yet with all the different facets of the black experience to be explored, network television continues to reinforce and uplift characters who can intelligently and legitimately pull themselves out of poverty.

Deborah L. Jaramillo, “The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand” in Television: The Critical View, (2007, 7th Ed.), pp. 579-594.