This Fall, Television Will Be a Lot Less Whitewashed

As the 2013–14 television season comes to a close, we have more to celebrate (Andre Braugher’s deadpan gay captain on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Lizzy Caplan’s sexy, independent Virginia Johnson on Masters of Sex, the complicated women of Mad Men and Game of Thrones) than lament. Truly offensive shows—racist Dads, sexist We Are Men—were appropriately given the boot, and at last week’s upfronts, when the new slates of fall shows were unveiled to advertisers, networks promised perhaps the most diverse casts in years, if not ever.

Leading the charge is ABC. Though the network finished this season in fourth place, any of its success is due to Shonda Rhimes, executive producer of long-running Grey’s Anatomy and Twitter-baiting Scandal. Rhimes’ shows are successful for their notoriously soapy plots, but they are also noteworthy for the multiracial America they casually present.

Her casts look like our lives, full of men and women of different colors and sexual preferences, all of whom are competent and at the top of professions (medicine, politics, law) that are lucrative and respected. There are no token gay friends on a Shonda Rhimes show; there are committed lesbian couples like Callie and Arizona, who found out this season on Grey’s that they are unable to have another child, and grieving husbands like Scandal’s Cyrus Beene, who lost his spouse in a shooting. To count up the racial backgrounds of Rhimes’ stars is to do a grave disservice to her multiethnic casts, which are as nonchalantly diverse as their real-life counterparts in hospitals across the country or in the Obama White House.

Next season ABC will have another Rhimes show on its roster, making Thursday night, when all three of her programs will air, Shonda Night in America. Her latest, How to Get Away With Murder, stars Viola Davis—so good in her Oscar-nominated performance in The Help—as a brilliant criminal defense professor who gets entangled in a murder case with four of her students.

Outside the Shonda-verse, other new ABC shows will put people of color front and center. Black-ish, a sitcom initially executive produced by Larry Wilmore (the comedian won’t have time now that he is taking over for Stephen Colbert when he moves to CBS), explores life for an African American family in an affluent suburb. Fresh off the Boat, which has already caused controversy with its title, is based on the memoir of lawyer turned restaurateur Eddie Huang and represents the first Asian American family on a network sitcom since Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl in 1994. Here’s hoping Huang has better luck with ABC than Cho, who was told she was too heavy and “not Asian enough” by the network—her show lasted one season.

Christela follows a Mexican American woman to law school as she butts heads with her more traditional family. Midseason drama American Crime, from the writer of 12 Years a Slave, is set to examine racial issues related to a murder trial. (Even the modern-day My Fair Lady, Selfie, which admittedly looks terrible, stars an Asian American—John Cho—as its romantic lead.)

These improvements aren’t just manifesting themselves in front of the camera. As Vulture notes, nine of ABC’s 12 new shows are helmed by either women or men of color. By comparison, last fall’s Hollywood Reporter “50 Power Showrunners” list included only four people of color and 14 women, many of whom run shows either not on a major network (Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black is on Netflix; Salim and Mara Brock Akil’s The Game is on BET) or are part of larger teams. Behind-the-scenes diversity is how we make changes to better represent all TV viewers onscreen.

Other networks’ new programs lag behind ABC in multicultural inclusiveness but are at least making strides. This year CBS mostly green-lighted spin-offs of its initial-heavy franchises (NCIS: New Orleans, CSI: Cyber), but one of its lone original new shows, Stalker, stars Asian American Maggie Q. Empire on Fox, which is executive produced by The Butler and Precious director Lee Daniels, reunites Hustle and Flow’s Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard for a show about a hip-hop label family business. Red Band Society, another Fox show, stars Davis’s Help mate Octavia Spencer in a show about teens in a hospital’s pediatric unit. NBC has scheduled Craig Robinson’s Mr. Robinson, about a musician who spends his days as a substitute teacher, for midseason. The CW’s Jane the Virgin, starring Gina Rodriguez, is about a religious Latina who has never had sex but is accidentally artificially inseminated.

While this diversity represents an improvement, it doesn’t mean that television is “fixed.” Announcing these shows doesn’t guarantee they will be any good or have staying power. (Getting picked up is one thing, but as any TV showrunner will tell you, staying on the air beyond your first season is another.) However, their existence is proof we are heading in the right direction—even if it is solely to placate advertisers, “for whom the only color that ultimately matters,” as Time’s James Poniewozik quips, “is green.” After all, just six years ago, the only new show starring a person of color was the animated Cleveland on The Cleveland Show. Audiences deserve better than that.