Not Enough Has Changed Since <em>Sanford and Son</em>
I. “You Can Hear a Pin Drop”
Carl Winslow, the protagonist of the ’90s sitcom Family Matters, wore his badge with honor. On the show, about a middle-class Black household in Chicago, Winslow (played by Reginald VelJohnson) loved being a police officer almost as much as he hated seeing the family’s pesky neighbor, Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), popping up in his home. Carl was a quintessential TV-sitcom cop, doughnut clichés and all. In one scene, he announces that he’s just had the worst day of his life: “I was in a high-speed car chase and ran out of gas.” The humor did not always break new ground.
The cast of Family Matters was predominantly Black, but the series was written and conceptualized mainly by white people. A 1994 episode, “Good Cop, Bad Cop,” illustrates the degree to which a Black writer could be sidelined, even on a show about a Black family. In the episode, Carl’s teenage son, Eddie (Darius McCrary), storms into the house, visibly upset about a run-in with the police. Yet Carl insists that Eddie’s account of being harassed and forced to the ground doesn’t add up: “That’s unusual procedure—unless you provoked it.” Carl’s response is jarring. He may be Officer Winslow when he’s on duty, but he’s still a Black father—one who ought to know how police in America often treat young Black men. Eddie walks away angry.
Felicia D. Henderson, a Black producer and screenwriter who worked on Family Matters from 1994 to 1996 before moving on to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Soul Food, and Empire, recalls the tension in the writers’ room when the episode was being workshopped. Television shows are typically written by a staff that collaborates on scripts; trading ideas and criticism around a table is an integral and sometimes raucous part of the process. Yet there’s a hierarchy in the room: The senior writers hold sway and the showrunner is ultimately in charge. Family Matters was no different. Then a junior writer, and one of only a few Black staffers on a team of more than a dozen, Henderson was at first hesitant to weigh in when a white writer tossed out the possibility of Carl responding the way he did. But the line felt wrong to her, and she spoke up. “I just said, ‘Well, no Black father would tell his Black son that,’ ” Henderson told me recently. “And the room got silent. I mean, you can hear a pin drop.” The white showrunner defended the line, and it went in. “It was clear in the room and in the moment that I had offended them,” Henderson recalled. “Like, ‘What, are you saying—we’re racist?’ No, but I am saying that’s not realistic.”
“Good Cop, Bad Cop” ends with Carl confronting the officer and reconciling with Eddie. Viewers get the kind of safe conclusion that wraps up a “very special episode”: Eddie was right to be upset, because some police officers really are racists. Last year, a month after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, the Family Matters cast reunited on Zoom to look back at the story line from 25 years ago. “When they wrote the episode, we didn’t realize it would be so revealing and telling today,” VelJohnson said.
Revealing and telling, yes, but maybe not in the way he thought. For Henderson, working on Family Matters offered an introduction to a defining feature of her long career in Hollywood. Negotiated authenticity is the phrase she uses to describe what many Black screenwriters are tasked with producing—Blackness, sure, but only of a kind that is acceptable to white showrunners, studio executives, and viewers.
The nature of the “negotiation” that Black writers must conduct has shifted over the years. Half a century ago, just getting Black characters on TV was a hurdle, and Black screenwriters were few. Today, as more networks and streaming platforms advertise the Black shows they’ve lined up—you’d be forgiven for thinking that every month is Black History Month—it is tempting to believe that Black performers and writers now have a wealth of opportunities, including wide creative latitude for those who make it to the top. This era of “peak TV,” in which the entertainment landscape is saturated with more high-quality series than ever before, has been a boon in some respects. According to data collected in UCLA’s 2020 “Hollywood Diversity Report,” an annual study of the entertainment industry’s progress, or lack of it, nearly 10 percent of lead roles on TV were filled by Black actors, likely the closest the industry has ever come to proportional representation (which would be about 13 percent). Shonda Rhimes, as titanic as any creative figure in the industry, is the force behind several of the most successful series in recent memory, ratings juggernauts such as ,, and . Kenya Barris, the creator of , has produced comedic series that take on deadly serious issues of race while appealing to a diverse group of viewers.
