When Casting Diversity Transforms a Show From Compulsively Watchable to Game-Changing

In 2014, during the second term of America’s first African American president and at the tail end of the most recent “golden age of television,” it might seem quaint, old-fashioned, or patronizing to champion a television show for representing diversity on-screen. After all, other areas of pop culture are already so dominated by those outside the white male establishment—I’m thinking of the pop charts—that it would be strange to praise or call attention to it. But for some reason, outside of BET, network programmers desperate to be the most widely appealing in a market that is, thanks to premium cable and streaming services, growing ever more niche rarely thought that bringing a little color to their casts might be the answer to their ratings problems.

Then came Shonda Rhimes. Starting with Grey’s Anatomy in 2005 and continuing with Private Practice and Scandal, she has taken television’s most well-worn genres—courtroom, medical, political—and, to great acclaim, added both a healthy dose of fantasy and some needed real-world diversity. Her workplaces look like real workplaces, where not everyone is white and blonde. But Rhimes’ shows aren’t the televised version of bran flakes—healthy for the culture but bland. No, they are sexy, populated with beautiful, highly competent people who also can’t help making racy, imminently watchable mistakes.

The latest show from the Shonda-verse, How to Get Away With Murder, fits perfectly into the constellation of Rhimes’ other shows. (Technically she is executive producer; the creator of the new show is Peter Nowalk, a ShondaLand veteran who has worked on Grey’s and Scandal). Starring Oscar-nominee Viola Davis as Annalise Keating, a masterful Philadelphia defense attorney and law school professor, How to Get Away With Murder has the procedural elements that have made other Rhimes shows hits. Every week Keating, her associates, and her cadre of law student investigators will have a client to help and a crime to solve or obfuscate. But there is also a larger, possibly season-long mystery to solve. It is shown in the opening of the pilot (which I won’t spoil here) and involves Keating and her students.

On the eve of its premiere, How to Get Away With Murder was the subject of an incendiary Alessandra Stanley–written New York Times piece, which was widely criticized not only by the Internet but also by the Times’ public editor, who called it “astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.”

The piece charged, among other wrongheaded things, that protagonists in ShondaLand shows are “angry black women.” But Scandal’s Olivia Pope, Grey’s Miranda Bailey, and Murder’s Keating aren’t angry. They are hyper-competent, driven achievers, which means that, yes, they are sometimes brusque or cold, but that’s only because they expect as much excellence from those around them as they do of themselves. They are also highly flawed—Keating, for example, seems to cheat both in the courtroom and the bedroom—which means that though they are black women who have risen to the top of their professions, they are still people, not saints. That’s a good thing; who would want to watch a nighttime soap about angels?

Plenty of people are tuning in. The pilot drew 14 million viewers, even more than the 11.9 million viewers for Scandal’s season debut (its biggest audience ever). The show’s movie star lead and the rest of ABC’s all-Shonda lineup no doubt lured some viewers. But others were certainly drawn to the show’s multiethnic cast, which looks more like any real law school than any other I’ve seen on-screen.

The show’s five star students include a bleeding-heart Brown grad, played by Mexican actor Karla Souza; a privileged, competitive African American, played by Aja Naomi King; an entitled white bro, played by Orange Is the New Black’s Matt McGorry; a bumbling but probably quietly brilliant African American just off the school’s wait list, played by British actor Alfred Enoch; and a moneyed gay man who isn’t afraid to use his sexuality to get ahead, played by Jack Falahee.

To list the characters and their ethnicities, though, is to do a disservice to the show, which offers up its diverse slate of characters without comment. Where so often on network television the minority character only serves to bolster a white male protagonist or offer comic relief in the form of a swishy, fey comeback or neck-snapping retort, in ShondaLand, all types of people sit center stage and are deserving of their own drama. Falahee’s character, for example, has already had a fairly graphic (by ABC standards) sex scene, which moved the plot along—he was using sex to get information from a person involved in the case of the week—while giving the slick show a chance for some soapy titillation.

While it is a shame to still be so surprised and appreciative of casting diversity in 2014, in a lot of ways that diversity is what lifts Shonda Rhimes’ productions from the realm of compelling, glossy network TV shows into the pantheon of game-changing ones. Though there’s nothing earth-shattering about How to Get Away With Murder’s format, with Davis on board there is real gravitas to the performances. One hopes that, as with lead-in program Scandal, we’re in for some crazy plot twists, sudsy romances, and tweet-worthy “oh, my God” moments.