Kweisi & Me - Kweisi Mfume accuses television of being racist - Brief Article

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Rob Long

Don't hate me 'cause my show is white.

Mr. Long is a contributing editor of National Review.

Kweisi Mfume is mad at me. He and his NAACP feel that my new television series, Love & Money (8:30 p.m. Fridays on CBS, premieres on Sept. 24, thank you very much), has an insufficient number of African-American characters.

Actually, it has none. The series is a simple little Upstairs, Downstairs-style romantic comedy. Boy, the young superintendent of a swank apartment building on Fifth Avenue, falls for girl, the young heiress who lives in the penthouse. Girl's father, imperious billionaire, hates the idea; boy's father, the doorman of the building, is convinced he's about to be fired. Girl's mother, zany socialite, secretly thinks the whole idea is perfect. Did I mention CBS, Fridays, 8:30 p.m.? Enjoy.

See, once you decide that the girl and the boy are white, well, pretty much everything else falls into place. On some level, I suppose, the boy and/or the girl could be black, but then you've got another thing going on, which really isn't the series we're doing. The series we are doing (which, incidentally, will compete with an all-black sitcom on the WB network) is a comedy about two young people in love and the disrupting effect on their families. I'm certain that if we really pushed, we could make it also about race, in the sense that everything in America these days is about itself and also about race, but times are tough in the television business (CBS, Fridays, 8:30 p.m.-have you written that down?), and a clear, funny idea is the best way to keep a show on the air.

Of course, accusations of racism, like accusations of child molestation, tend to provoke exactly the wrong sort of reaction. In each case, the accuser (Kweisi Mfume in the first, a child psychologist on the county payroll in the second) has a kind of magic power to transform an accusation into a statement of fact. I mean, he's Kweisi Mfume, for heaven's sake. If he thinks you're racist . . . well, aren't you?

Q: So, why aren't there any African-American characters on your show, Mr. Long?

A: Well, let me first just say that Love & Money appears on CBS, Fridays . . .

Q: That's enough now, sir.

A: I'm just setting the context. You see, our show is about two families . . .

Q: (turning to the jury) Two white families?

A: Well, yes, but . . .

Q: Two all-white families?

A: Well, families tend to run either all or . . . if you'll let me finish . . .

Q: At no point did you think to put in an African-American character?

A: We only have 21-and-a-half minutes to tell the story! We had to introduce seven family members!

Q: And there was no room in your little show for any non-white character?

A: (weakly) Well, the minister is played by a black actor . . .

Q: The minister? That old stereotype?

A: No, but . . .

Q: Thank you. You may step down.

What you're left with is the kind of angry sputtering-". . . but but but it's about two families, see! And a romance! So to have . . . I'm not . . . we're . . . that's just way not true!"-so prevalent among the guilty.

We could do what the cop shows do, which is to cast an African-American woman as the judge-any judge, every judge-thus creating the impression that, in TV Land, black women have two career options: angels in disguise or magistrates.

What we were trying to do is an intergenerational comedy. You don't see a lot of that on television these days. You don't see many people over 40 on television these days. As silly as it sounds, we thought that we were pushing an envelope (not the envelope, obviously, but an envelope) by featuring three series regulars over 45. There's only so much envelope-pushing a guy can do with his 21-and-a-half minutes.

What we will probably do is what we intended to do all along, which is introduce a best-friend character for our young male lead, probably in Episode Two, probably an African-American-I say probably because it hasn't been written yet, won't be filmed until early September, and won't be broadcast until October, at which time maybe Kweisi Mfume will be pointing the finger somewhere else, at somebody else's bread and butter.

In fact, the whole process of network-television production is ill suited to this kind of protest. My writing partner, Dan Staley, and I simply write what we hope is an interesting and funny show, hope that a network orders it as a series, hope that we cast it with nimble, talented actors, hope that it gets some attention (in this respect, at least, thanks go out to Kweisi Mfume), and hope, finally, that enough people tune in. On Fridays. At 8:30 p.m. On CBS.

There is no central authority out here. The idea that there is some racist conspiracy (or, for that matter, some liberal conspiracy) that controls the beast of TV strikes anyone at all who actually works in television as ludicrous. In the end, programming decisions are made by an ad hoc committee of diverse players-studios, networks, advertisers- and content decisions are made by another ad hoc committee-writers, actors, an executive or two-all of whom contribute to the cacophony and the chaos of the entertainment business. It's sort of like protesting a certain stock price. Whom do you send letters to? The market in general? That's an awful lot of cc's.