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Black women on the small screen: the cultural politics of producing, promoting, and viewing Black women-led series in the post-network era

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Black women on the small screen: the cultural politics of producing, promoting, and viewing Black women-led series in the post-network era

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BLACK WOMEN ON THE SMALL SCREEN:
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF PRODUCING, PROMOTING, AND VIEWING BLACK
WOMEN-LED SERIES IN THE POST-NETWORK ERA

By

Dayna Earlene Chatman

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATIONS)
ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM

August 2016

ii

Copyright by

Dayna Earlene Chatman

2016

iii
DEDICATION

I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Fayette D. Elliott and my high school teacher Jessica
Wright-Davis. The wisdom and guidance of these two women has inspired me to keep moving in
the darkest of moments and to always seek to grow intellectually.

iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I did not know it at the time, but my journey toward the completion of my doctoral
degree began in high school when Mrs. Jessica Wright-Davis, my Social Science Survey teacher,
inspired me by challenging me to think critically about what I was learning. Mrs. Wright-Davis
instilled in me a thirst for knowledge that stays with me today, and for that, I am most thankful.
I also have to acknowledge the support and guidance of Edward Tywoniak, my
undergraduate thesis advisor at Saint Mary’s College, Kevin Barnhurst, the former chair of the
Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Andrew Rojecki, my
Master’s thesis advisor. As a Black woman from a working-class community in Richmond,
California, struggled at times to find the confidence that I was capable of the educational success
I have now achieved. These men each saw potential in me, nurtured my abilities, and went to bat
for me in ways that I intend to pay forward in my future capacity as an educator and mentor.
I want to express my sincerest thanks and appreciation to my graduate advisors, Taj
Frazier and Sarah Banet-Weiser. Taj, from the day I entered the doctoral program at USC, you
guided me as I navigated my research interests and attempted to tackle a number of unforeseen
obstacles throughout my graduate experience. You were there at times when I experienced both
rewarding and discouraging moments, and I am happy that I can count you as mentor, colleague,
and also a dear friend. I am thankful for the honest conversations that we have had, and the
moments during writing this dissertation when I was given constructive feedback that, while
difficult to take at times, ultimately motivated and pushed me is ways I know I will prove
beneficial in the future.
During my second year, it was through Taj’s urging that I got to know Sarah by working
as her research assistant. Sarah, your research expertise was invaluable to my own scholarship,

v
and it was a delight to finally work with someone whose interests aligned with my own. I have
always been appreciative of your admiration for my work and work ethic. I am grateful that I had
you to call upon during that terrifying fourth day of my qualifying exams when I was physically
and mentally drained from the experience. Overall, I am sincerely thankful for your words of
support at times when I doubted my progression with this project.
Thank you to my committee members François Bar and Stacy Smith who agreed to
support me on this project, provided me with valuable comments during my dissertation defense,
and offered different perspectives on my work that will help assist me during the next phase of
this research. I also want to thank Larry Gross, Josh Kun, and Lanita Jacobs, who served on my
qualifying exam committee, and Alison Trope and Patty Riley, who have been my cheerleaders
throughout my time at USC.
There are also other members of the Annenberg community, and USC at large, that I
must thank for their support. I indebted to the entire 2010 cohort, but the following people
require a special word of thanks: Janeane Anderson, Brittany Far, Cynthia Wang, Alex Agloro,
Meryl Alper, Wenlin Lui, and Evan Brody. To Joel Lemuel, thank you for your candidness.
Since the day we meet I have always appreciated how we could just talk about anything, whether
discussing my dissertation or talking about life in general, I have valued those conversations. To
Kevin Driscoll and Lana Swartz, words cannot express how special you both are to me and how
extremely grateful I am that we meet. You both have given me research and personal advice that
have helped me immensely. Thank you to Inna Arzumanova and Ritesh Methta, two very
generous and kind people who I have great respect for. Thank you to Stefan Smith for always
providing me with a laugh when I needed it and for showing me what a fierce scholar looks like.
To Myoung-Sun Song, I am so glad we were brought closer together through bonding over K-

vi
pop. You have been extremely supportive of your unnie, encouraging me during this writing
process and listening to me vent. Thank you!
Finally, I want to thank my family. To my mother, thank you for your perseverance and
for always having faith in your eldest daughter. I know that without the sacrifices you made I
would not be where I am today. Thank you to my uncle Girard Chatman and my siblings Deidra
Chatman, Marcel Campbell, Dayman Chatman, Jr., Keira Chatman, Kelei Chatman, Kayla
Chatman, and LaPria Chatman, who, during various moments throughout this process, have
cheered me on from afar and inspired me to keep going. Thank you to my three closest friends
who are like my sisters: Ginnifer Mastarone, Kate Jablonski, and Lorien Hunter. We meet at
different stages in my life, and through the context of school, but our relationship has grown well
beyond the designations of “colleague” or “roommate.” You each are generous beyond measure.
Ginnifer, I am thankful that during our second semester at the University of Illinois at Chicago
we became quick friends and were virtually inseparable after that. I admire your intellect, sense
of style, and overall energy. To Kate, I love you to pieces and I am sincerely grateful to be a part
of your family. I am so happy that our friendship has grown over the years. Lastly, thank you
Lorien for countering my pessimism with optimism and for just being you. Words cannot
express the depth of my gratitude, but I hope you know how much your presence in my life has
meant to me.

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ABSTRACT

Black Women on the Small Screen: The Cultural Politics of Producing, Promoting, and
Viewing Black Women-Led Series in the Post-Network Era, explores how have recent economic,
structural and technological transformations in the television industry, in conjunction with
broader cultural shifts in gender and racial politics, have (re)shaped the ways Black female
subjectivity is discursively imagined, talked about, and understood inside and outside of the
industry. I am specifically interested in uncovering how contemporary politics of race—whether
in relation to conceptions of Black identity, multiculturalism, post-raciality, colorblindness,
etc.—are acknowledged, avoided, negotiated, and contested during the process of television
production and consumption.

viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iv
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. vii
LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... xi
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... xii
Introduction: Black Women’s Visibility in Post-Network Era Television ..................................... 1
Literature Review ........................................................................................................................ 6
Circuit of Cultural Production ................................................................................................ 8
Production and Industry Studies ........................................................................................... 12
Reception Research ............................................................................................................... 15
Research Aims .......................................................................................................................... 19
Chapter Overviews .................................................................................................................... 21
Chapter One: The Impact of Discourses of Race and Gender on Programming Practices ........... 24
Discourses of Racial Progress and Black Americans’ Visibility in Network Era Programming
................................................................................................................................................... 26
The Rise of Black-Cast Programs ............................................................................................. 31
Discourses of Post-feminism and Black Feminism .................................................................. 36
The Decline of Black-Cast Programs on Commercial Network TV ........................................ 48
The Transition of Black-Cast Programs to Cable ..................................................................... 55
Post-Identity Politics and Post-Network Television Programming Practices ........................... 58
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 63

ix
Chapter Two: Black Women Showrunners’ Politics of Representation ....................................... 66
Black Women Making Television and Navigating the Industry .............................................. 70
Shonda Rhimes’ Politics of Representation: “Normalizing” Television .................................. 83
Mara Brock Akil, Issa Rae, and Tracy Oliver: “Black on Purpose” ......................................... 90
A Tale of Three Protagonists: Olivia Pope, Mary Jane Paul, and J ........................................ 100
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 107
Chapter Three: The Online Promotion of Scandal and the Harnessing of Black Fans’ Labor .. 112
The “Audience” in the Post-Network Era: Media Convergence and Networked Co-Viewing
................................................................................................................................................. 116
Live-Tweeting During Television Broadcasts ........................................................................ 122
“Black” Twitter ....................................................................................................................... 125
ABC’s Twitter Strategy for Scandal ....................................................................................... 129
Black Fans’ Networked Co-Viewing of Scandal .................................................................... 134
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 141
Chapter Four: Black Fans and the Politics of Viewing Scandal ................................................. 142
The Politics of Viewing in the Age of Black Twitter ............................................................. 144
Making Scandal a “Black Show” ........................................................................................... 147
Image Memes ...................................................................................................................... 149
Affirmations of Black Cultural Experiences and Collective Interpretations ...................... 151
Jokes .................................................................................................................................... 154
Critical Readings ................................................................................................................. 156
Black Anti-fan Discourses of Race, Gender, & Sexuality ...................................................... 158
Anti-Fan Memes and Jokes Directed at Fans ..................................................................... 165

x
Remarks on Anti-fan Critiques of Scandal ............................................................................. 170
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 173
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 175
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 179

xi
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Tweet Responses to Olivia's Trench Coat ..................................................................... 139
Table 2 Black Celebrities, Personalities, Politicians and Characters in Memes ......................... 150
Table 3 Sample Tweet Reactions to "Twice as Good" Line ....................................................... 152
Table 4 Tweet Sample of Hair Jokes .......................................................................................... 156

xii
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 #AskScandal Promo ..................................................................................................... 131
Figure 2 #ScandalRecruitment Promo ........................................................................................ 132
Figure 3 #ScandalisBack Promo ................................................................................................. 133
Figure 4 Madea "Do Not Disturb" Meme ................................................................................... 136
Figure 5 The Color Purple "Do Not Disturb" Meme .................................................................. 136
Figure 6 Scandal Viewing Party ................................................................................................. 137
Figure 7 Networked Co-Viewing With Wine & Popcorn .......................................................... 137
Figure 8 Olivia's Burberry Prorsum Trench Coat ....................................................................... 138
Figure 9 #WhatMJWore Ad ........................................................................................................ 140
Figure 10 Iyanla Fix My Life Meme .......................................................................................... 151
Figure 11 Ne Ne Leaks "Read, honey" Meme ............................................................................ 153
Figure 12 Whitley’s Byron Meme .............................................................................................. 155
Figure 13 Infidelity Meme #1 ..................................................................................................... 167
Figure 14 Infidelity Meme #2 ..................................................................................................... 167

1
Introduction: Black Women’s Visibility in Post-Network Era Television

The cover of the May 2015 issue of Essence magazine featured five influential Black
women, described by the accompanying title as “game changers”: Debbie Allen, Ava DeVerny,
Shonda Rhimes, Mara Brock Akil, and Issa Rae. In the cover story, these five women discussed
the topic of Black women’s presence on and in contemporary television. Shonda Rhimes and
Mara Brock Akil, two women who have received considerable attention for their roles as
screenwriters and showrunners for dramas with Black women in leading roles, were asked about
the joys and challenges they have experienced in ushering in a moment in which “Black women
are the flavor of the month.” Akil commented, “We’re armed with so much experience and talent
in front of and behind the camera that to me it’s not a moment anymore. People might perceive it
that way, but to me it might even be sort of secret weapon—that you think it’s the flavor of the
month but it is rooted here.” Rhimes responded, “I don’t think it's a trend. It’s an economic
fact…It’s just clear that [people of color are] an economic force and the corporations can’t deny
that. When the shows start doing bigger numbers than what they think are going to be their top
ten shows, it becomes really hard to suggest it’s a trend.”
1

This dissertation, in part, considers the question of whether the proliferation of television
programs with Black women in leading roles is a fad or if it is indicative of a significant shift
within the television industry as it strives toward inclusivity in the medium. In considering this
question, I explore how recent economic, structural and technological transformations in the
television industry, in conjunction with broader cultural shifts in gender and racial politics, have
(re)shaped the ways Black female subjectivity is discursively imagined, talked about, and
understood inside and outside of the industry. As broadcast networks and cable channels face

1
Cori Murray, “(Un)Scripted: Five of Our Most Influential Storytellers Gather for One Epic Conversation,”

2
competition from original programming produced by video-streaming subscription services like
Hulu and Netflix, and web series uploaded to sites such as YouTube, there is an abundance of
content for viewers to choose from. New technologies, in the form of digital video recorders
(DVRs), tablets and smartphones, offer viewers’ opportunities to view content when and where
they want. This competition and advances in media technology have affected not only the types
of programs that are produced and distributed, but also how such programs are marketed to and
consumed by viewers. In The Television Will be Revolutionized, media industry scholar Amanda
Lotz describes this moment in televisions’ history as the “post-network era”—an era defined by
substantial alterations to the production process, and how audiences access television.
2
As a
Black feminist media scholar, I am interested in understanding what these shifts mean for the
current and long-term production, circulation, and consumption of televisual representations of
Black women.
This dissertation examines discourses surrounding the production, online promotion, and
reception of Black female-led series. I define “Black female-led” television programs in two
ways. Black female-led programs can refer to shows that feature one or more Black women as
central protagonists; however, such shows may not necessarily be “Black shows.” Black shows
articulate themes, aesthetics and narratives that are meant to relay a specific cultural experience
that is perceived to be unique to Black people.
3
In Black female-led series that do not articulate
such elements, Black female characters are often situated in a liminal space; their bodies are
visually seen as Black but that fact is not to be understood by the audience—or within the text

2
Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University
Press, 2007).
3
Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1995); Kristal Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the
Revolution of Black Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

3
itself—as representing any meaningful racial difference.
4
An example of this type of Black
female-led program is ABC’s Scandal. Black female-led programs can also refer to programs
that predominantly feature Black women and deal specifically with themes related to the unique
cultural experiences of Black women. BET’s Being Mary Jane (2014- ) is an example of this
second type of program. Both of these forms of Black female-led programs provide Black
women with media visibility and contextualize and produce meanings about their subjectivities
in different ways.
The increased visibility of Black women in leading roles—in dramas in particular, which
is a genre where Black women historically have been absent—leads to a number of questions
related to industry motivations behind the development of Black women-led series. Such
questions include how casting decisions are made; how these shows are promoted, and to whom;
and, how viewers respond to these series. Specifically, are the motivations behind the
development of these series simply tied to the potential market reward, as represented by the
mainstream success of Scandal? Or have decisions to develop and ultimately pickup such series
been part of a broader plan to schedule television programs that are more inclusive or diverse in
their representations? If the latter is the case, in casting these shows, are decisions made based on
an explicit desire to cast a Black actress, or has “colorblind” casting been used as a strategy?
Who is envisioned as the target audience for these shows? Who will actually turn up to watch
these series, and how will they—in this increasingly virtually connected world—choose to voice
their interest or dislike of these programs? These are some of the questions that this dissertation
considers through explorations of contemporary television industry strategies and practices

4
What I mean by “meaningful racial difference” is that others perceive the black body as
detached from a history of institutionalized racism, discrimination, and prejudice. There is a
belief that in the “now” one’s racial identity marks them as superficially different; at heart,
racially different individuals are the same, as humans.

4
connected to the development, production, and promotion of programs with black women in
leading roles, and viewer engagement with these programs. In short, the purpose of this
dissertation is to shed new light on the visibility and representation of Black women on
television through unpacking how industry structure, discourses, and practices, as well as viewer
consumption habits, produce the conditions under which certain kinds of programs are made.
The invisibility of marginalized groups on television has been an issue of concern for
special interest groups, labor unions, government agencies, and media researchers since the
critical study of television emerged in the 1970s. Why does the visibility of these groups matter?
As media scholar Darnell Hunt explains:
Media images contribute greatly to how we think about who we are, who we aren’t, and
who we hope to be. When marginalized groups in society are absent from the stories a
nation tells about itself, or when media images are rooted primarily in stereotype,
inequality is normalized and is more likely to be reinforced over time through our
prejudices and practices.
5

George Gerber and Larry Gross, and Gayle Tuchman describe the absence that Hunt mentions as
“symbolic annihilation”—an action that sustains the marginalization of groups that have been
historically discriminated against on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-
economic status, etc.
6

Representation is one area where hegemonic struggle takes place. As this dissertation is
about the visibility of Black women on television, it is necessary to understand the cultural
relevance of the medium for Blacks in general and Black women in particular. Historically,

5
Darnell Hunt, Hollywood Diversity Brief: Spotlight on Cable Television (Los Angeles, 2013), 3,
http://www.bunchecenter.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hollywood-Diversity-Brief-
Spotlight-10-2013.pdf.
6
See George Gerbner and Larry Gross, “Living With Television: The Violence Profile,” Journal
of Communication 26 (1976): 172–199; Gaye Tuchman, “The Newspaper as a Social
Movement’s Resource,” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, ed. Gaye
Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),
186–215.

5
Blacks have been treated as objects, not subjects, within dominant regimes of representation.
7

For this reason, theorists have conceived of the cultural struggle within commercial culture as
one over representation. Such a struggle is viewed as important because, as Jacqueline Bobo
writes, “the way a group of people is represented can play a determining role in how those
people are treated socially and politically.”
8
Moreover, representations are important because
they have the potential to provide Black audiences with Black figures through which they can
give meaning and direction to their lives.
9
Representations also serve as vehicles for re-
imagining and re-inventing narratives about Black cultural history.
10

In the current television climate there is no shortage of programs for viewers to choose
from. However, researchers at UCLA have made some significant—yet not entirely surprising
given the industry’s history—observations about the programs that circulate and the degree to
which actors, writers, producers, and directors from minority groups are visible within the
television industry. Hunt, Ramon, and Price report that in leading roles during the 2011-12
season, racial and ethnic minority actors were visible on just 5.1 percent of broadcast cable and
dramas. Although the percentage was considerably higher for cable comedies and dramas with
minority actors as leads (14.7 percent), when considering that, according to the 2010 U.S.
Census, minorities collectively accounted for 36.3 percent of the population, there is a clear
disparity in representation.
11

7
Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed.
Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (London: Routledge, 1996), 441–449.
8
Jacqueline Bobo, “The Politics of Interpretation: Black Critics, Filmmakers, Audiences,” in
Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (New York: The New Press, 1983), 66.
9
Mia Mask, Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2009).
10
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Black Man’s Burden,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent
(New York: The New Press, 1983), 75–84.
11
Darnell Hunt, Ana-Christina Ramon, and Zachary Price, 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report:
Making Sense of the Disconnect (Los Angeles, 2014), http://www.bunchecenter.ucla.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2014/02/2014-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2-12-14.pdf.

6
The statistics brought to light by Hunt, Ramon, and Price’s report paint a picture that—
with the exception of a few short-lived gains—demonstrates not much has changed over the
course of televisions’ nearly 70-year history. Indeed, it begs the question: When television
scholars talk today about the “massive changes” that have overhauled television in the United
States and around the world, why have they neglected to discuss both the lack of change in racial
minority groups’ visibility in/on television and the shifting locations in these groups’ visibility?
Furthermore, why have they failed to adequately address the ways that television as an industry
“remains mediated by racial hierarchies and commercial imperatives,”
12
and, therefore, has real
consequences for not only the number of Blacks on screen, but also what genres they are seen in
and the types of representations that circulate? In many of the discussions about the
transformations of television as a medium and industry,
13
media scholars have not directed
sufficient attention to how industry politics, which include racial politics, are navigated and
negotiated in this current television climate. This dissertation seeks to remedy this oversight.
Literature Review
As a Black feminist media and communication scholar, I have been trained both in the
“traditional” field of mass communication (or media effects) and cultural studies. My own
research of representations of Black women in contemporary popular culture has been guided by
a number of communication, feminist, and cultural theorists whose contributions to the
interdisciplinary field of cultural studies have been both substantial and long lasting. However,
as I have become more familiar with cultural studies research in general, and Black feminist

12
Herman Gray, “The Endless Slide of Difference: Critical Television Studies, Television and
the Question of Race,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, no. 2 (1993): 191.
13
See Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds., Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Amanda D. Lotz, ed., Beyond Prime Time: Television
Programming in the Post-Network Era (New York: Routledge, 2009).,

7
media scholarship specifically, I see the need to decenter “the text” as the primary object of
study because the critic’s view is often situated as the definitive “truth” of a text.
Studies that explore depictions of Black women in media frequently situate stereotypes as
the object of analysis. Patricia Hill Collins,’ for instance, she devotes a chapter of her canonical
book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, to
the analysis of what she describes as “controlling images”—representations of Black women
ideologically designed to maintain their subordination. These controlling images include: the
faithful and obedient mammy; the matriarch or “bad” Black mother; the welfare mother/queen;
and the jezebel or whore. In subsequent scholarship, several other controlling images have been
identified including the “Sapphire” or “Angry Black Woman,”
14
the “Gold Digger,” “Diva,” and
“Dyke,”
15
the “Black Lady,”
16
and “Modern Mammy.”
17
Based on the belief that “television
makes or attempts to make, meanings that serve the dominant interests in society,”
18
Black
feminists evaluation of these tropes have become both the historical and contemporary lenses
through which representations of Black women are analyzed and critiqued.
Television theorist Timothy Havens identifies the form of stereotype analysis undertaken
by Black feminist media scholars and others as analytically “stronger” than a second form of
stereotype analysis that prescribes “certain types of programs or representational practices as

14
Carolyn M. West, “Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel: Historical Images of Black Women and
Their Implications for Psychotheraphy,” Psychotheraphy 32, no. 3 (1995): 458–466.
15
Dionne P. Stephens and Layli D. Phillips, “Freaks, Gold Diggers, Divas, and Dykes: The
Sociohistorical Development of Adolescent African Americans Women’s Sexual Scripts,”
Sexuality & Culture (2003): 3–50.
16
Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle
Class (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
17
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
(New York: Routledge, 2005).
18
John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.

8
inherently superior or inferior to others” by categorizing them as “negative” or “positive.”
19
I
agree with Havens’ assessments about these two types of stereotype analysis; however, I also
believe that both restrict the lens through which we can fully understand depictions of Black
women within television today.
20
My mode of thinking about depictions of Black women on
television is in the same vain as cultural theorists like Stuart Hall: cultural artifacts bare the
traces of history and draw upon the discourses and politics of the time period in which they are
produced. By interpreting representations of Black women solely within the framework of
historically situated discourses of racism and sexism we lose sight of the complex, and
contradictory nature of televisual representations. This is not to suggest that discourses of racism
and sexism are not linked to contemporary images of Black women—they sometimes are. What I
mean to suggest through this study is that the images of Black women that circulate today are
neither totally oppressive nor liberatory, exist due to specific institutional logics that manifest in
the television industry, and are consumed and interpreted by viewers in conflicting ways.
Discourses about race and gender, and racism and sexism, adapt and change. Therefore, it is
necessary to consider how our understanding of contemporary representations of Black women
are nuanced by the racial and gender politics—as well as the economic politics—of the twenty-
first century.
Circuit of Cultural Production
This dissertation recognizes that television is more than a vehicle for the distribution of
cultural texts (e.g. television programs); it is also an industry and an institution. As an industry

19
Timothy Havens, Black Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe (New
York: New York University Press, 2013), 9.
20
I am firmly in agreement with film scholar Jacqueline Bobo who writes: “Although it is
patently evident that representations of black women in mainstream media have been persistently
negative, scholarship by black women should not limit itself to a hunt for negative imagery. This
can be self-defeating in that it diminishes any hope for change” (35).

9
and institution, television goes through various transformations that have an impact on the
production, circulation and distribution of content. Thus, it is important to consider the
relationship between industry and institutional changes in television, and how and why specific
content is created. Moreover, because television as an industry and institution is not isolated
from society as a whole, it is also necessary to take stock of broader political economic and
cultural shifts that both directly and indirectly influence the production, circulation, distribution,
and consumption of television. In this dissertation, I am not simply concerned with the meanings
of specific representations of Black women; I am also interested in how these meanings are
produced, circulated, utilized through consumption, and reproduced or reconfigured both by
producers and consumers.
Douglas Kellner argues that the focus on texts and audiences as objects of analysis within
contemporary cultural studies “leaves out many mediations that should be part of [the field],
including analysis of how texts are produced within the context of political economy and systems
of production of culture, as well as how audiences are produced by a variety of social
institutions, practices, ideologies, and the uses of different media.”
21
Both Stuart Hall and
Richard Johnson voiced Kellner’s criticism of cultural studies scholarship—which takes as its
primary focuses of study the relation between culture and questions of power— decades earlier.
Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” essay is of one of the first works to complicate
understandings of the televisual communication process.
22
The dominant conceptualization of
the communication process employed by mass communication theorists was the
sender/message/receiver model. Hall describes this model as narrowly focused on message

21
Douglas Kellner, “Media Communication vs. Cultural Studies: Overcoming the Divide,”
Communication Theory 5, no. 2 (1995): 170.
22
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural
Studies, 1972-79, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Routledge, 1991), 128–138.

10
exchange, and subsequently suggests an alternative way of thinking about the communication
chain. Halls’ circuit of televisual communication—or the “encoding/decoding” model as it is
popularly called—recognizes five linked, yet distinct “moments”—production, circulation,
distribution, consumption (reception), and reproduction. These moments constitute a “complex
structure of relations” that is “sustained through the articulation of connected practices.”
23

According to Hall, the object of these practices is meanings and messages, specifically their
“encoding” (production/circulation), distribution, and “decoding” (consumption/reception).
According to Hall, the moments of encoding (at the point of production/circulation) and
decoding (at the point of consumption) “are determinate moments”
24
in which discourses are
embedded within the codes of television and “read” or interpreted by viewers. “Discourse,” as it
is conceptualized in the field of cultural studies, refers to a language, group of statements, or
system of representation that produces social knowledge about how to construct, talk about, and
understand certain topics.
25
Because discourse defines the parameters around which a topic can
be represented and discussed, the knowledge that it produces constitutes a form of power that can
then be exercised in practice.
26

In “Encoding, Decoding,” Hall does not address the connection between capital and the
process of production and reception; instead, he focuses on “discourse” and “discursive
practices,” which relate, in part, to the cultural conditions of televisions production and
reception. Richard Johnson’s essay “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” in many ways picks up
where Hall’s work leaves off.
27
Johnson identifies three main areas of cultural studies research:

23
Ibid., 129.
24
Ibid.
25
Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed.
Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (London: Polity Press, 1992), 185–227.
26
Ibid.
27
Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?,” Social Text no. 16 (1986): 38–80.

11
production-based studies, text-based studies, and studies of lived cultures. Instead of approaching
each of these individually, Johnson theorizes that each constitutes a moment in the circuit of
culture. This is a circuit of production, circulation and consumption. As with Hall’s circuit of
televisual communication, each moment in Johnson’s circuit is linked to the others, yet is also
distinct: when placed “at one point of the circuit, we do not necessarily see what is happening at
others.”
28

Unlike Hall’s encoding/decoding model, Johnson is cognizant of both the cultural and
economic conditions of the production and reception. Cultural theorists often recognize the
significance of economic power; however, there is a tendency to draw attention away from it in
an attempt to avoid the economic determinism that exists within Marxist philosophy. For
Johnson though, the circuit of cultural production, circulation, and consumption cannot be
viewed outside of capital just as it cannot be analyzed outside of discourse. As Johnson
maintains, this “circuit is, at one and the same time, a circuit of capital and its expanded
reproduction and a circuit of the production and circulation of subjective [or cultural] forms.”
29

Therefore, Johnson argues that in the study of the production of cultural products researchers
should consider the “material means of production and the capitalist organisation of labour,” and
the range of “existing cultural elements drawn from the reservoirs of lived culture or from the
existing public fields of discourse.”
30
These aspects make up the economic and cultural contexts
of production and reception.

28
Ibid., 46.
29
Ibid., 47.
30
Ibid., 55.

12
Production and Industry Studies
Production studies “often seek to illustrate the complicated process of ideological
production by describing and analyzing the obstacles producers encounter during production and
their struggles to negotiate specific goals within the expectations and desires of distribution
networks.”
31
Compared to studies of specific television programs and audiences, there has been a
dearth in television industry and production studies. Todd Gitlin is frequently credited with
providing one of the first in-depth explorations of the television industry.
32
Gitlin examined the
ways in which the business practices and workplace politics constrained the creative output of
television production. Despite Gitlin’s groundbreaking work, television industry and production
studies have been sporadic.
33
Industry and production studies—as well as those in-depth works
focused on representation—omit conversation of programs that feature non-white women.
34

Additionally, as it pertains to studies of Blacks on television specifically, Black women, though
they have played leading roles in a number of television sitcoms,
35
are frequently ignored in
favor of Black-cast sitcoms where black men have lead roles (e.g. The Cosby Show, The Fresh

31
Amanda D. Lotz, “Textual (Im)possibilities in the U.S. Post‐network Era: Negotiating
Production and Promotion Processes on Lifetime’s Any Day Now,” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 21, no. 1 (March 2004): 24, doi:10.1080/0739318042000184389.
32
Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
33
Elana Levine, “Toward a Paradigm for Media Production Research: Behind the Scenes at
General Hospital,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 1 (2001): 66–82..
34
Julie D’Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey (Raleigh, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television,
Media Cultuture, and the Women’s Movement Since 1970 (Philadephia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Amanda D. Lotz, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network
Era (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Eileen R. Meehan and Jackie Byars,
“Telefeminism: How Lifetime Got Its Groove, 1984-1997,” Television & New Media 1, no. 1
(February 1, 2000): 33–51, doi:10.1177/152747640000100103..
35
Examples of programs with Black women as lead protagonists include 277 (1985-1990),
Living Single (1993-1998), Sister, Sister (1994-1999), Moesha (1996-2001), The Parkers (1999-
2004), Eve (2003-2006), That’s So Raven (2003-2007), and Girlfriends (2000-2008).

13
Prince of Bel-Air, etc.).
36
However, there have been some expectations. Individual black women-
led series that have been studied include the Beulah, Julia, Gimme a Break! and Living Single.
37

Berretta Smith-Shomade devotes a chapter in her book Shaded Lives: African-American Women
in Television to discussing Black women in both starring and supporting roles in situation
comedies such as Martin, and Moesha.
38
None of these prior studies of Black women in sitcoms,
however, focus on their production, but rather engage in textual readings, exploring various
themes, aesthetics, discourses about race and gender, and representations of Black cultural
identity and politics.
An additional shortcoming of existing scholarship is the shortage of research on Black
women’s authorship and creative control in television either in the past or within the post-
network era. In two brief articles,
39
media scholar Jannette Dates introduces several influential
Black women working in television during the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Debbie Allen,
Yvette Bowser, and Felicia Henderson. Dates overviews these women’s career accomplishments
and through snippets from interviews provides some insight into their experiences within the

36
Donald Bogle, Prime Time Blues: African Americans on Network Television (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).; Havens, Black Television Travels: African American Media
Around the Globe.; Leslie B. Inniss and Joe R. Feagin, “The Cosby Show: The View From the
Black Middle Class,” Journal of Black Studies 25, no. 6 (1995): 692–711; Sut Jhally and Justin
M. Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American
Dream (New York: Westview Press, 1992); June M. Frazer and Timothy C. Frazer, “‘Father
Knows Best’ and ‘The Cosby Show’: Nostalgia and the Sitcom Tradition,” The Journal of
Popular Culture 27, no. 3 (December 1993): 163–172, doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1993.00163.x.
37
Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Mack Scott, “From Blackface to Beulah:
Subtle Subversion in Early Black Sitcoms,” Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 4 (2014):
743–769, doi:10.1177/0022009414538473; Jennifer Fuller, “The ‘Black Sex Goddess’ in the
Living Room,” Feminist Media Studies 11, no. 3 (September 2011): 265–281,
doi:10.1080/14680777.2010.535306; Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the
Revolution of Black Television.
38
Beretta E Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
39
Jannette L. Dates, “Black Women in Charge in Prime Time,” Television Quarterly 34, no. 3/4
(2004): 28–33; Jannette L. Dates, “Movin’ on Up: Black Women Decisionmakers in
Entertainment Television,” The Journal of Popular Film and Television 33, no. 2 (2005): 68–79,
doi:10.3200/JPFT.33.2.68-79.

14
industry. However, due to the brevity of these articles, there is no in-depth study or analysis of
these women’s experiences, and in effect Dates merely offers information about the presence of
Black women working behind the scenes of television at the time.
Gregory Adamo’s African Americans and Television: Behind the Scenes offers a
substantive, but yet still brief, exploration into the work culture within the television industry and
how Black women and Black men navigate the challenges and expectations. Adamo interviews
Black television executives and creative professionals working in the industry during the heavy
proliferation of Black cast sitcoms and details their experiences getting their start in the industry,
receiving mentorship, and mediating multiple often competing interests in the process of
developing and producing a television series. In one chapter, Adamo presents the stories of three
Black women showrunners— Felicia Henderson, Meg DeLoatch, and Mara Brock Akil—and
illustrates how they were able to create representations that mattered to them and their audiences
despite instances of pushback from networks. Although, Adamo’s exploration of these women’s
experiences in the industry build significantly from Dates’ contribution, it too seems truncated in
its scope, analysis, and connection to theory.
40
However, Adamo provides valuable resource
material due to the breath of the responses from his interviewees.
Herman Gray’s Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, while not a
production study, provides insight into the industry dynamics in the mid to late 1980s that gave
rise to the proliferation of images of Blacks on television. Gray incorporates analysis of the
political economic and the cultural context of Black cast programs, and also performs critical
readings of specific shows. Utilizing press interviews, personal communications with Black
creative professionals, as well as financial and other behind the scenes details about the

40
Adamo’s primary connection to theory is through Stuart Hall’s circuit of culture, which he
references throughout.

15
production of these series, Gray situates his examination of the themes, discourses, and
ideologies present in shows such as In Living Color, and Frank’s Place against the dynamics of
the industry that shaped their very ability to exist within the space of commercial television at the
time. The work I undertake within this dissertation is indebted to the contribution Gray’s work
has made to the field of television studies, and the discipline of communication more broadly,
since—as apparent by the dearth of scholarship that addresses television programs with Black
actors in relation to both existing institutional constraints and cultural politics—its depth,
approach, and topic of focus have yet to be replicated. However, one limitation of Gray’s study
is that it lacks explorations of programs that prominently feature Black women and the
experiences of Black women working in the industry at the time are absent.
Reception Research
Reception research explores the relationship between the audience or ‘reader’ and media
message or ‘text’ to uncover the manner in which an audience makes sense of (meaning making)
a media text (act of decoding).”
41
Despite the proliferation of reception studies after Stuart Hall’s
canonic “Encoding, Decoding” essay, few cultural and television scholars have interrogated how
Black viewers interpret, use, and resist media texts. One of the first works to explore Black
audience engagement and deciphering of media representations is film theorist Jacqueline
Bobo’s Black Women as Cultural Readers.
42
Bobo uses group interviews and textual analysis to
explore Black women’s responses to works by or featuring Black women, including the film
Waiting to Exhale and the controversial novel and film The Color Purple. Bobo’s stance is that
critics often dismiss works like these because they misunderstand Black women’s experiences

41
Robin R. Means Coleman, ed., Say It Loud! African-American Audiences, Media, and Identity
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 13.
42
Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995).

16
and therefore misconstrue their significance for Black women cultural consumers. Bobo’s
primary theoretical contribution is to include Black women cultural consumers as members of an
“interpretive community” that also consists of Black female cultural producers and critics and
scholars. These women strategically “utilize representations of black women that they deem
valuable, in productive and politically useful ways.”
43
Throughout her study, Bobo makes it clear
that Black women cultural consumers employ negotiated readings of controversial texts; they are
able to sift through incongruent parts of such works and respond positively to elements that
resonate with their own experiences. Furthermore, in order to make sense of particular texts,
these women draw upon interpretive strategies that have developed from past viewing
experiences and personal racial, sexual, class backgrounds.
Despite the fact that Black Americans continue to consume more television than other
racial and ethnic groups, few studies have attempted to capture the viewing experiences of this
group. In prior receptions studies of Black audiences, researchers have identified three prominent
themes. First of all, Black viewers express personal connections to particular media texts. For
instance, they discuss how a particular narrative or characters’ actions is reflective of a personal
experience or is representative of the racial experience of Black Americans. A second theme
relates to debates over whether a specific media text is breaking down and/or reinforcing
stereotypes. This theme is related to concerns about the implications of viewing a text as
characteristic of Black American's experiences. The last theme is involves the role or
responsibility of the texts’ producer in crafting “positive” images in order to combat “negative”
images.
Aniko Bodroghkozy’ reception study of the controversial television series Julia, a

43
Ibid., 22.

17
situation comedy that aired in 1968 uses letters written by audience members and articles written
by press critics in order to produce partial knowledge about some of the debates and responses
the program generated amongst Black and white viewers. In their letters to the network, viewers
of the show grappled with racial identity, racial difference, and representation. Some of the
Black viewers critiqued the show for its unrealistic portrayal of Black people; the Black
characters were perceived as being whitewashed by show writers in order to appeal to white
audiences.
44
While white viewers applauded the denial of difference on the show, some Black
viewers challenged it, critiquing what they perceived as a denial of the "realness of black
identity.”
45
Others felt that Julia was a missed opportunity to dispel misconceptions about Black
people. Bodroghkozy discovers that amongst Black viewers there was a participatory quality to
their engagement with the program, as many of the letters they sent inquired about writing
episodes or playing roles on the show. Such offers generally came after Black viewers detailed
what they felt were the programs shortcomings.
The matter of “realness” or “authenticity” is a recurring theme within Black viewers’
discussions of television. In their analysis of Black middle-class viewers’ reception of The Cosby
Show, Leslie Inniss and Joe Feagin discovered that the show was considered not “Black” enough
because it did not provide a realistic portrayal of family life as it presented a Black family that
did not experience any problems, especially racial issues. In effect, there was a lack of tragedy;
the show depicted a home in which two working professional parents had well behaved children,
an always tidy house, and no trials and tribulations. There existed a dialectical tension amongst
Black viewers as some felt it provided “Black role models, positive values, and important

44
Aniko Bodroghkozy, “‘Is This What You Mean by Color TV?’ Race, Gender, and Contested
Meanings in NBC’s ‘Julia,’” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed.
Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 158.
45
Ibid., 159.

18
messages for Black Americans,”
46
but they were also critical of what they perceived to be the
image of assimilation to white culture.
In African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy, Robin Means Coleman
interviews thirty Black viewers’ interpretations of Black situation comedies. When asked to
respond to the question of how they perceive Blacks are depicted in this genre of programming,
Black viewers categorized portrayals into positive and negative. The majority overwhelming felt
that Black situation comedies negatively portrayed Blacks; in instances where viewers consider
the good in the portrayals, “the participants where identifying the redeeming qualities in what
they believed to be an otherwise problematic genre of television programming that represents
African Americans poorly.”
47
Likely because they found the portrayals of Blacks in Black
sitcoms to be negative, Black viewers in Coleman’s study saw themselves as different from the
Black characters portrayed. However, some expressed connections with some of the personal
situations that were depicted on programs like The Cosby Show.
What I find most compelling about Coleman’s study is the reflexivity of the participants
particularly as it relates not only to how Black situation comedies connect to their own self-
image, but also how this form of programming might impact other viewers’ perceptions of
Blacks in reality. Concerns were expressed that others would view the negative portrayals of
Blacks on television as accurate depictions of Black behavior, life, and culture. In suggestions
for how things could be changed, Black viewers, while recognizing that media control still
disproportionately rests in the hands of white owners, recommended that Black producers,
writers, and performers demand better roles, take charge of their images, and produce more
positive portrayals of Blacks.

46
Inniss and Feagin, “The Cosby Show: The View From the Black Middle Class,” 705.
47
Robin R. Means Coleman, African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy:
Situating Racial Humor (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 166.

19
Research Aims

Beyond asserting the significance of media, such as television, as a system of
racialization
48
prior examinations of Black women’s visibility and portrayals on television often
do not outline the specific industry logics and practices that either prevent Black women from
being visible, or that lead to their stereotypical depictions. Such ideologies and practices are only
eluded to in studies that quantify the absence of minority television executives, show creators,
directors, producers, and writers. Thus, the first aim of this dissertation is to explore the industry
politics, or “industry lore” involved in the development, production, and promotion of programs
that feature Black women in lead roles. In other words, this research is about bringing to light the
discursive struggle over meaning that takes place amongst television executives, show creators,
writers and producers, during the entire process of creating representations (i.e. television
programs); this also a struggle that continues at the point of reception.
A second objective of this dissertation is to highlight the varying roles that viewers, and
fans, play in the production and reception of contemporary television programs with Black
women in lead roles. Before moving forward in outlining this second aim, I feel it is appropriate
here to distinguish between how I will use the terms “viewers,” “audience,” and “fans.” I am in
agreement with Ien Ang's description of the television “audience” as a fiction; it is an “imaginary
entity, an abstraction constructed from the vantage point of the [television industry]” for the

48
Littlefield argues that the “media strategically remake our picture of reality by controlling
images and the information we receive. [. . .] The media serve as a tool that people use to define,
measure and understand American society. For that reason, the media serves as a system of
racialization in that they have historically been used to perpetuate the dominate culture’s
perspective and create a public forum that defines and shapes ideas concerning race and
ethnicity” (677). See Marci Bounds Littlefield, “The Media as a System of Racialization:
Exploring Images of African American Women and the New Racism,” American Behavioral
Scientist 51, no. 5 (January 2008): 675–685, doi:10.1177/0002764207307747.

20
benefit of its own interest.
49
Ang asserts that the television audience “refers to a structural
position in a network of institutionalized communicative relations: a position located at the
receiving end of a chain of practices of production and transmission of audiovisual material
through TV channels.”
50
Therefore, when I use the use the term “audience” in this dissertation, it
will be in reference to industry conceptualizations of who is watching particular television
content. At other points I will use “viewer,” which is conceptualized as “someone watching
television, making meanings and pleasures from it, in a social situation.”
51
Such a definition
recognizes the social positioning of consumers of television, and how that positioning shapes
their viewing experiences.
52
In short, viewers are active, while audiences are conceptualized in
ways that connote passivity.
Lastly, the term “fans” will also be used in this dissertation as well. Viewers can be
“fans” in a general sense, but they may not necessarily participate in types of behavior that
constitutes fandom. As Fiske writes, “All popular audiences engage in varying degrees of
semiotic productivity, producing meanings and pleasures that pertain to their social situation out
of the products of the culture industries. But fans often turn this semiotic productivity into some
form of textual production that can circulate among—and thus help to define—the fan
community.”
53
There are different degrees of fan activity; however, this dissertation is interested
in the types of activities that viewer/fans engage in during and after consumption of the
television programs they view.
Finally, through my examination of Black female-led programs from the point of view of

49
Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2.
50
Ibid., 3-4
51
Fiske, Television Culture, 17.
52
See Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.”
53
John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience, ed. Lisa A Lewis
(London: Routledge, 1992), 30.

21
their production, circulation, and consumption I aim to make a theoretical contribution to
feminists’ conversations about the ways in which race and gender are talked about or discussed
today. From the perspective of some white feminists, images of womanhood that are produced
for television today circulate both post-feminist discourses of femininity and post-racial
discourses of race.
54
These discourses produce images of specific types of subjects—subjects
who are empowered, exercise agency, and are devoid of concern about the ways in which they
continue to be subordinated in society. Both Black and white feminists find these discourses
problematic, but for different reasons. While acknowledging these varying feminist perspectives
about gender and race politics, and the types of subjects contemporary “post” discourses produce,
this dissertation seeks to assess the applicability of talking about post-network era images of
Black female subjectivity within the framework of these discourses.
Chapter Overviews

In Chapter 1, I address the following question: What is the discursive context in which
Black women-led programs in the post-network era are proliferating? I begin the chapter by
illustrating the connection cultural politics of race and gender have had to the types of programs
that are developed, produced, and broadcast. This chapter illustrates the ways in which the
visibility of Blacks on television is tied to economic interests, public sentiment, and ideologies
about race. Over the course of the mediums history, television has assessed public opinion—
often favoring those views of white viewers—in order to determine how to package those views
within the symbolic cues and narratives of programs. For instance, during the late 1940s and
early 1950s, the industry catered to white audiences by recycling racist and sexist representations

54
According to John Fiske, “Any account of discourse or a discursive practice must include its
topic area, its social origin, and its ideological work: we should not, therefore, think about a
discourse of economics or of gender, but a capitalist (or socialist) discourse of economics, or the
patriarchal (or feminist) discourse of gender” (15).

22
of Black women in order to fit within Jim Crow era philosophies of blackness. As the decades
progressed, and ideologies and discourses about race shifted, there were subtle changes in
programming, as well as a re-centering of who the audience was for that programming. Chapter
1 maps this history and illustrates the ways in which the cultural politics of race in the post-
network era, defined by post-racial or colorblind discourses, inform the practices of producing
shows that prominently feature Black women characters, and reflect the approach of narrative
development on commercial and cable television.
Black women showrunners are the topic of conversation in Chapter 2. Drawing on
interviews published in the press and in trade publications, I begin the chapter by examining the
experiences of Black women showrunners working in the industry prior to the post-network era.
I discuss their politics of representation—their attitudes and philosophies about race and how
they used those views within their representations of Black subjectivity—and the challenges they
faced in an industry that was just opening up to them in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I then
transition to an exploration of the politics of representation of four Black women showrunners
who have been influential in the post-network era landscape: Shonda Rhimes, Mara Brock Akil,
Tracy Oliver, and Issae. I discuss how these women’s politics are put into practice within their
specific programs, and highlight their differences in experience within the industry. Aside from
Rhimes, these Black women showrunner’s politics of representation limit their ability to operate
in the ways they would like to within television because they do not subscribe to the industry’s
logic about how race is to be incorporated within programming in the post-network era.
Chapters 3 and 4 are case studies of Scandal. In Chapter 3 I address the rise of the
program as a “must watch,” “must tweet” appointment television show. The success of Scandal
in terms of viewership catapulted interest from other networks to greenlight, develop, produce,

23
and broadcast dramatic series that feature Black women in leading roles. Additionally, the
weekly online engagement of fans of the show led to greater emphasis being placed on the use of
Twitter and other social media platforms in promoting shows. It also inspired new audience
measurement tools such as Nelson’s Twitter TV Ratings, which were instituted at the start of
Scandal’s third season. The chapter examines the social media strategies employed in the
promotion of Scandal, and documents how the ABC network utilized the grassroots activities of
Black fans live-tweeting during the first season to build their promotional approach for the show.
I put forth the argument that while downplaying the popularity of the series amongst Black
American viewers—in an attempt to distance the series from conversations about race and a
potential categorization as a “Black show”—the ABC network appropriated the creative labor of
Black fans in order to grow viewership for the series. I close out that chapter by exploring the
labor of Black fans engaged in networked co-viewing during the Season 3 premiere.
Black fans’ online engagement with and reception of Scandal during its third season is
the focus of Chapter 4. Through analyzing tweets and other content such as memes, I explore the
various ways Black fans make and derive meaning from the series. I introduce the concept of a
"politics of viewing," which I use to underscore how social media is utilized as a space in which
Black fans and non-fans struggle over how to interpret images of Black female subjectivity, what
should be consumed, and what the potential ramifications are for supporting images that can be
perceived as solidifying “negative” stereotypes. It is through these discussions that Black
political thought is generated. I place this fan engagement within the broader context of
discourse of race digitally circulated within the networked public identified as “Black Twitter.”

24
Chapter One: The Impact of Discourses of Race and Gender on Programming Practices

The thing about TV is that it only takes one show to be successful and there’ll be
50 copycats. All it’ll take is one successful series with a predominately minority
cast to do well, and someone will copy it. But it’ll be harder to get that show to
air.
1

Eric Deggens, media critic

A week before commercial broadcast network executives debuted their program line-ups
for the 2014-15 season at the annual Upfront event held in New York City—an event where
networks attempt to win advertisers’ financial support for new programs—trade publications,
industry insiders and entertainment outlets revealed the series that would be picked up, returning,
or cancelled. Among the programs four stood out, each of them new dramas: ABC’s How to Get
Away with Murder, NBC’s State of Affairs, and Fox’s Empire and Red Band Society.
2
Each of
these dramas featured Black women in prominent leading or co-leading acting roles. A few cable
channels have aired dramas with Black women in such roles—for example, Lifetime’s Any Day
Now (1998-2002), TNT’s HawthoRNe (2009-2011), and Vh1’s Single Ladies (2011-2014)
3
—but
the series picked up for the 2014-15 season continued a trend in programming that began
following the 2011-2012 season when ABC broadcast Scandal, a drama starring actress Kerry
Washington.
At the time of its premiere in April 2012, Scandal earned the distinction of being the first
broadcast TV drama in nearly forty years to have a Black woman in a leading role, and also the

1
R. Thomas Umstead, “Minorities Go Missing,” Multichannel News, July 27, 2008,
http://www.multichannel.com/news/content/minorities-go-missing/365691.
2
Out of the four series mentioned, Red Band Society and State of Affairs did not make it past the
first season.
3
After being canceled by Vh1, Single Ladies was picked up for another season by the BET-
owned cable channel Centric.

25
first created and co-produced by a Black woman.
4
Garnering mixed reviews from television
critics upon its debut, and watched by a modest 8 million viewers per week,
5
it was likely that
Scandal would not return for a second season. However, the program was given the green-light
for a second season, and midway through that season increased its viewership to average of over
10 million viewers. The success of Scandal—as illustrated by its ability to grow its audience
from the first to second season—catapulted both broadcast and cable network executives’
interest in the development of pilots that featured Black women and men in lead and co-leading
roles as evidenced by the 75 pilots that had been ordered for the 2015-2016 television season.
6

Post-Scandal, the television industry has shifted its view of minority-led programs; they are
viewed as economically viable and not as “risky” for networks as they had been perceived in the
more recent past.
Scandal’s emergence and mainstream success is the result of a confluence of factors
rooted in both the strategies the television industry frequently uses to respond to the economic
and technological conditions of the period and public sentiment on issues of race and gender.
This chapter begins by briefly tracing the history of Black women’s presence in television from
the introduction of the medium through to the early 2000s, and explores how this visibility has
been connected, historically, to racial and gender politics and commercial broadcast networks’
conceptions of the audience. The second half of this chapter situates considers the proliferation
of Black women-led series within the context of contemporary racial and gender politics and

4
ABC’s short lived 1974 series Get Christie Love!, which starred Teresa Graves, has the
distinction of being the first network television drama to feature a Black female lead character. A
Blaxploitation film of the same name that also starred Graves inspired the television crime-
drama. The series was one of two that aired during the Fall 1974 season featuring women in
leading roles as police officers.
5
Scandal was a mid-season replacement and only aired eight episodes during its first season.
6
Tambay A. Obsenon, “73 New TV Pilots & Series with Black Actors in Starring And/or
Supporting Roles Ordered for Next Season. Here’s the Full List,” Indie Wire, March 10, 2015,
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/71-new-tv-pilots-series-with-black-actors-in-starring-
and-or-supporting-roles-ordered-for-next-season-heres-the-full-list-20150310.

26
post-network era programming practices that are influenced by such politics. I argue that in order
to understand the current programming practices and promotional strategies within post-network
era television one must consider contemporary discourses of race and gender in the United States
and how such discourses factor into how the industry conceptualizes television audiences,
programming, and the representational responsibilities of content creators. Essentially, this
chapter illustrates the complex and often ambivalent nature of how the institution of television
responds to and makes use of existing racial and gender politics in order to meet its economic
obligation as an industry. Simply put, there is a clear paradox in which the matter of representing
racial difference and being inclusive within the industry is and is not made central to the
production of Black women-led series.
Discourses of Racial Progress and Black Americans’ Visibility in Network Era
Programming

Analysis of the political economic context of the television industry and the technological
changes in the industry alone cannot explain why Black women have gained a greater degree of
visibility in the medium in the post-network era. One of the shortcomings of Amanda Lotz’s
theorizations of the three periods of transition in television in her book Television Will Be
Revolutionized is that she fails to document and interrogate the ways in which social and cultural
politics intersect with and subsequently inform programming decisions, industry
conceptualizations of audiences, marketing practices, etc. Effectively she paints an incomplete
picture; one that erases the ways that television, from its very inception, has never been separate
from the social and political milieu, and in fact is reliant upon it in order to gauge audience
temperament and to shape televisual images themselves. Therefore, although Lotz outlines
significant shifts in the television industry, the erasure of the moments of cultural importance
that have also been pivotal to these shifts is a grave oversight.

27
In Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, Herman Gray maps the
relationship between the economic, structural, and technological transformations within the
television industry, the cultural politics of race at the time, and the subsequent production of
programming that circulated images of blackness during the 1980s. Gray illustrates that
commercial television is in the business of registering shifts and packaging cultural moods. As
Gray explains:
In order for television to produce cultural effects and meet its economic imperatives (that
is, to produce identifications and pleasures necessary to maintain profitability), it has to
operate on the basis of a popular awareness and general common sense about the currents
adrift in the society. To do this, commercial television must constantly negotiate and
renegotiate, package, and repackage, circulate and recirculate this common sense; it must,
of necessity, frame its representations in appropriate and accessible terms that express the
a shared assumption, knowledge, and experiences of viewers who are situated along
different alliances of race, class, gender (and increasingly, sexuality).
7

Although television is a business that undergoes multiple changes, those changes are not solely
connected to broader economic flows; they are also connected to existing cultural politics and
how such politics can be navigated and utilized in order to capitalize monetarily.
When television was introduced in the late 1940s, the United States was beginning to
assess its racial politics. As historian J. Fred MacDonald writes in Blacks and White TV: African
American in Television Since 1948, following World War II, America actively sought to
“confront the horrendous results of institutionalized prejudice and theories of racial superiority.”
8

President Harry S. Truman set about creating a legislative plan that confronted institutionalized
racism on several fronts, including pushing forward reforms aimed at instituting protections
against lynching, establishing prohibitions against discrimination in interstate transportation and

7
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 58.
8
J. Fred MacDonald, Black and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948 (New
York: Burnham Publishing, Inc., 1983), 5.

28
in employment, and ensuring voting rights.
9
In addition to Truman’s efforts at the national level,
church groups, private citizens, and Black artists such as Paul Robeson and Lena Horne, were
vocal in criticizing the continued prejudice towards Blacks in the United States, and actively
worked to advocate for changes in a number of areas within American society, including
desegregation of schools, and improving the ways Black people were represented within the
entertainment industries.
Early television emerged during this atmosphere of progressive change and actively
positioned itself as a medium that could usher in “a new and prejudice-free era in popular
entertainment.”
10
In 1951, for example, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) began to
make efforts toward improving its image with Black audiences through a public relations
campaign, and by publishing “guidelines for equitable portrayal of minorities on TV.”
11
The
guidelines focused on representing Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities in a manner that
was not demeaning and that treated the depiction of non-whites with “dignity and civility.”
12
In
service of these efforts to rectify the marginalization of Blacks that had existed in minstrel
theatre, film, and radio during the earlier decades of the twentieth century, Blacks appeared in a
wide variety of roles on local and network programs, as dancers, singers, musicians, comedians,
and actors. Thus, upon first glance, things appeared to be looking up for Black Americans as the
new medium provided a new outlet for Black visibility and a chance at a countering long-
established stereotypes that proliferated within other entertainment spaces.
In actuality, however, progress was marginal at best, as the same corporations that
controlled radio continued to control television. Just as radio frequently cast Blacks in minstrel

9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 3.
11
Ibid., 4.
12
Ibid., 8.

29
roles, the practice persisted on television. In effect, as MacDonald argues “television simply
became visualized radio: the enactment for viewers of storylines and stereotypes that had proven
successful for decades in radio.”
13
Moreover, the three-network structure of television at the time
was one that “offered similar programs for audiences of common tastes and prejudice.”
14

Because “TV executives and advertisers feared alienating the white consumer in the South” they
“avoided programs that might be too flattering or egalitarian towards blacks.”
15
As MacDonald
explains, television executives had “preconceived notions of appropriate roles for blacks on TV,”
which consequently meant that representations of Blacks during the network era tended to fall
within the framework of prior stereotypes. For instance, in two popular programs in the 1950s,
CBS’s Amos ’n’ Andy (1951-1953) and ABC’s Beulah (1950-1952)—both programs that
migrated from radio to television—Blacks were depicted as “happy-go-lucky social
incompetents who knew their plaice” or subservient to white characters.
16
Such representations
of blackness served as “comforting reminders of whites and the ideology of white supremacy
that it served.”
17

Programming in the 1960s reflected the racial ethos of the time, as the civil rights
movement and racial reform throughout the U.S. meant a shift towards combating the
stereotypes of the decades before. For this reason, programs fared marginally better in their
representations of Black characters, offering television shows such as I Spy, an adventure series
that co-starred Bill Cosby as a covert agent, and Julia (1968-1971), a sitcom starring Diahann
Carroll as a single mother who worked as a nurse in a doctor’s office. However, although these
shows did offer representations of blackness that diverged from those of the past, they were

13
Ibid., 7–8.
14
Ibid., 8.
15
Ibid.
16
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 75.
17
Ibid.

30
positioned in a manner designed to be appealing to white viewers. Gray describes this period as
marked by “assimilationist” programming as Black “characters lived and worked in mostly white
worlds where whites dare not notice and blacks dare not acknowledge their blackness.”
18

Ultimately Black American audiences were denied the opportunity to see characters and
narratives that were not stereotypical and demeaning, or that had some resemblance to their lived
social, economic, and cultural lives.
The 1970s saw the appearance of Black-cast sitcoms such as NBC’s Sanford and Son
(1972-1977) and Different Strokes (1978-1986). Whereas the sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s
featured Black and white characters, Black-cast sitcoms were comprised of ensemble casts that
were predominately Black.
19
Such sitcoms appeared in response to “angry calls by different
sectors of the black community for ‘relevant’ and ‘authentic’ images of black people.”
20

Although several of these programs had long runs and aired throughout the 1970s, broadcast
networks did not begin to target programming for Black American audiences in full force until
the middle to late 1980s. It was during this period that commercial network television was
struggling to bring in viewers; cable channels were on the rise and a fourth network, Fox,
emerged in 1986, and further eroded viewership on the “Big Three” networks. Black audiences
began to be viewed and positioned by broadcast networks as a valuable market because they
continued to rely on “free” commercial television while middle-class white Americans

18
Ibid., 76.
19
Throughout this chapter I will use “Black cast sitcoms” as opposed to “Black shows.” The
former is inclusive of programs that did not employ Black cultural themes, but had Black casts.
Zook highlights in her book that Black shows, were Black productions, that often had four
common traits: “autobiography meaning a tendency toward collective and individual authorship
of black experience”; “improvisation, the practice of inventing and ad-libbing unscripted
dialogue or action; aesthetics, a certain pride in visual signifiers of blackness; and drama, a
marked desire for complex characterizations and emotionally challenging subject matter” (5).
20
Ibid., 77.

31
increasingly gained access to cable subscriptions and videocassette recorders,
21
and because
Black viewers watched more television than other racial and ethnic groups.
22
In order to bring in
more viewers, commercial networks borrowed from a strategy implemented within the film
industry during the early 1970s: create content with Black casts that Black viewers will tune in
for.
The Rise of Black-Cast Programs
In the 1970s the film industry turned its interest towards Black American consumers
through the Blaxploitation film genre. At the time, the industry was ailing as television sets in the
home increased and white flight to the suburbs resulted in the abandonment of urban movie
theaters.
23
Black Americans became the go-to market for the industry because, since the 1960s,
more than 65 percent of Blacks lived in urban cities in close proximity to where most theatres
were located.
24
Moreover, in the late 1960s, Blacks “represented nearly 30 percent of the movie
going audience in American cities” although they accounted for “approximately 15 percent of
the U.S. population.”
25
Thus, the film industry’s interest in supplying films that would attract
Black moviegoers during the early 1970s was rooted in the potential to grow attendance of that
demographic.
Similar to television, American film tends to reflect contemporary social realities and
cultural discourses. During the early years of the civil rights movement, Sidney Poitier emerged
as a prominent Black actor and, as Robert Weems Jr. explains:

21
Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television.
22
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness; Brent Zook, Color by Fox:
The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television.
23
Robert E Weems Jr, Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the
Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
24
Ibid., 70.
25
Ibid., 81.

32
Poitier’s carefully crafted ‘respectable Negro’ image had enormous economic
implications. Both white and black moviegoers flocked to his movies, but for
different reasons. For whites, Poitier’s nonthreatening screen personal reassured
them about the implications of racial desegregation. For blacks, Poitier’s roles,
while contrived, represented a welcome relief from earlier, overtly offensive,
African American screen depictions.
26

As the decade came to a close however, an “increasingly militant and black nationalist-oriented
African American population had grown tired [of Poitier’s roles].”
27
Former football star Jim
Brown became the new superstar who “radiated unabashed physical prowess, including
sexuality.”
28
Brown’s popularity amongst Black audiences set the stage for Melvin Van Peebles’
1971 film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, which was “shot in nineteen days, with a budget
of $500,000 [and] grossed more than $10 million within a couple months.”
29
The success of the
film captured the interest of Hollywood studios, and they hoped to replicate its achievements.
Since film, like television is in the business of what Gitlin describes as recombination and
imitation, the proliferation of films that depicted sex, violence, and crime, all designed to appeal
to Black audiences began in great hast.
Hollywood’s interest in producing Blaxploitation films quickly began to wane in the mid-
1970s, however. Weems Jr. identifies three factors that contributed to the demise of the genre.
First, Weems Jr. argues, the novelty of Blaxploitation films wore off and Black American
audiences became more discerning in their tastes. Producers within the film industry were alerted
to this shift when sequels for Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972)—two films that had been highly
successful that the box office—failed to bring in the box office dollars of their predecessors. The
second factor that contributed to the death of the genre was the discovery by Hollywood that
Black Americans would see quality “mainstream” movies like The God Father (1972) and The

26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid., 82.

33
Exorcist (1973). Thirty-five percent on the movie-going audience for each of these films were
Black, indicating to production studios that Blaxploitation films were not the only genre of
interest for Black audiences.
30
The final factor was the realization that Black audiences would
support “mainstream” films that featured Blacks in prominent supporting roles. It was at this
time that Hollywood sensed “yet another profitable trend,” and began to create a number of
“crossover” films, several of which spotlighted comedic actor Richard Pryor.
Although broadcast networks were similarly making use of the tactics employed within
the film industry in their programming of Black cast-sitcoms in the 1970s, there was a more
concerted effort to target Black viewers in the late 1980s as networks began re-defining
audiences, segmenting them into groups based on various social demographics, such as race,
gender, and income, and then tailoring and scheduling programming to meet the perceived tastes
of those audiences. This practice, known as narrowcasting or “niche programming,” was first
experimented with women-oriented shows such as Mary Tyler Moore (1970-1977), Rhonda
(1974-1978), Cagney & Lacey (1982-1988), and Katie & Allie (1984-1989).
31
These shows,
featured white female protagonists and brought discourses of feminism to television in response
to second wave feminist critiques of media representations of women as either child-like damsels
in need of rescue, or devoted housewives whose role was to care for their families. What
emerged was the image of the “new woman”—a “take charge,” single, content woman who do
not need a heterosexual partner to define her identity.
32
Driven by the growth of the single-
woman market, and the desire to reach young, urban viewers with greater disposable income,
networks began programming female audience-oriented sitcoms that drew upon second-wave

30
Ibid., 89.
31
Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television.
32
Rachel Dubrofsky, “Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and Fetishizing of
the Independent Working Woman,” The Communication Review 5 (2002): 265–284.

34
feminism while producing “a version of feminism that [was] a selection, deflection, and
reflection of various available discourses.”
33
Feminism, within the television landscape of the
1970s and onward, was re-articulated in order for viewers to “makes sense” of it and for
networks to profit from its marketability in its new manifestation as a “lifestyle choice.”
34

By the time network television began implementing its strategy of narrowcasting for
Black audiences in the mid to late 1980s, it too was banking on the potential for crossover
success, but took a different approach from that of the film industry in the late 1970s. While the
film industry focused on featuring prominent Black actors in supporting roles opposite of white
leads,
35
networks sought to create shows that had crossover appeal but featured predominately
Black-casts. Such a model was guided by the crossover success of NBC’s The Cosby Show
(1984-1992) a Black cast situation comedy about the lives of an upper-middle class family of
seven who lived in a brownstone in New York City. Created by Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show was
groundbreaking as the first Black-cast sitcom led by a Black showrunner. It is also frequently
considered one of the first Black-cast sitcoms to break away from stereotyped portrayals of
Blacks.
36

In addition to the success of The Cosby Show, Fox’s ability to draw in Black audiences to
its network also motivated the “Big Three” networks’ programming of Black cast sitcoms.
Entering the scene in 1986, Fox set about airing a variety of genres that featured Blacks and
other persons of color, including popular programs like the sketch comedy show, In Living Color

33
Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Cultuture, and the Women’s Movement Since
1970, 49.
34
Ibid.
35
In the late 1980s the film industry’s approach to creating “crossover” films paralleled that of
the television industry. The reason for this new trend was the growing popularity of rap music,
among young whites. The motion picture industry was able to capitalize on whites’ interest in
rap music and draw Black audiences by utilizing rappers within films like Boyz N the Hood and
House Party.
36
Inniss and Feagin, “The Cosby Show: The View From the Black Middle Class.”

35
(1990-1994), the sitcom Martin (1992-1997), and the police drama NY Undercover (1994-1998).
As part of its programming strategy Fox hired screenwriters, producers, and directors of color to
have hands-on creative control in the development of television content. As Krystal Brent Zook
explains, by 1993 the Fox network “was airing the largest single crop of black-produced show in
television history.”
37
For the first time in the history of the television industry, Black television
professionals found a space to develop narratives that emphasized Black culture and aesthetics
were autobiographical in nature, and that depicted the complexities of Black experiences in the
United States.
38
Moreover, such narratives were produced with Black audiences in mind.
Sitcoms were the primary genre where Black Americans received visibility on television;
however, there were instances on both broadcast and cable television in which Blacks held
leading and supporting roles in dramas.
39
Dramas with predominately Black or multiracial casts
often focused on tribulations of families, relationships within Black communities, and the
professional careers of characters. Additionally, such dramas tended to explicitly grapple with
Black social and cultural life, racial politics and relevant social issues.
40
Compared to dramas
with predominately Black casts on broadcast networks, those on cable television, such as
Showtime’s Soul Food, HBO’s The Wire, and Lifetime’s Any Day Now, remained on air for
more than a season. At the time when ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox were implementing
narrowcasting as a strategy they were tepid in their interest in programming multiracial dramas
led by Black actors since they had proven to be incapable of appealing to mainstream viewers.
This is likely because such drama placed an emphasis on the Black subjectivity of characters,

37
Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television, 4.
38
Ibid.
39
See for instance: CBS’s Frank’s Place (1987-1988) and City of Angles (2000), Fox’s Roc
(1991-1994), NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999), Showtime’s Soul Food (2000-
2005), Lifetime’s Any Day Now (1998-2002), and HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008).
40
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness; Jennifer Fuller, “Branding
Blackness on US Cable Television,” Media, Culture & Society 32, no. 2 (March 31, 2010): 285–
305, doi:10.1177/0163443709355611.

36
featured settings, aesthetics, and cultural markers that were unfamiliar to white viewers. As I
shall discuss later in this chapter, Black-cast dramas on cable were able to thrive for the very
reason they had failed on broadcast television because cable channels were able to utilize
discourses of “quality” and “edginess” as a way to generate interest in programs that were active
in their engagement with racial politics and social issues.
Discourses of Post-feminism and Black Feminism

Although Black-cast programs increased during televisions’ period of multi-channel
transition, in the early years few featured Black women as main protagonists.
41
The majority of
Black-cast programs, in general, featured Black men as the central protagonists (e.g. The Cosby
Show, The Fresh Prince, Martin, The Bernie Mac Show, etc.). NBC’s Gimme a Break (1981-
1987) and 227 (1985-1990) were the only sitcoms during the 1980s to represent Black women in
primary roles, while Fox’s Living Single (1993-1998), ABC’s Sister, Sister (1994-1995)
42
and
UPN’s Moesha (1996-2001) were shows in the 1990s that centered on depicting experiences of
Black women. During the 2000s, UPN, which launched in 1995, became the space in which
Black audiences could see Black women represented as leading protagonists through sitcoms like
Eve (2003-2006), The Parkers (1999-2004), and Girlfriends (2000-2008). Some of these sitcoms
were created, written, and produced by Black women,
43
who entered into the industry to develop

41
The network era was marked by even less opportunities to see Black women in roles as lead
protagonists. NBC’s sitcom Julia (1968-1970), which starred Diahann Carroll as a widowed
single mother who worked as a nurse in a doctor’s office, and the networks’ short-lived crime
drama Get Christie Love! (1974), which starred Teresa Graves and a police detective, were the
only programs to feature Black women in lead roles during the 1970s.
42
Sister, Sister moved to the WB network during its second season and remained on the network
until 1999.
43
Some examples of Black women working behind the scenes of television at the time included
Yvette Bowser, who was the creator and showrunner from Living Single; Mara Brock Akil, who
was the creator, writer, and showrunner for Girlfriends; Felicia Henderson, who was writer and
co-executive producer for Moesha and Sister, Sister; Debbie Allen, the director-producer for A
Different World; Meg DeLoatch was the showrunner for Eve.

37
and produce the new wave of programming for Black audiences.
Black women’s presence on television during the early 1990s and 2000s coincides with a
change in pubic conversations about feminism and subsequent representational practices in the
medium and in popular culture more broadly. Discourses of post-feminism emerged in the 1990s
and evolved from Regan-era conservatives’ two-pronged agenda aimed at demonstrating first,
that feminism was no longer needed, and second, that feminism failed to make women happy. As
journalist Susan Faludi highlights in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, at the close
of the twentieth century the perception was that the barricades had fallen; women could enroll at
any university, run for public office, work in traditionally male-dominate occupations, etc. At the
same time, however, these new freedoms were viewed as the cause of much stress and mental
health issues amongst women. Indeed, the ability to choose one’s lifestyle was proving to be
overwhelming for women in U.S. society—or so the rhetoric went. Women were recognizing
that their ambitions to “have it all”—the career, and family—was making them miserable. As
Faludi writes, the prevailing discourse of the 1980s asserted, “Women are unhappy precisely
because they are free. Women are enslaved by their own liberation.”
44
Popular media has, in the
proceeding decades, appropriated some aspects of this Regan-era “backlash” discourse and
combined it with neoliberal and multicultural rhetoric in order to formulate a new a dialogue
centered on discourses of post-feminism.
According to British cultural theorist and feminist media scholar Angela McRobbie,
discourse of post-feminism are used to represent women’s “a double entanglement” with
feminism, whereby “feminism is taken into about in order that it can be understood as having

44
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Three
Rivers Press, 1992), 2.

38
passed away.”
45
Such discourse bespeaks a sensibility or feeling about women’s agency,
empowerment and control that, at the level of the individual, materializes as a form of
feminism.
46
Discourses of post-feminism envelope and appropriate neo-liberal ideas of
“freedom,” “equality,” “individualism,” and “consumerism,” and situate women as female
subjects who are free to embrace their femininity, sexual agency, and economic independence.
Moreover, discourses of post-feminism encourage women to “concentrate on their private lives
and consumer capacities as the sites for self-expression and agency.”
47
McRobbie argues that
post-feminist discourses perpetuate a “new gender regime” in which “popular and political
discourse is repeatedly framed along the lines of female [individualization]. Rather than stressing
collectivity or the concerns of women per se, this replaces feminism with competition, ambition,
meritocracy, [and] self-help.”
48

In television and in film, discourses of post-feminism circulate within representations of
the “new, new woman”—the childless, single, independent woman focused on her professional
career. Such representations often situate women in male dominated workplace environments
and these spaces became sites for presenting and debating feminist discourses.
49
It was during
this time period that biological clock metaphors and representations of anxiety about marriage in
series like Ally McBeal (1997-2002), and Sex and the City (1998-2004) appeared.
50

45
Angela McRobbie, “Beyond Post‐feminism,” Public Policy Research (2011): 179–180,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-540X.2011.00661.x/full.
46
Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of
Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (May 1, 2007): 147–166, doi:10.1177/1367549407075898.
47
Stéphanie Genz, “Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’ and the Dilemma of ‘Having It
All,’” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 1 (2010): 338,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00732.x/full.
48
McRobbie, “Beyond Post‐feminism,” 181.
49
Amanda D. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and
Identifying Postfeminist Attributes,” Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2001): 105–121,
doi:10.1080/14680770120042891.
50
For research that has examined these series, see the following: Bonnie J. Dow, “Ally McBeal,
Lifestyle Feminism, and the Politics of Personal Happiness,” The Communication Review 5, no.

39
Conservatives saw these post-feminist characters as anti-family, and thus, as a response to the
single career professional, an alternative images of female characters as “superwomen,”
emerged. Superwomen were “capable of balancing a successful career and a conventional family
life, with little redistribution of women’s, or men’s traditional responsibilities within the
home.”
51
The “new woman,” the “new, new woman” and the “superwoman,” as Stéphanie
Genez argues, were “built up with the socially and historically specific politics of identity that
circumscribe and delineate the conditions of female subjectivity and agency.”
52

Discourses of post-feminism work in tandem with neoliberalism, which is “a political
discourse about the nature or rule, and a set of practices that facilitate the governing of
individuals at a distance.”
53
Neoliberalism is a mode of governmentality that evokes “common
sense” ideals such as “freedom,” “equality,” “individualism,” “personal responsibility,” and
“self-help” in an effort to produce “self-governing subjects who regulate themselves without the
need for state control or repression.”
54
Neoliberalism, like liberalism, situates the individual

4 (2002): 259–264; Dubrofsky, “Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and
Fetishizing of the Independent Working Woman”; Brenda Cooper, “Unapologetic Women,
‘Comic Men’ and Feminine Spectatorship in David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 18, no. 4 (2001): 416–435; Michele L. Hammers, “Cautionary Tales of
Liberation and Female Professionalism: The Case against Ally McBeal,” Western Journal of
Communication 69, no. 2 (April 2005): 167–182, doi:10.1080/10570310500076890; Laurie
Ouellette, “Victims No More: Postfeminsm, Television, and Ally McBeal,” The Communication
Review 5 (2002): 315–335; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, “Beyond the Backlash: Sex and the
City and Three Feminist Struggles,” Communication Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 9, 2008): 149–
167, doi:10.1080/01463370802026943.Bon; Deborah Jermyn, Sex and the City (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2009); Meredith Nash and Ruby Grant, “Twenty-Something Girls v.
Thirty-Something Sex And The City Women,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 6 (2015): 976–
991, doi:10.1080/14680777.2015.1050596; Penelope Robinson, “Mobilizing Postfeminism:
Young Australian Women Discuss Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives,” Continuum 25,
no. 1 (February 2011): 111–124, doi:10.1080/10304312.2011.538469.
51
Lotz, “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying
Postfeminist Attributes,” 108.
52
Genz, “Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’ and the Dilemma of ‘Having It All,’” 97.
53
Wendy Larner, “Neo-Liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality,” Studies in Political
Economy 63 (2000): 6.
54
Rosalind Gill and Jane Arthurs, “Editors’ Introduction,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 4
(2006): 445, doi:10.1080/14680770600989855.

40
within universalistic terms, that is, devoid of specific racial, gender, or class identities. However,
as Lisa Duggan argues, neoliberalism “was constructed in and through cultural and identity
politics.”
55

Black women-led television programs also surfaced following a period in which Black
women scholars, artists, musicians and writers re-defined feminism and its history in ways that
countered the universalizing narratives of women’s oppression articulated by white feminist
during the second wave. Black feminist scholars such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, for
instance, mapped the history of Black women’s political engagement in the quest to eradicate
sexism and racism since slavery and detailed Black women’s ambivalence about feminism due to
how their concerns and interests were frequently excluded by white feminists.
56
Along with
Davis and hooks, poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde—among others
57
—spoke of the
limitations of a binary understanding of identity and oppression, acknowledging that women are
subject to multiple forms of social categorizations (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, class, etc.) that not only serve as the “ingredients” of personal identity, but also have
material impact and inform their experiences within society.
58

Some Black women were adverse to the very term “feminist” because of its association
with white women’s liberation. Novelist Alice Walker introduced “womanism” as an alternative
term to feminism in the 1980s through her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s
Gardens. Walker derived the term “from the Southern black folk expression of mothers to

55
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 3.
56
Angela Davis, Women, Race, & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983); bell hooks, Ain’t I A
Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981).
57
Smith Barbara Hull, Gloria T, Patricia Bell Scott, ed., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks
Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982); bell hooks,
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); K Crenshaw,
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of
Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299, doi:10.2307/1229039.
58
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984).

41
female children ‘you acting womanish.’”
59
Certain attributes were attached to “womanish girls”:
they “acted in outrageous, courageous, and willful ways, attributes that freed them from the
conventions of long limiting white women. [They] wanted to know more and in greater depth
that what was considered good for them. They were responsible, in charge, and serious.”
60

Walker places Black women’s experiences in opposition to those of white women, positioning
the latter as frivolous, irresponsible and not serious. Thus, womanism distances Black woman
from white women, “yet still raises the issue of gender.”
61

Black women’s inquisitiveness and pursuit of knowledge is central to Walker’s definition
of womanism. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of
Empowerment Patricia Hill Collins discusses both Black women’s quest for wisdom—or,
moreover, their journey toward consciousness—and how they build a collective body of
knowledge through their relationships with music, literature, and other Black women. The
collective body of knowledge, which Collins calls Black feminist thought, derives from the
socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts that have shaped Black women’s common
experiences of oppression in the United States. Black feminist thought is used to undermine and
combat discourses of Black womanhood that manifest in various “controlling images” used to
maintain intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Black feminist thought
manifests several discourses of Black womanhood that on their surface may appear similar to
discourses of feminism and post-feminism, but are instead nuanced in ways that reflect Black
women’s unique experiences and politics. These discourses include: self-definition, self-
valuation and respect, self-reliance and independence, and self, change, and personal

59
Patricia Hill Collins, “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and beyond,” The
Black Scholar 26, no. 1 (1996): 10.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.

42
empowerment.
62

Discourses of Black womanhood that have circulated within controlling images center on
Black women’s labor and work ethic, identities as mothers and caretakers, their sexuality and
sexual behaviors, their relationships with Black men, and the ways in which their temperament
differs from that of white women. Collins explores these elements in her analysis of four
controlling images: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, and the jezebel or hoochie.
The mammy is the oldest controlling image and has its origins in the depiction of Black female
house slaves as “the faithful, obedient domestic servant” who dutifully nurture the white children
under their care.
63
Mammies have been portrayed within literature, film, and television as
completely committed to their jobs, childless themselves, but devoted to the roles as surrogate
mothers and caretakers of the white family’s home. In contrast to the mammy, the matriarch
came to symbolize the “bad” Black mother: those who spent too much time away from home due
to work, thus leaving their children unsupervised and at risk for failure at school. While the
mammy has been represented as submissive, the matriarch is situated as “overly aggressive,
unfeminine” and threatening to Black men’s masculinity and hierarchal status in the home.
64

Like the matriarch, the welfare mother or “welfare queen” is yet another representation of
Black motherhood that serves to ideologically justify Black women’s oppression by painting
them as “bad” mothers. The controlling image of the welfare queen surfaced during President
Ronald Regan’s administration in the 1980s and continues to be used to demonize recipients of
economic aid, especially unwed Black women who are viewed as exploiting the system through
having multiple children and refusing to work. The welfare queen’s lack of work ethic means

62
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment, 10th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).
63
Ibid., 72.
64
Ibid., 75.

43
that her children are not socialized to value hard work and thus she fails to properly provide them
the necessary tools to exist in society as “productive” citizens. By virtue of the lack of a job
and/or income, her moral deviance by having a child or children with no father or husband, and
economic reliance on the U.S. government,
65
the image of poor Black women as welfare queen
became a symbol in the 1980s of what was perceived as wrong with American society and used
to “target social policies designed to shrink the government sector.”
66

The last controlling image Collins examines is that of the jezebel and its contemporary
iteration, the hoochie. The image of the jezebel originated during slavery and was a contrasting
image from that of the mammy; while mammies were depicted as asexual, jezebels were
positioned as having excessive sexual appetites. According to Collins, “Jezebel’s function was to
relegate all Black women to the category of sexually aggressive women, thus providing a
powerful rationale for the widespread sexual assaults by White men.”
67
White slave owners tied
Jezebels, like mammies, to “the economic exploitation inherent in the institution of slavery.”
68

However, in jezebel’s new manifestation via the image of the hoochie, discourses of Black
women’s “deviant” sexualities have been re-crafted by Black men, most prominently through rap
music. Hoochies are portrayed as sexually aggressive Black women who wear “sleazy” clothes
and who seek to attract men with money either for the purpose of a one-night stand or a long-
term relationship in which they can have a child and become financially reliant on the father.
Thus, the hoochie’s motivation for having children is situated as tied to economic needs.
Through Black feminist thought, Black women offer multi-dimensional representations

65
Wahaneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstreals: Ideological War
By Narrative Means,” in Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence
Thomas, and the Social Construction of Reality, ed. Toni Morrision (New York: Pantheon,
1992), 323–363, doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004.
66
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment, 80.
67
Ibid., 81.
68
Ibid., 82.

44
of Black womanhood that articulate the range of their humanity, using literature, music, and film
to confront controlling images, express their experiences and address misogyny and other issues
within the Black community. Sisterhood, romantic relationships, sexual politics, motherhood and
family, and political activism are core themes within the creative works of Black women.
69
The
representations of Black women generated within Black feminist thought depict them as tough,
resilient, independent and empowered; they are often victimized by society at large, and by
Black men, but they are able to find ways to navigate life’s circumstances through self-
discovery, relationships with other women, through family, and via creative expression. Writers
like Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, for instance, offer stories in which Black female
characters grapple with the aftermath of various traumas—including rape, and other forms of
abuse—but find strength and persevere.
70
Through blues and rap music, artists challenged
notions of female sexuality, desire and pleasure, and confronted “the gender politics implicit in
traditional cultural representations of marriage and heterosexual love relationships”
71
by
exposing the problem of domestic violence and other forms of abuse that threatened Black
women’s physical and psychological wellbeing.
72

Self, independence, economic self-sufficiency, and personal empowerment are common
threads within discourses of Black womanhood, feminism, and post-feminism. However, there
are differences. Discovery of self and the ability to define self are situated as important for Black
women’s struggle against internalized racism, sexism, and controlling images. For Black women,

69
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and
Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.
70
See Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicde/When the Rainbow Is
Enuf (New York: Macmillan, 1975); Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1982).
71
Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie
Holiday.
72
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 1994).

45
“the self is not defined as the increased autonomy gained by separating oneself from others.
Instead, self is found in the context of family and community.”
73
Thus, the journey towards self-
discovery and the development of a womanist consciousness is connected to forging complex
personal relationships. Whereas autonomy and economic independence are positioned within
feminist and post-feminist discourses as being able to participate fully in the system of capitalism
where many white women were once denied access, for Black women independence and self-
reliance within Black feminist thought are about both confronting the stigma of Black women’s
reliance on government financial assistance and having the ability to choose their relationships.
Lastly, as represented within Black feminist creative works, personal empowerment is derived
from the power of self-definition and its ability to motivate Black women towards social change.
In other words, personal empowerment for Black women is not solely about freedom of
“choice,” but rather finding and utilizing one’s voice in order to heal the self and enact change
within the Black community.
Black women-led sitcoms during the 1990s and early 2000s emerged within the cultural
milieu of Black feminist, feminist, and post-feminist discourses, but surprisingly few scholars
have interrogated how such discourses manifested in these programs. Besides Living Single,
74

and Smith-Shomade’s brief analysis of Moesha, Black women-led sitcoms have not received
much attention within television or feminist media studies. Neither Bonnie Dow nor Amanda
Lotz, for instance, touch on any Black women-led sitcoms in their explorations of feminist

73
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment, 113.
74
See Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television;
Bambi L. Haggins, “There’s No Place Like Home: The American Dream, African-American
Identity, and the Situation Comedy,” The Velvet Light Trap 43 (1999): 23–36; Smith-Shomade,
Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television.

46
discourses within representations of women in television during the 1990s and early 2000s.
75

Although an in-depth analysis of Black women-led sitcoms and the degree to which they
incorporate Black feminist or womanist discourses or utilize or challenge discourses of post-
feminism is beyond the scope of this dissertation, I want to briefly consider why past and present
Black women-led sitcoms deserve more critical attention and analysis with respect to the
discourses they employ. I posit that it is possible that Black feminist discourses were utilized
within Black women-led sitcoms at the time and in some instances may have been made to
appear congruent with the television industry’s interest in promoting post-feminist
representations of women and girls.
Sitcoms that featured Black teenage girls as the central protagonists, such as Moesha,
One on One and Sister, Sister, may illustrate where the lines between post-feminism,
neoliberalism, and Black feminism blur. Such shows depicted exceptional, young, middle-class
girls who were coming of age in urban environments such as Los Angeles, Baltimore, and
Detroit. They embodied the “can-do” spirit that was prevalent in representations of girls during
the era. According to Anita Harris the “Can-Do” girl is a self-assured, driven, and active
consumer in the free-market economy. The “Can-Do” girl seeks an education, profession, and
delays motherhood all in hopes of obtaining a “consumer lifestyle”
76
The “Can-Do” girl
contrasts with the “At-Risk” girl who is seen as a failure; she lacks drive and indulges in
disordered consumption such as drugs and sex. “At-Risk” girls are presented as those who have
been rendered vulnerable by “living in poverty, in unstable homes, in communities known for

75
Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Cultuture, and the Women’s Movement Since
1970; Lotz, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era.
76
Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge,
2003), 20.

47
violence, drugs, and crime, and so on.”
77
Because of contemporary neoliberal ideals, and a
culture of meritocracy, the “At-Risk” girl is “depicted as having a set of personal limitations that
can be overcome through sufficient effort.”
78

Representations of the “Can-Do” girl were inspired by the rhetoric of “girl power,” which
emerged in the early 1990s “from a countercultural feminist movement called ‘riot grrrl’”
79
but
was re-packaged within mainstream popular media. As part of a countercultural feminist
movement, young women and girls across the United States organized and carved out spaces for
themselves to join together as artists, musicians, writers, etc., to support and empower each
other, and confront issues they faced. Girl power was a rallying cry of sorts to motivate young
women and girls to recognize their self-worth, find and express themselves, and not feel deterred
by efforts to confine them within socially constructed gender roles. The girl power slogan, and
the values it embodied, was quickly appropriated within mainstream culture, first by The Spice
Girls, a five-member British pop group, who positioned themselves as role models and used the
slogan to inspire young girls across the globe. The Spice Girls’ quick rise in popularity meant
that various industries, including the television industry, found a new entry point to reach a
desirable consumer market. The cable television network Nickelodeon for example, became a
key producer of programs that used discourses of girl power to draw in young female viewers.
Through depicting “self-confident, assertive, and intelligent girls”
80
who work through issues
related to body image, popularity, inclusion and perceptions that they lacked the same abilities as
boys, Nickelodeon catered to and capitalized on a market that had been absent from the

77
Ibid., 25.
78
Ibid., 27.
79
Rebecca C. Hains, “Girl Power Goes Pop: The Spice Grils and Market Empowerment,” in
Growing Up With Girl Power: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2012), 13.
80
Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Girls Rule!: Gender, Feminism, and Nickelodeon,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 21, no. 2 (June 2004): 120, doi:10.1080/07393180410001688038.

48
television landscape of children’s programming. The successes of series’ like Clarissa Explains
It All and As Told By Ginger, among others, lead to the proliferation of sitcoms and animated
programs that featured tween and teenage girls as main characters. Tween and teen girls of color
were not absent from this trend of girl power programming, as Black, white, Latino and Asian
girls occupied main roles on popular shows like The Cheetah Girls and That's So Raven.
The Decline of Black-Cast Programs on Commercial Network TV
From the mid-1980s until the late 1990s, the structural transformations occurring within
the television industry constructed and produced Black audiences as instrumental to the
operation of the industry.
81
Black audiences were perceived as an economically viable and
desirable market. Priorities began to shift, however, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. By
the early 2000s, television programs that featured Black casts had virtually disappeared on what
was now the “Big Four” networks. Post-2000, the two smaller networks, The WB network and
UPN—both launched in 1995—were the sole venues for Black programs. These networks
employed Fox’s “Black first, White later” strategy of catering to Black audiences by
programming Black ensemble situation comedies.
82
The CW network, which emerged in 2006
from the merger of The WB and UPN, continued to schedule Black cast situation comedies such
as All of Us (2003-2006) and Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009) until the popular sitcom The
Game was cancelled in 2009.
83
One year earlier the network cancelled Girlfriends, the last
sitcom centered on Black female characters.
The view could be taken that the cancellation of Black cast programs—which were

81
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 57.
82
Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television.
83
Both Everybody Hates Chris and All of Us began as shows on UPN before moving to the CW
Network. The Game was eventually picked up by BET and aired for four additional seasons
beginning in 2011.

49
primarily situation comedies—simply reflects the overall change in direction in television
programming as broadcast networks sought to focus on unscripted or “reality” programming and
hour-long dramas. These genres began their rise to popularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
and in the case of unscripted programming, became cheaper to produce. Broadcast networks
during this time were faced with the challenge not only of competing with each other, but also
grappling with cable networks continued expansion and investment in producing “prestige
programming” or “quality television,” which is often characterized by its “creation by writer-
producers ‘auteurs,’” its sophisticated subject matter, its “emphasis on character development,
structural complexity, reflexivity, aesthetic innovation,” and critical recognition and praise.
84

Moreover, broadcast networks also had to strategically confront the emergence of new
“convenience technologies,” such as digital video recorders (DVR) and video on demand
services, which provided audiences with the ability to bypass advertisements and gave them
more control over when and how they watched television.
85
Commercial broadcast television is
reliant on advertising revenue in order to sustain itself; if it cannot deliver to advertisers a live
viewing audience, then those advertisers will be reluctant to spend their money purchasing ad-
spots for programs. In response to these new technologies, broadcast networks began to once
again favor shows with vast reach in terms of audience appeal; shows that would generate
“water-cooler” buzz to the point that viewers could not miss out on watching a program live.
These aforementioned programming and technological shifts, however, only partially
explain why Black-cast programs began to significantly decline at the turn of the century. The
disappearance of such programs indicates that broadcast networks’ strategy of programming for

84
Susan Brower, “Fans As Taste Makers: Viewers of Quality Television,” in The Adoring
Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992),
164.
85
Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized.

50
Black audiences was an interim business strategy, similar to that employed within the film
industry. The television industry is in the business of producing television content as a
commodity, and thus always has in mind its economic interest. In seeking to fulfill that economic
interest, network executives and advertisers imagine and construct their desired audience based
on “specific qualities—discretionary income, tastes, scarcity, and viewing habits.”
86
In response
to the political economic conditions of the time, and the shifting terrain of television as
competition for viewers grew, Black audiences were constituted as valuable economic subjects,
consumers whose desires and preferences were registered within the structure of the advertiser-
driven system of commercial television.
87

Broadcast networks were willing to take a chance on what would be conceptualized as
“urban” or “diversity” programming because it needed to draw in viewership in an increasingly
competitive television landscape. However, Black audiences were never the ideal economic
subjects. As one ad buyer noted in a press interview, the major networks have no financial
incentive to be more inclusive: “They are reaching the minority audience no matter what, so they
don’t really worry about trying to put minorities on shows. Yes, the shows should be more
representative. But it’s not like networks are in this for the public good. They are in business.”
88

By directing their attention to diversity in programming and employing narrowcasting as a
strategy for Black audiences, networks were denying advertisers the dollars that could have been
generated from programs directed at young, middle-class, white audiences, as few Black cast
shows achieved the crossover success of The Cosby Show. At the close of the twentieth-century,
broadcast networks indicated through scheduling decisions that “diverse programming based on

86
Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 93.
87
Ibid.
88
Greg Braxton, “Minorities Are Missing in New Programs,” The Baltimore Sun, June 1, 1999.

51
racial and ethnic differences [posed] a conflict between [their] political economic interests and
representational responsibility.”
89
The industry of course framed their decision to transition away
from Black programming as reflective of a change in audiences’ tastes. But, which audience?
The answer is, of course, white audiences. White audiences could not seem themselves in Black-
cast sitcoms; they were not visible as cultural subjects in the representations in the same ways as
they had been during the network era. As a result, network executives had to rethink their
strategy.
By the early 2000s there is a sense that white Americans were experiencing a sort of
multicultural fatigue that was brought about by a focus on racial and ethnic difference within
entertainment and others realms. Discourses of multiculturalism frame American society as a
cultural “melting pot” comprised of racial and ethnic groups whose differences should be
embraced and celebrated. Such discourses contrasted with Regan-era exclusionary “us versus
them” tactics that sought to redefine and reclaim American identity in terms meant to create
divisions along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. This strategy of proclaiming
openness to difference was a means of illustrating America’s ideological progress in terms of
attitudes about racial and ethnic minorities. It was in response to decades past when non-white
groups were systematically erased via representation in schools, corporations, government, the
media, etc. But, while multiculturalism was being celebrated on the one hand, it was used on the
other hand as justification to roll back the gains of civil rights legislation in general and
affirmative action policies specifically.
90
Together with discourses of neoliberalism, rhetoric
about America’s multiculturalism sought to demonstrate that society had progressed to the point
that it was inclusive (i.e. not racist, sexist, or xenophobic) and offered equal opportunities for all,

89
Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, 92.
90
Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism.

52
provided they worked hard enough and merited through opportunities.
Given the grievances that Black audiences historically had with radio and film
representations and later with television depictions in the early years of the medium, it is not
surprising that such audiences were constructed within the industry as political subjects:
“audiences that constituted themselves as political entities or […] interest groups” that sought “to
have their interest raised and represented to the industry and the state.”
91
Herman Gray argues
that in the early twenty-first century, Black audiences and other audiences of color were solely
positioned as political subjects—a shift away from their status as economic subjects the decade
prior. The constitution of Black American audiences as political subjects became abundantly
clear in the wake of the rollout of 1999-2000 television season line up, when none of the twenty-
six comedies and dramas introduced featured actors of color. Tom Nunan, then entertainment
president of UPN, was openly critically of the lack of diversity on ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox
saying, “It was a shortsighted approach that they took. When you realize how valuable the
African American audience can be, and also any minority audience, [inclusion] shows respect to
all Americans, not just one demographic group.”
92
Earlier in the year, executives from the
networks had stressed their continued commitment to being inclusive. For instance, NBC’s West
Coast President Scott Sassa commented: “We need to make sure the shows we have on
accurately represent the people viewing. People like to see people like themselves on the air.”
93

However, others reasoned that the lack of diversity in the new shows reflected the best
programming choice given the options, with one industry insider saying about one of the new
dramas with an all-white cast: “We really tried to include more minorities, and we tried them out

91
Ibid.
92
Braxton, “Minorities Are Missing in New Programs.”
93
Ibid.

53
in parts, but there were cases when the person for the part was not a minority. I would tell the
producer, I know what I want for the part, but I know who would be best for the role.”
94

In response to what he described as a “virtual whiteout” during the 1999-2000 season,
Kwesis Mafume, then president of the NAACP, threatened to mobilize a boycott of the Big Four
networks. The advocacy group demanded that the networks make swift changes to be more
inclusive in their programming and in their hiring of persons of color in executive and creative
roles. Although Black audiences were no longer valued as economic subjects, the threat of a
boycott by the NAACP was viewed as potentially damaging to the reputations of the networks
and they were essentially backed into a corner and forced to make some concessions. After a
series of negotiations held in early 2000, the NAACP separately signed a “memorandum of
understanding” with each of the four networks.
95
The memorandums called upon the networks to
make a number of changes including increased hiring of persons of color, creating training,
mentoring, and fellowship programs, and instituting mandatory employee diversity training.
96

ABC, for instance, instituted several development programs under its ABC-Disney Television
Group: it expanded its writing program, which began in 1991, developed a directing program,
and began a casting showcase that seeks out actors from racially and ethnically diverse
backgrounds. The programs and fellowship programs that emerged from these memorandums
were viewed by the NAACP as a step in the right direction and the organization set about

94
Ibid.
95
The negotiations grew out of the Television Diversity Hearings that took place on November
29, 1999 in Los Angeles, California. At the hearings a variety of stakeholders—actors, writers,
producers, activists, union and guild representatives—testified to a panel comprised of NAACP
officials, and coalition partners representing Latino, Native American, and Asian American
communities. Those who testified spoke to the exclusionary practices and procedures in the
industry. Each of the networks was invited to participate but only the CEO of CBS, Leslie
Mooves, gave testimony.
96
The NAACP established the Hollywood Bureau to monitor the implementation of diversity
initiatives amongst the networks and to keep track of progress made within television programs
in terms of inclusivity and quality of depictions of racial and ethnic groups.

54
creating an oversight committee, the NAACP Hollywood Bureau, tasked with monitoring the
issue of diversity and minority employment in the television and film industries.
Overall, however, networks’ diversity and inclusion initiatives—as they are often
called—did, and continue to do, relatively little to increase the presence of people of color
working in the industry, either as on screen talent or as creative professionals working behind the
scenes. As annual reports from the NAACP and the Writers Guild of America have consistently
shown, over the course of the ten years following the signing of the agreement, television has not
become more inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities. In the 2008 NAACP Hollywood Bureau
report for instance, the advocacy group reveals that the ABC network has been inconsistent in its
hiring of Black writers, producers and directors. From seasons spanning from 2000 to 2007, the
network hired anywhere between 6 to 14 Black writers, 7 to 20 Black producers,
97
and 3 to 16
Black directors. Although Black creative professionals comprised more than 50 percent of the
minorities employed at the network, they still represented but a fraction of the content creators
working in an industry dominated by whites.
From 2008-2012 the number of Black actors and creative professionals working in
commercial network television significantly declined. This decline was due to the fact that
Black-cast sitcoms were no longer airing on any of the networks. Black actors, and—as I will
discuss in Chapter 2—Black writers, producers, directors, and showrunners, are frequently
typecast within the television industry and limited to working on programs with Black or multi-
racial casts. Therefore, both Black actors and creative professionals faced difficulty in finding
employment on commercial television. With the decline of Black-cast sitcoms there were shifts
in the location of Black visibility on television—from network to cable—and in genre focus, as

97
During the 2004-2005 season ABC employed 20 Black producers and in the two proceeding
seasons there were less than 10 Black producers working on shows for the network.

55
reality television emerged as a popular genre.
In the 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report, Hunt, Romon and Price found that during the
2011-2012 season, non-white actors played only 5.1 percent of lead roles in comedies and
dramas.
98
Scandal was one of the few dramas that season where 30 percent of the cast featured
actors of color. Additionally, during the same season, just 10 percent of the majority of writing
staffs working on comedies and dramas on network television were racial minorities. In fact, the
only show that had a racially diverse writing staff that was above 35 percent was the Rhimes
helmed Grey’s Anatomy.
99
These numbers point to the limitations of the diversity and inclusion
initiatives and disconnect between what the commercial broadcast networks say about their
efforts to create opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities.
The Transition of Black-Cast Programs to Cable
At the time when commercial broadcast networks were moving away from niche-
programming in general, and Black-cast sitcoms specifically, cable channels began looking to
capitalize on a market that was being abandoned. The industrial discourse of cable differed from
that of broadcast television in the early 2000s as it sought to draw Black and white viewers to ad-
free premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime, and basic-tier channels such as Comedy
Central and Lifetime.
100
In the 1990s, HBO and Showtime began to shift the types of
programming they provided to their audiences. Since their emergence in the 1970s, they had
primarily served as venues for screening theatrically released motion pictures, uninterrupted by

98
Hunt, Ramon, and Price, 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report: Making Sense of the Disconnect.
99
Ibid.
100
Fuller, “Branding Blackness on US Cable Television.”

56
advertising.
101
However, both networks began to develop original series programming in the
1990s, including made-for-cable movies, documentaries, stand-up comedy shows, dramas, and
comedies. By the early 2000s, HBO and Showtime had garnered visibility for producing
critically acclaimed programs that were viewed as uniquely different from the average show
found on broadcast network television.
Cable channels often have more flexibility to focus on television aesthetics, and
production, and take “risks” with the types of narratives or storylines because they are not
beholden to the same ratings system as commercial broadcast television. In fact, cable channels
do not need to reach a large audience in order to be successful, thus they can target a narrow
viewership. Unlike broadcast networks, which rely entirely on advertising revenue to sustain its
programs, premium subscription cable channels do not use advertising at all and basic cable
channels get half their revenue from ads and the other half comes from monthly subscription
fees.
102
For cable, the primary concern is not drawing in live viewership, but instead “attracting
subscribers and keeping them from cancelling.”
103

Broadcast networks had difficulty finding long-term success in minority-led dramas
because they often depicted racial and social issues considered too political for white audiences,
but cable utilized these facets of representation “in order to promote themselves as edgy and
innovative.”
104
Along with Black viewers, cable channels sought to appeal to young, white,
upscale “quality” viewers who were looking for that bell hooks calls the “spice” of difference,

101
Amanda D. Lotz, “If It’s Not TV, What Is It? The Case of U.S. Subscription Television,” in
Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed. Sarah Banet‐Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and
Anthony Freitas (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 85–102.
102
Fuller, “Branding Blackness on US Cable Television.”
103
Ibid., 291.
104
Ibid., 287.

57
and the opportunity to experience difference by way of television.
105
Made-for-cable movies
such as Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and 10,000 Black Men Named George, as well as cable
series like HBO’s The Wire were given “quality” status, which derived from their “historical
content or gritty social realism, high production values and respected actors with significant
crossover appeal.”
106
Quality and blackness as edginess was central to cable channels
programming and branding practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it was also necessary
for channels to avoid ghettoizing their dramas and comedies with Black casts as “Black shows.”
As Jennifer Fuller explains, HBO executives, for example “downplayed the racial specificity of
their programming strategies; even when half of one year's original movies were black-oriented,
their comments focused on the discourse of ‘quality.’ One executive acknowledge that blacks
were a significant portion of the subscriber base, but said many of its original movies 'just
happen to be' black-oriented, and […] were 'inspired more by their historical premise than by
their racial component.’”
107

Basic cable networks such as Black Entertainment Television (BET), Vh1, and Bravo,
also played important roles in developing and broadcasting Black-cast programs following the
decline of such programs on commercial broadcast networks. Reality television competition and
documentary series have been the main genres these aforementioned cable networks have
provided to Black audiences. BET, which had primarily aired music video programs and news
series in its early years as a network, began airing reality television series such as How I’m
Living (2001-2003), College Hill (2004-2009), Baldwin Hills (2007-2007).
108
The reality shows
on BET however, have not had the same longevity as those on Vh1 and Bravo. Vh1 was able to

105
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
106
Ibid.
107
Fuller, “Branding Blackness on US Cable Television,” 295.
108
BET would also serve as the main hub to watch Black-cast sitcoms of the 1980s through to
the 2000s once they were syndicated.

58
capitalize of on the void in Black programming by airing a series of reality matchmaking
competition shows including Flavor of Love (2006), which starred rapper Flavor Flav of Public
Enemy, and its spin-off I Love New York (2007) starring rejected contestant Tiffany “New York”
Pollard. Inspired by the success of Bravo’s Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008--) —the most
popular of the Real Housewives franchise, and the only one that predominately features Black
women—Vh1 began replicating reality programs focused on the marital lives and careers of
Black women and their athlete or rapper husbands (see Basketball Wives, Love & Hip Hop).
The prevalence of Black women on reality television is a source of tension within the
Black community. Although they continue draw millions of viewers, and are ranked in the top
ten primetime shows within Black households, they are often criticized for the ways in which the
replicated controlling images. Although there have been instances where Black Americans have
campaigned against specific series, such as when in 2015 members affiliated with Black
sororities threatened to boycott advertisers for VH1’s Sorority Sisters, a show about the post-
collegiate lives of Black women who attended historically Black colleges and universities,
109
the
genre continues to thrive. However, as I illustrate in Chapter 4, reality television provides a
critical backdrop for discourses about race, gender and sexuality in relation to Black audiences’
discussions, interpretations, and critiques of Black women’s presence in other genres.
Post-Identity Politics and Post-Network Television Programming Practices
Post-network era television programming practices—whether on commercial networks or
on cable—have been greatly informed by discourses of post-identity. As Ralina Joseph explains,
discourses of post-identity utilize “a narrative of progress from a past notion of identity

109
Chandra Thomas Whitfield, “What We Can Learn From VH1’s ‘Sorority Sisters’ Flap,” NBC
News, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/what-we-can-learn-vh1s-sorority-sisters-
flap-n292846.

59
categories as biased, discriminated against, and particular, to a current notion of identity
categories as unbiased, discrimination-free, and universal.”
110
Joseph argues that discourses of
post-identity impact how those who are “different”— especially people of color and women—
are represented, discussed, and understood. Those who are differ perceived as “somehow
magically granted equal status and are therefore given the mandate to set aside historic, structural,
interpersonal, and institutional discrimination, which are imagined to exist exclusively in the past
or paranoia.”
111
As noted earlier, discourses of post-feminism, which are included in post-
identity politics, were packaged within media representations of the 1990s and early 2000s, and
continue into the present. Joined with discourses of post-feminism, beginning in the mid to late
2000s has been “post-race” discourses, which have manifested within post-network era television
practices, programming, and storytelling.
“Post-racial” began to be a salient term used within American media at the time of Barak
Obama’s run for the presidency during the 2008 election.
112
His subsequent election has been
especially important, as it has been perceived and positioned as the harbinger of America’s
“post-racial” era,
113
solidifying a definitive end to racial politics and racism. Moreover, it has
been rationalized that through the success of affirmative action policies, and other legislation,
historically oppressed racial groups have either gained equal social and economic status in
society, or have the ability to do so through hard work.
114
Post-racial discourses aim to submerge
racial categories, purporting that they serve to divide rather than unite. Instead, in post-racial

110
Ralina L. Joseph, “‘Hope Is Finally Making a Comeback’: First Lady Reframed,”
Communication, Culture & Critique 4 (2011): 60, doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01093.x.
111
Ibid., 58.
112
Catherine R Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century
(New York: New York University Press, 2014).
113
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Victor Ray, “When Whites Love A Black Leader: Race Matters in
Obamerica,” Journal of African American Studies 13, no. 2 (2009): 176–183,
doi:10.1007/s12111-008-9073-2; Rogers M. Smith and Desmond S. King, “Barack Obama and
The Future of American Racial Politics,” American Education 6, no. 1 (2009): 25–35.
114
Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism.

60
society where racial inequality is presumed to be at an end,
115
whites in particular, through a
series of carefully selected symbols, rhetorical techniques and code words assert that they are
“color-blind”

as a way to demonstrate their progressive ideologies and willingness to embrace
those who are different.
116

Colorblind racial ideology and discourses are the byproduct of the civil rights-era.
Rooted in assertions that individuals are just individuals, instead of differentiated racial subjects,
colorblindness is premised on the fiction of non-recognition; individuals are asked to forget or
not consider race.
117
Through erasure of the terms of constructs necessary for recalling the past,
colorblind discourses “disconnect the legacy of white supremacy from enduring material
inequality.”
118
Colorblind discourses stress communality and a “universal” humanity, and erase
notions of difference in favor of being able to forge connections based on egalitarian principals.
In the process of this erasure of difference, colorblind racial ideology re-envisions racism as
individual bigotry, and thus a personal issue, rather than indicative of a systemic social issue that
bares social responsibility. As Ashley Doane explains, “in a ‘colorblind’ world, race is most
often (but not always) defined as a characteristic of individuals in a world where racism is no
longer a major factor and race plays no meaningful role in the distribution of resources. In
essence, race is reduced—in theory but not in practice—to another descriptor along the lines of

115
Ralina L. Joseph, “‘Tyra Banks Is Fat’: Reading (Post-)Racism and (Post-)Feminism in the
New Millennium,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 3 (August 2009): 237–254,
doi:10.1080/15295030903015096.
116
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism: How to Talk Nasty About
Blacks Without Sounding ‘Racist,’” Critical Sociology 28, no. 1–2 (2002): 41–64,
doi:10.1177/08969205020280010501.
117
Roopali Mukherjee, “Rhyme and Reason: ‘Post-Race’ and the Politics of Colorblind Racism,”
in The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America, ed. Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E
Turner (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 39–56.
118
Ibid., 40.

61
“tall” or “left-handed.”
119
This view of race as an individual characteristic, Doane asserts, opens
“the door for colorblindness to embrace diversity.”
120

The 1990s and early 2000s were marked by American proclamations of embracing its
multiculturalism. Images of diversity, particularly in terms of racial and ethnic difference, have
been and continue to be carefully crafted by corporations, universities, and media. The visibility
of this diversity has been used support the claim that American society is welcoming of
difference, and that people are no longer targeted on the basis of their racial or ethnic difference.
Doane maintains that colorblind discourses manifest a conflicting phenomenon of “colorblind
diversity,” whereby individuals point to the visibility of persons of color as a way to say, “See,
race no longer matters.” In other words, as Herman Gray explains, “race is visible but
emptied.”
121
Race and diversity, however, is made not to matter only to the extent that persons of
color have assimilated “to white middle-class/upper-class norms.”
122
Thus, the embrace of
diversity rests upon assimilation rather than the recognition of racial difference “as the basis for
collective conceptions of social locations, attachment, belonging, sentiment, and the distribution
of social access to life and death.”
123

Within the current landscape of television in the post-network era, difference and
diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc., are valued, but often
symbolically. That is, difference is desirable to the degree that it can manage to not be too
outside the norm and therefore palatable to white audiences. In terms of programming then, for
both commercial broadcast network and cable channels, there has been a focus on multicultural,

119
Ashley (“Woody”) Doane, “Shades of Colorblindess: Rethinking Racial Ideology in the
United States,” in The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America, ed. Sarah Nilsen
and Sarah E Turner (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 17–18.
120
Ibid., 18.
121
Herman Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2013): 780,
doi:10.1353/aq.2013.0058.
122
Doane, “Shades of Colorblindess: Rethinking Racial Ideology in the United States,” 19.
123
Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” 791.

62
ensemble-cast shows that are “formed around a tight-knit or fatefully intertwined cohort of
ethno-racially diverse characters, with a complex soap-like narrative structure, significant
interracial romance, and sophisticated televisual aesthetic.”
124
These “neo-platoon” shows
recombine difference within a single program, “rather than doling out difference” in the form of
segmenting (e.g. a “Black” show, a “Hispanic” show, an “Asian” show). Within neo-platoon
programs, “people of color are placed on a par with or even a notch above their white cohorts,
both in screen time and in social or occupational standing.”
125
Vincent Brooks suggests that
networks view neo-platoon shows as a more cost-effective way to showcase diversity, as they
can avoid the “genre ‘ghettoization’ stigma” and increase audience appeal in the domestic and
international markets.
126

It is within the context of colorblind racial discourses and their incorporation into the
logic of diversity within television, that the current influx of programs led by Black women
protagonists need to be understood. Although Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Scandal, did not
begin the trend of neo-platoon programs, she has been instrumental in illustrating how lucrative
the genre can be. Rhimes’ first drama for ABC, Grey’s Anatomy, is a series that follows the lives
of surgical interns, residents and attending surgeons at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital.
127

Although prior medical dramas such as NBC’s ER (1994-2009) featured racially and ethnical
diverse ensemble casts, Grey’s Anatomy has been situated as different because of the way in
which casting was executed for the show—through colorblind casting—and because the
characters never acknowledge their diversity. Each successive Shondaland production for ABC

124
Vincent Brook, “Convergent Ethnicity and the Neo-Platoon Show: Recombining Difference
in the Postnetwork Era,” Television & New Media 10, no. 4 (April 2009): 331–353,
doi:10.1177/1527476409334021.
125
Ibid., 341.
126
Ibid., 333.
127
In Season 4 the name of the hospital changed from “Seattle Grace” to “Seattle Grace Mercy
West.”

63
can be classified as neo-platoon dramas, including Private Practice, Scandal, Off The Map
(2011) and How to Get Away With Murder (2014-). Moreover, the majority of post-Scandal
dramas featuring Black women protagonists that air or have aired on other networks, and are not
produced by Rhimes, also adhere to the neo-platoon genre (e.g. Red Band Society, Sleep Hollow,
Extant, etc.).
Conclusion

Throughout this chapter I have sought to illustrate that the current trend in the
proliferation of Black women-led television programs must be viewed as part of an industrial
strategy rooted in a quest for economic gain—via increased live viewership and thus advertising
dollars—and driven both by competition and cultural discourses about inclusivity within
television. Whereas in the late 1980s, “structural transformations in the television industry, as a
cultural institution, constructed and produced black audiences as a key element in the operation
of the industry,”
128
resulting in the proliferation of Black-cast sitcoms into the mid-2000s, in the
post-network era attracting “diverse” audiences through cross-over, neo-platoon shows that
feature diversity in an accessible, non-culturally specific ways seems critical to programming
decisions. The current focus on “diversity” is not tied to conversations about creating
programming for marginalized racial groups or underserved audiences. Instead, discourses of
diversity in and on television are framed within the context of networks’ ideal cultural and
economic subjects, white audiences, who are viewed as increasingly more receptive to shows
with racially and ethnically diverse characters. For the purpose of understanding discourses of
diversity with respect to the proliferation of Black women-led programs specifically, I see this
receptiveness as originating from a shift in public mood with respect to both racial and gender

128
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 125.

64
politics in the United States. Moreover, this focus on programs that feature diversity—rather than
“diversity programming,” which I view as types of programs tailored to the aesthetics and
cultural traditions and interests of specific racial or ethnic groups—is once again tied to changes
in the television landscape; changes that have to do with growing competition, not just from the
continued proliferation of cable channels, but also from the emergence of streaming services
such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, which have begun creating original programming.
Colorblind diversity has become a part of networks’ branding strategy as they seek to
draw in audiences with television content that reflects America’s multiracial and multicultural
composition. Such a strategy works to quail critiques of interest groups that networks are not
actively doing enough to create television programming that accurately reflects the racial and
ethnic diversity in the United States. However, colorblind diversity efforts are often about
quantity and not quality.
129
Diversity is also viewed by some in the industry as a “tool to make
content better,”
130
and “good for ratings and good business.”
131
Thus, when reflecting back on
the optimism voiced by Black female showrunners in the introduction to this dissertation, I am
much more pessimistic—I view the contemporary landscape, marked by Black women as
leading protagonists as a trend that will last so long as it continues to be deemed good business,
rather than important to both the craft of televisual storytelling and the desire to produce content
that is inclusive, culturally specific, yet has resonance for diverse audiences, especially those
who have been historically marginalized.

129
Kristen J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (New York: Routledge,
2015).
130
Daniel Holloway, “Diversity in Primetime: A Work in Progress,” Broadcasting and Cable,
February 2014.
131
Eric Deggens, “Fox Says Diveristy Leads To Good Ratings And Better Business,” NPR,
November 13, 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/11/13/244988218/fox-says-
diversity-leads-to-good-ratings-and-better-business.

65
In the chapter that follows, I examine the ways in which contemporary discourses of race
factor into the politics of representations of Black women showrunners working in the television
industry in the post-network era. I highlight the various ways in which these showrunners have
negotiated, challenged, and in some cases affirmed the industry logic about how race and racial
identity should be constructed within televisual depictions of Black female protagonists. Chapter
2 also illustrates the maneuvers that Black women showrunners are forced to make if they
choose not to adhere to existing colorblind expectations for creating dramas or comedies with
Black women in leading roles.

66
Chapter Two: Black Women Showrunners’ Politics of Representation

In late January 2016 Shonda Rhimes received the Producers Guild’s Norman Lear
Award for Achievement in Television. Rhimes’ tongue-and-cheek acceptance speech, which was
lauded as “rousing,” a “powerful message,” “an amazing speech on diversity,” and simply
“prefect” in press coverage, mocked her positioning in the industry as a trailblazer. The opening
of Rhimes’ speech was tinged with sarcasm as she boasted that she completely deserved the
award for she had “courageously pioneered the art of writing people of color as if they were
human beings.”
1
The implication, of course, is that such a practice is viewed by the industry as
novel and therefore worthy of unique recognition. Rhimes points out that writing female
characters and characters of color that are not one-dimensional stereotypes is not difficult, yet
they continue to be outside of the norm within television. As she explains in her speech, the
tropes used to characterize women and people of color on television are unrealistic: “Women are
smart and strong. They are not sex toys or damsels in distress. People of color are not sassy or
dangerous or wise. And believe me, people of color are never anybody’s sidekick in real life.”
Rhimes also acknowledges the support she received from ABC in decisions she made
around Scandal and other programs she created and/or helmed for the network. She mocks the
notion that she had to prepare for a fight that ultimately never manifested, saying to her
audience: “I fearlessly faced down ABC when they agreed with me that Olivia Pope should be
black. And I raised my sword heroically and then put it down when Paul Lee never fought me
about any of my storytelling choices.”

Rhimes’ comments highlight the freedom she was
afforded to tell the stories she wanted to tell, unhindered by network bureaucracy. At one point in

1
Carita Rizzo, “Shonda Rhimes’s Powerful Message on Receiving Her PGA Award: ‘I Deserve
This,’” Vulture, 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/shonda-rhimes-on-pga-award-i-deserve-
this.html.

67
her delivery, Rhimes questions why it has been so difficult for others to do what she has done,
offering her own response by stating: “I don’t thinking anyone else was asking. I think it had
been a very long time since anybody had thought to or tried. Maybe content creators were afraid,
maybe they had been hitting brick walls, maybe they had their spirits broken. Maybe their
privilege had made them oblivious. Maybe. But for me, I was just being normal.”
Rhimes’ remarks about her experiences with ABC and the freedom she was afforded
by the network appear unique to her. Other Black women showrunners like Mara Brock Akil,
Issae Rae, and Tracy Oliver express the persistent challenges they face and negotiations they
must go through in order to find venues for their creative endeavors. What are the differences
between these women and Rhimes? This chapter explores that question by looking at each of
these women’s experiences working in the television industry, their politics of representation,
and how those politics manifest in the series they create. It is my argument that Rhimes
experiences a certain degree of autonomy from ABC not only because of her reputation as a hit-
maker and revenue generator, but also because she adheres to the industry logic of creating
“accessible diversity” through television programs. I conceptualize accessible diversity as giving
the appearance of inclusivity by casting a group of diverse actors to play roles that do not
originally specify race and then depicting characters that lack awareness of their racialized selves
and the world around them. The erasure of racial awareness, or racial specificity means that non-
white characters are made legible for white audiences as they are framed within the
universalizing terms that have been afforded to whites in Western representations, but also
remain accessible for non-white viewers as such characters can still be read in ways in which
they can identify. Rhimes has become this spokesperson because her politics of representation
are in alignment with the networks’ logic of using diversity as a mechanism to draw in audiences

68
from multiple social and cultural demographics. Because the other Black women showrunners I
discuss in this chapter have a different politics of representation, and have been typecast in
specific ways, they have not been afforded the same creative license or opportunities in the
industry.
I use “politics of representation” both in this chapter and in Chapter 4, but I employ this
concept in different ways. In this chapter politics of representation is related to the politics of
producing or creating representations; the ideological viewpoint of the professionals involved in
the artistic development of a television program.
2
Several scholars have theorized about politics
of representation in ways that differ from how I will discuss the concept here. For instance,
Kobena Mercer and Stuart Hall both discuss politics of representation in connection to Black
British films being made in the 1980s.
3
For Mercer politics of representation manifest in the
burden that is place upon Black British filmmakers to use their works to relay narratives that
simultaneously challenge stereotypical discourses of blackness, while creating something that is
representative or expected to speak for the entire race. Stuart Hall describes politics of
representation in a manner that is connected to the need for criticism of works by Black
filmmakers; a form a criticism that expands beyond the critique of a particular film replicating
“positive” or “negative” stereotypes. Hall views politics of representation as an opening up of a
“continuous critical discourse about themes, about the forms of representations, the subjects of
representation, [and] above all, the regimes of representation.”
4

I find both Mercer and Hall’s conceptualizations of politics of representation useful
and I draw upon both theorists in Chapter 4 in my theoretical positioning of Black fans and anti-

2
In Chapter 4 I discuss the politics of representation as it relates to viewers watching and making
meaning from viewing televisual images.
3
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London:
Routledge, 1994); Hall, “New Ethnicities.”
4
Ibid., 448.

69
fans’ politics of viewing. However, neither Mercer nor Hall speaks directly to the politics that
manifest in the content creators’ rationale for developing a character or their approach to
storytelling. In talking about the creators’ rationale, I do not mean the cultural producers’
creative vision for the content they create, but rather how their own personal politics about race,
gender, etc. are mobilized in their execution of their craft. Thus, I situate politics of
representation here as the guiding principles, ideologies or motivations that undergird content
creators’ creative endeavors and narrative decisions. Such politics manifest in the meanings they
attach to or seek to get across through their characters and/or through their narratives, as well as
the various practices they employ, such as casting. In the case of commercial broadcast television
such politics are of course not divorced from the business imperative of making a product that
will generate advertising revenue and draw in a diverse body of viewers. Therefore, a cultural
producers’ personal politics of representation is entwined with the industrial process.
I begin this chapter by discussing the experiences of Black women working in the
television industry as show creators, directors, producers, and writers, historically. The
experiences of these women have not often been documented outside of press and trade articles.
Besides Gregory Adamo’s African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes, in which he
interviewed Black women and men working in the television industry in the 1990s, Black
women’s experiences as showrunners has not been extensively researched within the academy.
5

Against this history of Black women creative professionals, I examine the politics of
representation and experiences of Rhimes, Brock Akil, Rae and Oliver. These women produce
content within three different televisual spaces in the post-network era landscape: all of Rhimes’
television programs can be found on network television (ABC); Brock Akil’s first drama series

5
Adamo has a chapter in which he interviews three Black female showrunners: Felecia
Henderson (Soul Food), Meg DeLoatch (Eve), and Mara Brock Akil (Girlfriends).

70
appears on cable (BET),
6
but she has past experience in network television working on sitcoms;
and both Rae and Oliver have experience producing content for the web and premium cable as
well.
7
In the last section of this chapter I discuss the ways in which these women’s politics of
representation manifest in the Black women protagonists and in the narratives they create.
Black Women Making Television and Navigating the Industry
As I discussed in Chapter 1, Black Americans have had limited behind-the-scenes roles
as writers, produces, and directors in the television industry prior to the 1980s. Denise and
William Bielby discovered that between 1972 and 1976 there were only “sixty-six minority
writers (mostly African-American)” signed with the Writers Guild of America.
8
This influx of
Black writers working in the industry coincides with the period in which Black cast shows such
as Sanford & Son, The Jeffersons, and Good Times emerged. It is difficult to gauge concretely
the affect Black writers had on these sitcoms as they were created and produced by white men
and still had predominantly white writing staffs. A television writers’ job is to follow the
guidance of a programs’ creator or producer in crafting narratives and characters that fit within
the latter’s’ creative vision for that program. They have little creative control; they must work
collectively with other writers and are not responsible for final approval of storylines.
Showrunners are “executive producers who manage the day-to-day productions of
television programs.”
9
Showrunners outline the precise style for a show—this style establishes “a
particular set of meanings, a range within which writers and directors and actors may work

6
In 2016 Mara Brock Akil left her position as showrunner for Being Mary Jane.
7
Issa Rae is the creator and co-executive producer for the HBO comedy Insecure. Tracy Oliver
worked as a writer on the Starz series Survivor’s Remorse. She is also a film screenwriter,
serving as co-writer for Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016) with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris.
8
Denise D. Bielby and William T. Bielby, “Hollywood Dreams, Harsh Realities: Writing for
Film and Television,” Contexts 1, no. 4 (November 2002): 25, doi:10.1525/ctx.2002.1.4.21.
9
Darnell Hunt, “Black Content, White Control,” in Channeling Blackness: Studies of Television
and Race in America, ed. Darnell Hunt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 294.

71
without tampering with [the showrunners’ creative vision].”
10
Horace Newcomb and Robert
Alley explain that the range of responsibilities for a showrunner depends on their working style,
as they may choose to monitor all aspects of the production process including “the style of the
lighting, the wardrobe planning, the set design, and the make-up or the actors,”
11
or they may
delegate these tasks to others. Each showrunner is responsible for initial approval of story ideas,
and scripts, since it is their job to ensure continuity in the overall narrative development and
consistency in characters. Since writing television is a collective process, the showrunners’
control “is used to translate their personal, individual ideas into television content.”
12
The
showrunners’ control, however, is not without its limitations, as they must navigate relationships
with network executives who have final approval on stories and must constantly weigh concerns
about the business end of television.
Bill Cosby was the first Black creative professional to have creative control of producing
a television program when in 1969 he served as showrunner for The Bill Cosby Show.
13
Debbie
Allen took on the role of director-producer for The Cosby Show spin-off, A Different World in
1989 and became the second Black create professional in charge of a television program. Allen,
an actress, dancer, and choreographer, began as a Broadway and film star. She entered the
television in the early 1980s when she began starring in and serving as co-producer of NBC’s
television series Fame (1982-1987). After her time working on Fame, Cosby brought Allen to
helm A Different World, a sitcom that depicted student life a historically Black college. Allen
replaced Anne Beatts, a white woman who was well known in the industry and thus was granted

10
Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, “The Producer as Artist: Commerical Television,” in
Individuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and Constraint, ed. James S Ettema and D
Charles Whitney (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982), 73.
11
Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium" Conversations with Creators
of American TV (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10.
12
Newcomb and Alley, “The Producer as Artist: Commerical Television,” 75.
13
Yvette Lee Bowers later became the first Black woman showrunner who was a creator-
executive producer like Cobsy had been for his programs.

72
the role of producer for the first season of the show. During Beatts’ tenure, A Different World
floundered; the show failed to authentically depict the lived experiences of Black college
students and instead “presented a harmonious cultural collective” of Black and white students.
14

Cosby had been hands-off when it came to the show, but after Phylicia Rashad made a guest
appearance on A Different World, she reported that the show “was far from quality and that the
cast was disaffected and simply waiting for the series to be canceled.”
15
At Rashad’s urging,
Cosby took interest in what was happening with the program and invited Allen in as a producer.
Allen immediately set about re-imagining A Different World, drawing on her own experiences as
a student at Howard University, a historically Black college located in Washington D.C.
Allen wielded significant control over the creative direction of A Different World,
participating in script development, overseeing post-production, managing the technical crew,
and approving set designs.
16
As Cosby had, Allen brought in other Black American writers,
producers, and editors in order to bring her vision into fruition. Several of these talented creative
professionals Allen added to her team were Black women, including director-producer Neema
Barnette (The Cosby Show, The PJs,), writer-producer Yvette Lee Bowser (Hanging With Mr.
Cooper, Half & Half, Living Single), and director and screenwriter Gina Price-Brythwood (Love
& Basketball). With her team, Allen set about revamping a show that she described as initially
“juvenile and trite” to something that more accurately reflected the nuances of coming of age,
and intellectual, political and sexual growth.
17
She saw A Different World as her “chance to

14
Robin R. Means Coleman and Andre M. Cavalcante, “Two Different Worlds: Television As A
Producer’s Medium,” in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, ed.
Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (Rutgers University Press, 2012), 35.
15
Ibid.
16
Coleman and Cavalcante, “Two Different Worlds: Television As A Producer’s Medium.”
17
Laura B. Randolph, “Debbie Allen On Power, Pain, Passion and Prime Time:
Dancer/Director/Singer/Actress Looks for New Movie, Stage and TV Worlds to Conquer,”
Ebony, March 1991.

73
redefine the logic of the American community in terms of what they see as black.”
18
Ultimately,
Allen was able to produce “a complex and dynamic show reflecting a diverse set of characters
and a broad range of often competing viewpoints, concerns, pressing social issues and
struggles.”
19
Allen presented forms of cultural knowledge and political struggle in ways that
were accessible to both Black and non-Black audiences.
20
Although Allen’s approach to the
show had an education-entertainment quality in which the shows’ audience were taught about
Black history, culturally specific jokes, and practices, there were times when these things were
left unexplained, and thus, according to Coleman and Calvalcante, A Different World “resisted
the impulse to be the ‘Blackness tour guide.’”
21

Allen’s vision for A Different World was not always welcomed, however; at times it
clashed with the corporate structure of the broadcast network and lingering racial antagonisms.
As part of the process of producing a television show, network executives or producers give
“notes”—“suggestions to directors or writes about how to ‘improve’ the direction” of a series.
22

These notes “function as orders about who to cast, how to modify scripts, how to deal with
quality of performance, how to recut a scene or how to revise endings.”
23
In Allen’s case, the
notes she often received about plotlines on A Different World were driven by concerns NBC had
about “doing things that were so topical and controversial, [because] they wanted a show that
didn’t offend [viewers].”
24
When Allen pitched an interracial romance storyline between Marisa
Tomei’s character Maggie, a white woman, and Kadeem Hardison’s character Dwayne, a Black

18
Carla Hall, “Back From A Different World; Director Debbie Allen, Making Each Step Count,”
Washington Post, May 8, 1993.
19
Coleman and Cavalcante, “Two Different Worlds: Television As A Producer’s Medium.”
20
Ibid., 40.
21
Ibid.
22
John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in
Film and Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 216.
23
Ibid., 217.
24
Carla Hall, “Back From A Different World; Director Debbie Allen, Making Each Step Count,”
Washington Post, May 1993.

74
man, NBC rejected the story and went as far as removing Tomei from the series.
25
In another
instance, Allen presented the network with a storyline on the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which
began after a trial jury acquitted four LAPD officers of using excessive force in the beating and
arrest of Rodney King following a high-speed chase. Allen recalls meeting with NBC
Entertainment chief Warren Littlefield who expressed “a lot of discomfort over having white
rioters.” Allen was able to get “Rosanne and Tom Arnold to play the looters. Then [network
executives] were excited.”
26
Allen’s comments about how support for the storyline shifted upon
learning of the guest appearance of two popular white comedic actors at the time illustrates the
ways in which network executives mediated their concerns about the show veering into the genre
of drama; to have just any white actors rioting on screen in a predominately Black cast show
would be too offensive, but bringing in established comedians would undercut the seriousness of
the narrative.
Yvette Lee Bowser, a graduate of Stanford University, began her career as a production
assistant when Cosby brought her on to work on A Different World in 1987. Bowser worked her
way up the ranks, and by the fifth season was a producer on the show. Following A Different
World, Bowser went on to Fox’s Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper where, for a season, she was a writer-
producer. In contrast to A Different World, Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper was a Black-cast sitcom
that was under the direction of primarily white male writers. Bowser says that it was through her
experience on that sitcom that she realized what she would be up against in the industry as she
felt she was frequently dismissed because she was both a woman and Black. She struggled while
working on the show because she wanted to protect images of women and Black Americans but

25
Coleman and Cavalcante, “Two Different Worlds: Television As A Producer’s Medium.”
26
Hall, “Back From A Different World; Director Debbie Allen, Making Each Step Count,” May
1993.

75
felt she was not able to do so.
27
Thus, as she explains, her “first taste of predominately white,
predominately male Hollywood” left her with the impression that if she did not create her own
show she would not last in the business for very long.
28

In 1993 Bowser became the first Black American female showrunner when executives
from Warner Brothers Studio approached her to develop a show for rap artist Queen Latifah and
comedic actress Kim Coles both of whom requested that the studio meet with a least one Black
woman writer.
29
The result was Living Single, a sitcom about six upwardly mobile Black
friends—four women, two men—living and working in New York City.
30
Bowser acknowledges
in a 1996 interview for Ebony that both the studio and Fox were interested in the sitcom because
they saw the potential of capitalizing on Black female audiences after witnessing the success of
the 1992 novel, Waiting to Exhale, written by Terry McMillian.
31
The novel told the story of four
Black women in their 30s who support each other through personal and professional struggles
and triumphs. The four women are successful in their careers but have been unlucky in finding
fulfillment in their relationships with men.
Bowser describes her vision for Living Single as an effort to “depict African Americans
in television in a realistic, humorous way.” She drew upon her own experiences in fashioning her
characters, saying “The beauty of Living Single characters is that they are honest with each other,
as my friends and I are. Maybe not all people interact the same way, but [the show] is about my

27
Michael Schneider, “Yvette Lee Bowser,” Electronic Media, June 30, 1997.
28
Eric Estrin, “Profile: Bowser Beat the System by Becoming a Producer,” Television Week,
2004, 22.
29
Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television.
30
Aldore D. Collier, “Behind the Scenes of Living Single,” Ebony, 1996.
31
The novel Waiting to Exhale was adapted into a film in 1995 an starred Whitney Houston,
Angela Basset, Loretta Devine, Lela Rochon, and others. The film was directed by Forest
Whitaker and grossed $14.1 million in its first weekend of release.

76
life. It's about my friends. It's about people I know."
32
Bowser, who says that she enjoys telling
stories about people who look like her, wanted to create a show the reflected the “ups and downs
of being twenty something.”
33
Black viewers took to the show immediately, making in the most
watched Black cast sitcom in Black households.
34

As Allen had done, Bowser handpicked her team of writers, which consisted of a group
of five Black Americans and four women. She was responsible for selecting ideas for scripts and
at times also designed them herself. Bowser oversaw the taping of the show and then took part in
the editing process. Although Bowser has said did not run into difficulty getting approval from
Fox executives for the shows' episodes,
35
Zook identifies one issue the network originally had
with the series—its name, My Girls. As Zook writes, “the name was changed to Living Single by
network executives in order to avoid what they feared would amount to male alienation. With the
change in name came a whole host of narrative shifts. Contrary to Bowser’s intentions, the show
went from “being a slice-of-life comedy about girlfriends [to a show] about the ‘male quest,’ or
the ‘Fight for Mr. Right’ as one two-part episode was dubbed.”
36
Zooks suggests that the name
change of the show alone re-shifted the narrative focus of Living Single in such a way that the
network undercut Bowser’s creative vision. Nevertheless, Bowser continued to maintain that she
was provided with the opportunity to create characters and relay narratives that were drawn from
her personal experiences as a Black woman.

32
Malaika Brown, “Sisterhood Televised: Yvette Lee Bowser and The Voices She Listens To,”
American Visions, 1995, 42.
33
Collier, “Behind the Scenes of Living Single.”
34
Despite its popularity amongst Black viewers, industry insiders questioned Living Single’s
long-term success since it was unable to attract a white viewing audience. The program ran for
four season before it was dropped by Fox in 1997. However, after fans sent over 8,000 letters to
the network about the cancellation, the series was brought back for one last season.
35
Brown, “Sisterhood Televised: Yvette Lee Bowser and The Voices She Listens To.”
36
Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution of Black Television, 67.

77
Although, like Debbie Allen, Suzanne de Passe was not a showrunner (creator-producer),
she is a prominent Black woman who has worked in the television industry as an executive
producer. De Passe—who is credited with having discovered the Jackson 5 and others—began
her career in 1968 as a booking agent for Motown acts and eventually in 1981 become the
president of Motown Productions, a division of Motown industries responsible for TV, film, and
theatrical projects. De Passe worked as a producer on the Black-cast sitcoms Sister, Sister and
Smart Guy, and two popular mini-series, NBC’s The Temptations and CBS’s Lonesome Dove, an
adaptation of the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by author Larry McMurty. Lonesome Dove won
de Passe extensive recognition in the industry as the mini-series went on to earn seven Emmy’s.
De Passe laments in a 1992 Vogue article that she was often typecast in the industry, saying:
“When I was doing the Motown specials, people said, ‘Well, sure she can do those because she’s
black.’ It wasn’t until Lonesome Dove that it really became apparent that something else was
going on…Every time I do something, it’s not viewed as part of a rather substantial body of
work.”
37

Typecasting is an experience that many Black American writers and producers
encountered in the industry in the 1990s, and it continues in the post-network era. As a result of
typecasting, which often means being hired to work on minority-themed programs, the
employment of Black writers and producers is “extremely vulnerable to the inevitable cycles of
genre popularity.”
38
Throughout the 1990s, Fox, the WB, and UPN provided sustained
opportunities for these writers and producers until these network shifted their programming
strategy from a focus on niche audiences and minority-themed sitcoms, to broad-based

37
Richard Alleman, “Vogue Arts: Television: American Dream Girl,” Vogue, November 1992,
176.
38
Bielby and Bielby, “Hollywood Dreams, Harsh Realities: Writing for Film and Television,”
25.

78
programming. The perception of television executives has been, and continues to be, that Black
writers can only write about Black Americans “while white writers can write about the
experiences of any racial or ethnic minority group.”
39

Typecasting is not the only hurdle Black creative professionals working in television
face. In discussing the challenges of pitching a show, de Passe explains:
[It] is a miracle when any project—black or white—gets made because the
entertainment industry is both complex and extremely competitive. But it's harder
for black creative artists, who more often than not pitch their ideas to mostly
white guys in suits who are not really interested in their ideas, mainly because
they don't understand or can't relate to some of the stories they want to tell. And
it's rare to find a friendly black face among those guys in suits who can help
blacks write who have truly creative and marketable ideas.’
40

De Passe’s comments speak to the struggles faced by Black American creative professionals
both then and now as they lack access or a sustained presence in roles as development and
programing executives.
41
Few Blacks occupied these positions in the 1980s either at broadcast
networks or cable.
42
Network executives have "green-light" authority; they determine the pilots
that get made, with what kind of budget, and by which producers. The role of network
programmers is to “mediate the business relationship between creative personnel employed by
independent production companies and advertisers who bear the costs of distribution.”
43

Programmers are also responsible for make decisions on what productions should be scheduled,
keep in mind what audience is being targeted, and assess whether advertisers will be supportive
of a program. Because Black Americans and people of color in general, lack a sustained presence

39
Ibid.
40
Dates, “Black Women in Charge in Prime Time,” 31.
41
Gregory Adamo finds that with some Black network executives, they struggle rise up the
network hierarchy and thus stay in roles where their power remains limited.
42
See Aldore D. Collier, “Begind the Scenes in Hollywood,” Ebony, August 2006.
43
William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby, “‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized Decision
Making and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development,” American Journal of
Sociology 99, no. 5 (1994): 1290.

79
in these roles, they continue to be marginalized within the industry even when they have creative
power.
Felicia Henderson is a showrunner who benefited from the support of a Black woman
who held a position as a development executive. Henderson began working in the television
industry in the mid-1990s as an apprentice writer on Family Matters, after going through a
NBC’s internship/training program for minorities. Eventually Henderson would work as a writer-
producer on several Black cast programs, including Sister, Sister alongside de Passe, Moesha,
44

the popular coming of age sitcom that starred teen R&B sensation Brandy, and Everybody Hates
Chris, a sitcom that was inspired by the life of comedian Chris Rock. Henderson notes of
instances where, while working on these and other programs, network executives felt that
storylines and characters she pitched were unrealistic, or not believable. In an interview in
Gregory Adamo’s study of Black Americans’ experiences in television, she says that what
people making decisions in the industry “know of Black people is what they have seen on
television.”
45

When Henderson made attempts to find work on programs that did not have Black
casts—specifically Seinfeld and Frasier—the networks were not interested in her.
46
In the late
1990s Henderson found herself limited by the fact that work on Black-oriented sitcoms was on
steep decline. Her agent told her that she needed to pitch ideas that were “multicultural” in nature
or the networks would not be interested. Henderson expressed that she was not against working
on a show with multiracial casts, but took issue with the ways in which diversity was treated in

44
Vida Spears and Sara Finney created Moesha while working on Family Matters and pitched he
show to CBS who liked it, agreed to produce the pilot, but ultimately did not put the program o
its schedule. The program ultimately ended up on the UPN network.
45
Gregory Adamo, African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2010), 47.
46
Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn, “Hot Show Runners: Producers Felicia D. Henderson and Mara
Brock Akil,” Essence, April 2001.

80
television in general, saying: “They don’t want the series to talking about these people are
different … [It is] as if you talk about it, you talk about differences, you still can’t be together …
You have to show those differences and the conflict, yet still be together… No, we just want to
be Black in the White world.”
47
Henderson’s comments speak to the beginning of the shift within
the television—a shift to multicultural diversity on television and colorblind narratives.
After Henderson could not find the types of jobs she wanted in the industry, she enrolled
at the University of California at Los Angeles in order to study directing, hone her writing skills
and acquire a MFA in film. While attending UCLA, Henderson gave a script for a film drama
she was working on to her friend Rose Catherine Pinkney, a Black woman, who, at the time was
Vice President of Comedy at Paramount. Although Henderson was just expecting Pinkney to
provide feedback on her script as a friend and not in her professional capacity, Pinkney took the
script to producers who were looking to adapt the 1997 film Soul Food into a television series.
48

After a series of meetings in which the production company and executives from the premium
cable network Showtime expressed enthusiasm for Henderson’s script and vision for the drama,
Soul Food the television series was green-light and eventually made its premiere in 2000. At that
time, Henderson became the first Black woman to create a dramatic series for American
television, network or cable.
Soul Food, which followed the struggles of a Black American family living in Chicago,
Illinois, was broadcast on Showtime for five seasons. Henderson hoped that Soul Food would
open the door for more dramas that featured Black casts, saying in a 2002 Q&A in Variety, that
there had been too few dramas with Black performers likely because “networks are afraid

47
Adamo, African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes, 89.
48
Ibid.

81
because these types of shows have not been successful” in the past.
49
Although dramas that
featured Black actors such as City of Angels, and Hill Street Blues: Life on the Street were
acclaimed series, they did not achieve the longevity of other dramas with white actors.
Showtime’s willingness to take a risk on a drama like Soul Food is representative of
premium cable networks interest in developing and scheduling “edgy” programs that would
appeal to both Black and white viewers. As discussed in Chapter 1, premium cable channels
became the new spaces in which to see televisual images of blackness after the decline of Black-
cast sitcoms on network television in the late 1990s. In an effort to attract “upscale ‘quality’
viewers and the youth demographic” HBO and Showtime sought to use blackness in order to
cultivate brand identities with transracial appeal.
50
Since cable channels are not reliant on
advertisers, and instead function of subscribers, they have flexibility in terms of the size of the
viewing audience for their programs. As Jennifer Fuller maintains, “cable channels [can] be
more responsive to narrow audiences.”
51
Black Americans in the early 2000s subscribed to both
cable and premium cable channels and watched those channels more than whites; thus, networks
like Showtime were catering to a revenue-generating demographic that had been abandoned by
the broadcast networks.
In contrast to working in network television, Henderson says she felt supported by both
executives at Showtime and Paramount, the production studio for the show. However, while
Henderson says that she experienced more creative freedom and was able to develop characters
in the manner in which she wanted, she felt that the one downside was that more viewers could
not see the show due to the nature of the pay-cable network structure. Nonetheless, Henderson
expressed being proud of having the opportunity to work on a show the resonated not just with

49
“Creative Q&A: Felicia D. Henderson,” Variety, May 27, 2002, 20.
50
Fuller, “Branding Blackness on US Cable Television,” 287.
51
Ibid., 291.

82
Black viewers, but also with white audiences, as they constituted forty percent of viewers for the
series. She viewed the show as appealing to all types of people because it focused on experiences
that all families in America face on a daily basis.
52

For Allen, Bowser, de Passe, and Henderson, having the opportunity to represent Black
characters and cultural experiences was of central importance. Each of these Black women were
operating within the space of television that had finally invited Black content creators to tell
stories that were rooted in those experiences. Through their programs they were able to create
counter-narratives—to directly combat existing perceptions of Black Americans though creating
complex and dynamic characters that challenged the one-dimensional tropes that existed within
the television landscape from its inception. Although these women were able to make great
strides in the industry, they faced unique challenges dealing with network pushed-back against
storylines that could potentially offend white viewers, gendered racism within the space of
writers’ rooms, and struggles simply getting the programs they wanted on the air.
As had been the case in the periods prior to the post-network era, women continue to be
less likely than men to serve as executive producers of prime-time network series, whether on
broadcast or cable.
53
Black women showrunners working on prime-time programs are few and
far between. Allen, Bowser, de Passe, and Henderson’s experiences within television during the
late 1980s throughout the early 2000s raises questions about just how much has changed for
Black women executive producer-creators working in the industry in the post-network era. Do
Black women showrunners today encounter similar challenges in terms of getting their programs

52
“Creative Q&A: Felicia D. Henderson.”
53
Black women’s presence as executive producers on prime-time cable series is not discussed
here. In scripted series—either comedies or dramas—there have been a few women who have
occupied that role including Jada Pinkett Smith on the TNT medical drama HawthoRNe; Queen
Latifah on Vh1’s dramady Single Ladies; and Mona Scott-Young, who is responsible for
producing the reality television series Love & Hip Hop, and Shaunie O’Neil, creator of
Basketball Wives.

83
“green light,” micromanaging from network executives, hostility in the writers’ room, etc.? If
they do not experience these challenges what accounts for the difference in their experiences
working in the industry? If they happen to face any of these challenges, how do they navigate
these obstacles? In the next part of this chapter I address these questions by exploring the
experiences of four Black women working in the industry. I also discuss the politics of
representation of these women and how such politics have either created opportunities or
challenges for them.
Shonda Rhimes’ Politics of Representation: “Normalizing” Television
In press conversations about Scandal during its second season in early 2013, critics and
journalists described race as incidental to the show. Ari Michelson wrote in a Parade Magazine
article about Kerry Washington’s noteworthy role in the series that “Scandal’s wacky scenarios
and steamy Oval Office romance is so over the top it’s easy to forget what’s groundbreaking
about the show: that the 36-year-old actress who plays the lead just happens to be African-
American.”
54
Jezebel columnist Dodai Stewart opines:
One of the best parts about Scandal is that while its cast of characters is diverse,
it's not about race. On Scandal, it doesn't matter if you're black or white or a man
or a woman or straight or gay: It's about your work ethic, your integrity, your
intelligence, your strength, your ability to run with the big dogs. Who would
blame Ms. Rhimes if she didn't want to talk about the blackness of the show?
Scandal's a runaway success not because it's a black show from a black writer but
because it's a great show from a great writer.
55

54
Ari Michelson, “Kerry Washington’s Scandal Role Breaks Rules, Makes History,” Parade,
May 4, 2013, http://parade.com/11185/benjaminsvetkey/kerry-washingtons-scandal-role-breaks-
rules-makes-history/.
55
Dodai Stewart, “ABC: Yes, Black People Are Part of Scandal’s Succes, No, We Don't Want to
Talk About It,” Jezebel, January 18, 2013, http://jezeble.com/5977066/abc-yes-black-people-are-
part-of-scandals-success-no-we-dont-want-to-talk-about-it.

84
Michelson and Stewarts’ remarks embody the interpretive framework that Shonda Rhimes wants
people to use when watching her shows and when discussing her contributions in the industry:
her characters are just characters, not Black or white characters, and she is simply a showrunner,
not a Black woman showrunner. As Rhimes expressed in a 2009 interview for TV Guide, she
finds it scary and disturbing “that people think because you’re somebody of color you have to be
referred to or defined by your race. It doesn't make sense because that’s not how I live my life, or
how most people live their lives.”
56

Shonda Rhimes earned her MFA from the University of Southern California’s School for
the Cinematic Arts and began her career as a film screenwriter. Her first project that was slated
to be produced was a short film she had written called When Willows Touch, but after the lead
actor, Omar Epps, exited the film and Miramax pulled its funding, the film died.
57
Rhimes’ big
break came when she was asked to write the script for HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
(1999), a made-for-television film starring Halle Berry in the title role. This vehicle led to two
other film projects—Crossroads, starring Britney Spears, and Princess Diaries 2: Royal
Entertainment with Ann Hathaway and Julie Andrews.
After the success of these films, Rhimes decided to make the transition from film to
television. Rhimes made this transition in part because she “wanted to write for grownups a little
more because [she] was doing teen girl movies” and she “felt it was clear that on television, [her]
characters grow and change and develop and [can] be incredibly flawed in ways that couldn’t be
in a big studio move at the time.”
58
For her first foray into television in 2003, Rhimes developed
a drama for ABC about four young, sexy female war correspondents “who drank a lot and had a

56
Mickey O’Conner, “The Humanist: Shonda Rhmes Hones in on Ethical, Moral Grey Areas,”
TV Guide, December 7, 2009, http://www.tvguide.com/news/shonda-rhimes-greys-1012879/.
57
Stacy Wilson, “The Quiet Mystery of Shonda Rhimes,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 23,
2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/quiet-mystery-shonda-rhimes-203448.
58
O’Conner, “The Humanist: Shonda Rhmes Hones in on Ethical, Moral Grey Areas.”

85
lot of sex and on a bad day, people died.”
59
The project, however, was ultimately scrapped
because of the political climate brought about by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was not until two
years later that Rhimes saw one of her creations on the small screen: Grey’s Anatomy premiered
in January 2005 as a mid-season replacement program on the ABC network.
In press interviews and awards speeches, and through her casting practices, Rhimes has
been vocal in expressing her politics of representation. One of the primary reasons for her
outspokenness is because she is frequently celebrated for contributing to diversifying television.
The aforementioned incident at the Producers Guild Awards in 2016 was not the first instance
where Rhimes used the platform to discuss the absurdity of being recognized for something that
should simply be a widespread practice in the industry. In 2014, Rhimes and her producing
partner Betsy Beers received a diversity award from the Directors Guild for their efforts in
producing series that feature racially and ethnically diverse casts. In her awards speech Rhimes
lambasted the continued existence of a “diversity” award, saying to those in attendance: “Like,
there’s such a lack of people hiring women and minorities that when somebody does it on a
regular basis, they are given and award. It’s not because of a lack of talent. It’s because of a lack
of access. People hire who they know. If it’s been a white boys club for 70 years, that’s a lot of
white boys hiring one another.”
60
The speech is representative of the way in which Rhimes has
explicitly taken a stance on addressing issues of disparities in the television industry with respect
to women and people of color being employed in onscreen roles and behind the scenes of
television. However, while she has been critical of the lack of access to the industry, she has also
voiced frustration at the entire framing of “diversity” within the industry.

59
Ibid.
60
Jane Lynch, “Divesity in Primetime: A Work in Progress,” Broadcasting and Cable, February
17, 2014.

86
At the Human Rights Campaign Gala in Los Angeles in March 2015, Rhimes once again
addressed the matter of diversity in television, saying:
I get asked a lot by reporters and tweeters why I am so invested in ‘diversity’ on
television. ‘Why is it so important to have diversity on television?’ they say.
‘Why is it so challenging to have diversity?’…I really hate the word ‘diversity.’ It
suggests something…other. As if it is something…special. Or rare…I have a
different word: NORMALIZING. I’m normalizing TV.
61

Rhimes’ takes aim at the entire notion of diversity, arguing that it otherizes and places people of
color outside of the norm. Because the reality is that America is a multiracial and multiethnic
society, she views her role as a storyteller is to reflect that norm instead of the pseudo-reality
painted within television through use of predominately white characters. Rhimes then, is
confronting whiteness as the norm on television, but also challenges the juxtaposition of
“diversity” to whiteness, since to contrast the two is to position the presence of non-whites as not
normal, and thus special, rare, or unique when they are visible on television. Furthermore, from
Rhimes’ point of view, audiences should be able to turn on the television and see characters that
look like them. As she puts it, viewers “should get to turn on the TV and see [their] tribe, see
[their] people, someone like [them] out their existing.” She also says that it is just as important
for viewers to see someone who doesn’t look like them, “Because, perhaps then, they will learn
from them. Perhaps then, they will not isolate them. Marginalize them. Erase them.”
62

In her efforts to “normalize” television, Rhimes has been known to make use of
colorblind casting methods. Colorblind casting or “race-blind casting” emerged in the mid-2000s
as a strategy of casting whereby the network opens auditions for a role to any actress or actor,
regardless of racial or ethnic background. In instances in which colorblind casting is used, the
shows’ showrunner has not specified the race or ethnicity of a character in the writing process.

61
Shonda Rhimes, “‘You Are Not Alone,’” Medium, March 16, 2015,
https://medium.com/thelist/you-are-not-alone-69c1a10515ab#.l57yo6ln.
62
Ibid.

87
As Kristen Warner notes, the perception is that “blindcasting serves as an invisible guide to
selecting the best actors who will naturally reflect the diversity in the United States in terms of
racial difference.”
63
Contemporary television seeks to be more “authentic” in its racial and ethnic
representations, although not by focusing on quality and cultural specificity, but rather on
quantity, that is, the number of racially or ethnically diversity characters on screen.
64
This point
is made clear in ABC’s former president Paul Lee’s remarks at the Television Critics Association
gathering in 2014, where he commented that the television industry was not “there yet” in terms
of reflecting the demographics of America both on screen and behind the scenes. He went on to
express his pride in the fact that his network had a diverse group of executives in charge of
development, programming, and marketing, and criticized shows that lack diversity today saying
that they “actually feel dated, because America doesn’t look like that anymore.”
65
Adam Moore,
the national director for equal employment opportunities and diversity at SAG-AFTRA, made a
similar remark:
Slowly but surely [the broadcast networks] are realizing the dollars and the eyeballs are
coming from an incredibly diverse population. And folks are tired of watching the same-
old, some-old—whether we’re talking about age or gender or ethnicity of LGBT or
disability. Audiences are savvier and are less willing to put up with things that they find
unrealistic or not reflective of the world around them.
66

Both comments by Lee and Moore illustrate how “diversity” within post-network era television
is “often based on demography,”
67
or how “accurately” the racial and ethnic composition of the
cast onscreen parallels the racial and ethnic demographics in American society.

63
Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting.
64
Ibid.
65
Maureen Ryan, “ABC Hearlds Diverse Lineup of Shows at TCA,” Huffington Post, July 15,
2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/15/abc-diversity-tca_n_5589674.html.
66
Lynch, “Divesity in Primetime: A Work in Progress.”
67
Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” 784.

88
Since Grey’s Anatomy, Rhimes has continually discussed her use of colorblind casting. In
an interview in 2006 with Oprah, Rhimes says that with the exception of the character Miranda
Bailey, a strong, non-nonsense general surgeon with a sharp tongue who she envisioned as a
“tiny, adorable blond person with lots of ringlets,”
68
she wrote the script for Grey’s with no
character descriptions or clues as to what anyone should look like.
69
Rhimes says that during the
casing process she and her team read “every color actor for every single part” and that her goal
was to cast the best actors.”
70
She re-iterates this point in 2012 in Essence, saying, “I never write
the race of character in scripts. I just want somebody good and we’ll figure the out the rest
later.”
71
In both instances, Rhimes acknowledges that she was “lucky” because the network did
not object to her approach.
The story that Rhimes’ repeatedly tells about the casting process for Grey’s Anatomy—as
well as for her other programs—is that ABC was in full support of her approach. While Rhimes’
has not voiced that she has experienced any other impediments to casting decision, Amy Long
argues press coverage for the program obfuscated the “actual struggles [Rhimes] encountered in
her attempts to build a racially heterogeneous ensemble in favor of a more harmonious, organic
picture of the casting process.”
72
Long arrives at this conclusion after a comment made by Isaiah
Washington, who starred on Grey's Anatomy for three seasons.
73
Long notes how in an interview
Washington asserts: “Rhimes ‘stood up and took a risk. She said ‘Look, you [talent agencies]
continue just bringing me all blond-haired, blue-eye people. I want to see all actors. You can't

68
Matthew Fogel, “‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Goes Colorblind,” The New York Times, May 8, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/arts/television/08foge.html?_r=1&pagewanted.
69
Oprah Winfrey, “Oprah Talks to Shonda Rhimes,” O Magazine, December 2006,
http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-Greys-Anatomy-Creator-Shonda-Rhimes.
70
Ibid.
71
Lola Ogunnaike, “The Drama Queen,” Essence, March 2012.
72
Amy Long, “Diagnosing Drama: Grey’s Anatomy , Blind Casting, and the Politics of
Representation,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5 (2006): 1068.
73
Washington was forced to leave Grey’s Anatomy at the conclusion of season three after he
made homophobia remarks towards cast member T.R. Knight.

89
tell me all the actors in LA. are blond and blue-eyed.”
74
Washington’s comments indicate that
Rhimes wrestled with talent agencies that, due to a long history of using racial and ethnic
descriptors to indicate that a non-white actor was required for a specific role, presumed the
showrunner was looking for white actors. Aside from Washington’s remarks however, it is
unclear as to whether Rhimes did have to struggle with talent agencies, as she has continually
asserted that the blind-casting process was met with no confrontation.
Rhimes’s politics of representation are also connected to her understanding of television
as a business. As she says, “A television show is a creative endeavor, but it’s also a business.
[…] It’s very smart to be in a place where you’re contributing a lot economically to a network.
That’s what keeps you on the air.”
75
With that acknowledgement in mind, Rhimes’ asserts that
the industry is missing out financially in their slow progress to adapt to the changing social
demographics. In a 2015 interview with Essence magazine, Rhimes asserts that she does not see
the influx of programs that feature Black women and diverse casts on broadcast network
television as a trend, saying: “You can’t ignore what’s happening economically, when you put a
show like Empire on television and its drawing bigger numbers than a show like The Big Bang
Theory. It’s just clear that there is an economic force and the corporations can’t deny that. When
the shows start doing bigger numbers than what they think are going to be their big ten shows, it
becomes really hard to suggest it’s a trend.”
76

In her comments, Rhimes references two programs; the first is CBS’s The Big Bang
Theory (2007- ), a quirky comedy about “four nerdy men and three women who put up with

74
Ibid.
75
Ogunnaike, “The Drama Queen.”
76
Murray, “(Un)Scripted: Five of Our Most Influential Storytellers Gather for One Epic
Conversation,” 88.

90
them.”
77
Featuring a predominately white cast, The Big Bang Theory is the highest rated comedy
on network television.
78
The Big Bang Theory is a rating success story as the sitcom has steadily
grown its audience from averaging just over 8 million viewers a week during its first season to
over 20 million viewers a week by its eight season. The second program Rhimes references is
Fox’s Empire, a predominately Black cast drama that made its debut in 2015. A musical drama
about a hip-hop mogul, his ex-wife and three sons running a family business, Empire has been
recognized for its astronomical ratings success as its audience grew from 9.90 million viewers
upon its premiere to over 17 million viewers for its first season finale episode. Although these
numbers show that Empire has not yet reached the same numbers as The Big Bang Theory, what
Rhimes’ comments suggests is that the ratings for Empire illustrate how a show that features
non-white characters can draw comparable numbers to those that feature predominantly white
casts. In terms of what networks strive for in terms of generating advertising revenue via getting
viewers to tune in and watch their programs live, Rhimes hints that there is a diverse market of
viewers who will willingly consume television shows that represent the diversity of the United
States.
Mara Brock Akil, Issa Rae, and Tracy Oliver: “Black on Purpose”
Rhimes’ perspective on the industry and her politics of representation are markedly
different from Mara Brock Akil, a Northwestern University alum, who began working in the
television industry in the mid-1990s as a writer for the Fox comedy-drama South Central (1994).
Brock Akil worked on several popular sitcoms, including Moesha and the WB’s The Jamie Foxx
Show. Like Rhimes, she has also worked in film as a screenwriter, most notably on the 2012

77
Adam K Raymond, “Why Are 23.4 Million People Watching The Big Bang Theory?,”
Vulture, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/big-bang-theory-ratings.html.
78
The Big Bang Theory is one of the few remaining multi-camera sitcoms shot with a studio
audience.

91
remake of Sparkle. Brock Akil created and served as co-executive producer along with Kelsey
Grammar on two popular UPN and CW sitcoms: Girlfriends and The Game. When Brock Akil
created Girlfriends, a show about four tight-knit Black women living in Los Angles, she joined
her predecessors Yvette Lee Bowser and Felicia Henderson as a pioneering Black female
creator-producer. Similar to Bowser’s autobiographical approach to Living Single, Brock Akil
was able to express her own experiences through Girlfriends, saying of the series, “[it] was my
first expression in the medium, my full voice, and it allowed me to document myself.”
79

Girlfriends was highly successful; it ran for eight seasons and holds the distinction of
being the longest running Black-cast sitcom. However, the success of the show did not mean
Brock Akil did not face obstacles, as she recalls, the network had concerns about whether a
young Black woman “could run a show by herself.” As she says to a Los Angeles Times
journalist in 2002: “I’m hearing this when there are these white guys making million-dollar
deals, and their shows are not making it. Mine is.”
80

Despite the success of Girlfriends, and her second sitcom The Game, which was
cancelled in 2010, Brock Akil has struggled to find venues for her projects. It was not until the
summer of 2013 that she returned to television—this time on cable—with the two-hour long pilot
for Being Mary Jane, a drama series that stars actress Gabrielle Union. The series made history
as BET’s first scripted drama and they had high hopes for its success. Brock Akil says that in
BET she found a network that believed in the project and gave her the space to do what she
wanted with the characters and the narratives. Speaking to the Huffington Post in 2014, Brock
Akil says of her experience working at BET: “I found a place that gets the show, want it and

79
Logan Hill, “Mara Brock Akil and the Audience TV Forgot,” Business Week, April 24, 2014,
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-24/bet-showrunner-mara-brock-akil-and-the-
audience-tv-forgot.
80
Greg Braxton, “She’s Running the Show and She's Heard the Questions,” Los Angeles Times,
2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/dec/01/entertainment/ca-braxtonside1.

92
knows how to support it. I mean they went from zero to 60 in terms of [spending] which is great
for a network just getting started in the scripted game. It’s very important to note that we’re
spending some money and treating it with the quality it deserves in order to tell the story
correctly.”
81

Race and racial identity are central to Brock Akil’s politics of representation. She
encapsulated these politics in 2013 in a moving speech she gave at BET’s Black Girls Rock!
Awards. In her speech, Brock Akil spoke of “being driven by the belief that the human spirit
needs validation” and that Black women often lack such validation. Brock Akil explains that
images are the greatest exports in the United States and asserts that such images are used for
individuals to see themselves, unless those individuals are Black girls. She says, “We walk
around in our home called American and we don’t see our picture hanging on the wall. It’s like
we don’t exist. And when there is an image that resembles us, often times upon closure
inspection, it’s not us.” In the remainder of her speech Brock Akil goes on to describe the
complexities of Black women; that they are strong, brave, bold, trendsetting, as well as lonely,
scared, insecure, and vulnerable. She expressed wanting to see these complexities within
television and film.
Brock Akil strives to tell stories that articulate the full humanity of Black people, which
includes documenting those experiences that result from their racial and gender identities. For
this reason, Brock Akil does not subscribe to the logic of colorblind casting; instead, she creates
characters that are “black on purpose.” In 2015, Brock Akil voiced frustrations with industry
pressure to use colorblind casting, asserting that race and culture provide a roadmap for how she
writes her characters. As she explains: “I don’t know why race and culture would not be

81
Nsenga Burton, “Mara Brock Akil: ‘Being Mary Jane’ Shows Our Full Humanity,” Huffington
Post, January 9, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nsenga-burton/mara-brock-akil-being-
mar_b_4546170.html.

93
important to a character. The problem is when I want to go into a room and be black on purpose,
the chances of me getting the program are nil.”
82
In speaking specifically about Being Mary
Jane, Brock Akil maintains that others tell her the show could be on any network, but she retorts:
“Well, yeah, but when I went to pitch it, nobody wanted it.”
83

Throughout her career, Brock Akil has worked primarily on Black-cast programs on
networks like Fox, The WB, and UPN, which utilized Black programming as a tool to draw in
Black and Latino audiences and then abandoned them in favor of white viewers.
84
Brock Akil’s
accomplishments are often overshadowed by Rhimes who is positioned by the press and other
media organizations as if she is the only Black female showrunner working in the industry. In
commenting on the lack of recognition for her success—as illustrated by her exclusion from the
“machine that creates success” (e.g. talk shows, magazine covers and editorials, billboards,
etc.)—Brock Akil says, “I have not really benefitted from or participated in [them]…not because
I don’t want to.”
85

Whereas Rhimes talks about the freedom she experienced at ABC, and the perception
that networks in general are receptive to shows with Black women in lead roles, or those that
have racially and ethnically diverse casts, Brock Akil highlights the challenges, negotiations, and
sacrifices creative professionals like her face in the television industry, saying:
You’ve got to do a song and dance to get these shows made and sold. Lots of
times, I’m a black woman selling a black show. There’s so much compromise.

82
Adrienne Gaffney, “Being Mary Jane Creator Mara Brock Akil on Her Flawed Heroine, the
Rise of Diverse TV, and Why She Hates Color-Blind Casting,” Vulture, February 3, 2015,
http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/being-mary-jane-mara-brock-akil.html.
83
Ibid.
84
Brock Akil is credited as a writer for two episodes of the ABC network comedy Cougar Town,
which featured an all-white cast.
85
Diana Ozembhoya Eromosele, “This Mara Brock Akil Interview Begs the Question, Who Do
Shonda Rhimes’ Casts Get More Accolades Than Akil's?,” The Root, January 7, 2016,
http://www.theroot.com/blogs/the_grapevine/2016/01/this_mara_brock_akil_interview_begs_the
_question_why_shonda_rhimes_casts.html.

94
What’s a great idea that walks in for whatever reason gets watered down. You’re
so far away from the vision, you don’t even know what to do or which way to
go.
86

Brock Akil’s remarks illustrate the ways in which some Black creative professionals are
pigeonholed in the industry, categorized as “Black” writers or producers pitching “Black” shows
simply because their vision is to prominently feature Black characters or other persons of color
and relay narratives that are cognizant of those characters racialized experiences. Brock Akil is
not the only Black women creative professional in the contemporary television landscape that
has experienced this “boxing” as they attempt to garner support for their programs from
networks, whether broadcast or cable.
Issa Rae and Tracy Oliver, who met when they attended Stanford University, began
working together on the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (ABG), a comedy
that starred Rae as the main protagonist, J, a young, socially awkward woman who worked at a
job she hated. ABG came about as a web series because Rae says she did not see anybody on
television that looked like her, or that she could relate to.
87
In an interview with the Associate
Press, Rae states: “There’s just so many limited archetypes for black females in particular, and
just people of color in general, and it’s frustrating to look at the screen and only be able to relate
to people like Tina Fey or Amy Poehler, people who don’t look like me.”
88
Rae laments: “There
are no quirky black comedies out there.”
89
Originally imagined as an animated series that would

86
Christopher A. Daniel, “‘Being Mary Jane’: Mara Brock Akil Talks Sexual Politics of Black
Shows,” The Burton Wire, 2013, http://theburtonwire.com/tag/mara-brock-akil-interview/.
87
Stacy A. Anderson, “Diverse Web Series Grows Through Social Media,” Associated Press,
September 9, 2011.
88
Ibid.
89
Helena Andrews, “Awkward Black Girl Interview: Issa Rae Talks to The Root,” The Root,
July 6, 2011,
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/07/awkward_black_girl_interview_issa_rae_talks_
to_the_root.html.

95
showcase her talents as a writer, producer, director and actress, Rae switched directions when
she realized that she could not afford to go that route.
90
She called upon several of her friends,
including Oliver and began filming ABG in January of 2011.
Rae and Oliver filmed six episodes before running into challenges financing the series.
However, after receiving offers from people wanting to donate to the show, they began an
official campaign seeking donations from viewers through Kickstarter.com, an online
crowdfunding platform founded in 2009.
91
Through the campaign, Rae and Oliver raised over
$56,000 in order to fund six additional episodes of ABG.
92
For the second season, Rae received
$150,000 from iamOther, a multi-media creative collective launched in 2012 by music producer
and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams.
93
Rae credits social media as playing a prominent role in the
success of the series: “Had it not been for social media, this show just wouldn’t have been what
it is today. I couldn’t have done this 10 years ago.”
94

Rae hoped the success of ABG would enable screenwriters, producers, and directors of
color the opportunities to tell their stories within mainstream television.
95
Both Rae and Oliver
had intentions of packaging ABG as a half-hour comedy for a cable network; however, they soon
realized that there were obstacles in their way. In an essay Oliver pinned for Yahoo News, she
explains how her initial hopes to bring ABG to a mainstream audience were dashed after a

90
Hillary Crosley, “5 Questions for Issa Rae on ’Awkward Black Girl,” Essence, July 26, 2011.
91
Anderson, “Diverse Web Series Grows Through Social Media.”
92
DeNeen L. Brown, “Issa Rae and Her Web Series ‘The Misadventures of Awkward Black
Girl’ Are Rising Stars,” Washington Post, October 4, 2012,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/issa-rae-and-her-web-series-the-
misadventures-of-awkward-black-girl-are-rising-stars/2012/10/01/bf3c04a4-fc2b-11e1-8adc-
499661afe377_story.html.
93
i am Other hosts several other web programs on its YouTube channel, including the style
series OTHERS, the social and political series Stereotypes, and Club Chrissie, a DIY series.
94
Ibid.
95
Anderson, “Diverse Web Series Grows Through Social Media.”

96
frustrating meeting with a television executive. In the meeting Olivier and Rae were told that
they would have to replace the entire cast in order to make the series more mainstream. The
executive also suggested that J be played by “a long haired, fair-skinned actress who looked
more like a model from a rap music video than an awkward black girl.”
96
For Oliver, the
executives’ recommendations “stripped the show of what made it a hit in the first place—its
relatability [sic].” Oliver concludes that the executive did not understand ABG, her and Rae’s
vision for it, or the audience for the series.
Oliver felt that ABG, by virtue of having a dark skin Black American female lead, could
have been transformed into a revolutionary mainstream comedy. For Oliver, the web series had
the potential to be “what The Cosby Show was back in the day—a universal show breaking in
several actors of color in front of the screen and writers and directors of color behind the scenes.
In a perfect world, it could change the perceptions of African-American women at large and fill a
void that’s absent in mainstream media.”
97
However, following the aforementioned meeting,
Oliver found in subsequent encounters in the industry that getting ABG on mainstream television
was not going to be an easy task. In an article written for Cosmopolitan in 2016, Oliver spoke of
being frequently confronted with the question of why she feels “the need to write black
characters so often.”
98
Oliver, who says she takes pride in the fact that she has established
“herself as a voice for stories primarily about black women and other woman of color” and does
not mind being known for that, challenged the executive who asked the question inquiring

96
Tracy Oliver, “‘Awkward Black Girl’ Producer Shares Thoughts on the Web Vs. TV,” Yahoo!
News, November 1, 2011.
97
Ibid.
98
Tracy Oliver, “I Will No Longer Defend My Choice To Write About Black Women,”
Cosmopolitan, February 22, 2016,
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/movies/a53909/tracy-oliver-essay/.

97
whether it was something also asked of white writers.
99

Oliver experienced the pressure to write “mainstream” or white characters, simply
because at the time she was working she had missed the 1990s wave of Black sitcoms, and
Scandal, Empire, and other shows with Black characters in any substantial capacity had not yet
arrived on the scene. Therefore, when she pitched a script about “an ensemble romantic comedy
centered on several black female characters,” networks perceived the idea as risky. Oliver
ultimately went back to writing scripts about Black characters as she felt her attempts to write
other characters was inauthentic and unsatisfying, and did not reflect her unique experiences. She
met resistance in the industry as she was told, “a story about a black ballerina wouldn’t sell, that
a show about and awkward black girl wasn’t mainstream enough.”
100
Oliver’s experience mirrors
that of Henderson decades before when network executives could not see her vision for a plot
line on Moesha because they presumed it did not reflect the “reality” of the Black experience.
Case and point: after Misty Copeland became the first Black principle ballet dancer for American
Ballet Theater in 2015 Oliver’s the script that had been rejected years before was bought by Fox
and put into development as a potential series. Suddenly, a story about Black ballerina was not so
farfetched in a television climate seeking to profit from the visibility of Black women on
television.
Issa Rae has had similar struggles in the industry. In an interview with Vibe, Rae
discussed her concerns about whether she could get a show like ABG on air even though the
experiences of feeling awkward are universal:
We’re all human beings. We all essentially go through the same things when it
comes down to it, so I don’t I think that should limit who watches it. The show
and the concept should be mainstream but I don’t know that Hollywood is ready

99
Ibid.
100
Ibid.

98
to accept an entire Black cast or a predominately multicultural cast as mainstream
and that’s where my problem is.
101

Rae believed that since the television and film industries were not as open to decimating certain
images of blackness that cannot be packaged for mainstream (white) viewers, the best place for
Black creative professionals to turn was online spaces because such venues are relatively free of
gatekeepers. As Rae explained: “I don’t think that going through Hollywood is the best way. I
think that you just need to create content on your own and make it happen for yourself, and then
others will take notice.”
102

Although Rae was not optimistic at the time, the state of the industry significantly
changed post-Scandal. In a 2015 Essence roundtable session with Brock Akil, Rhimes, Debbie
Allen, and film director and screenwriter Ava DuVernay, Rae acknowledges the proliferation of
shows with Black female leads in television but questions whether it is “coming from an
authentic place or if it is coming from a place like, ‘We know this is going to make money
because there has been a model’?” Rhimes, who Rae worked with developing a show that
eventually never materialized, responded that the answer and the reasons behind it do not matter
since what is important is that a role that would have normally gone to a white woman now goes
to a Black woman.
The question raised by Rae points at concern over networks profiting from images of
Black women without a commitment to actually wanting to tell complex stories about Black
womanhood. Rae’s concern is about the commodification for Black women’s image merely for
economic gains. If the purpose of proliferating such images is simply because there has been

101
GangStarrGirl, “V Exclusive: VIBE Gets to Know The Creator of YouTube’s Hit ‘Awkward
Black Girl,’” Vibe, August 4, 2011, http://www.vibe.com/2011/08/v-exclusive-vibe-gets-know-
creator-youtubes-hit-awkward-black-girl/.
102
Kjerstin Johnson, “Young, Awkward, and Black,” Bitch Magazine, November 16, 2011,
https://bitchmedia.org/article/young-awkward-and-black.

99
success in the past, then the visibility of Black women in leading roles is reduced to a trend in the
market; the interest in such visibility is thus contingent on the industries’ view of their
profitability. In contrast to Rae, Rhimes is not too concerned about whether or not what is
happening in the industry is a result of a quest for economic gain. She expresses being of two
minds: It’s racist that networks are suddenly putting Black women in shows in order to get it to
air, but it is about time Black women are given these opportunities. As she says, “If [network
executives are] going to be stupid, let’s use their stupidity.”
103
In other words, Black creative
professionals should exploit the opportunity; seize upon it in a positive way.
The discrepancies in how Rhimes, Brock Akil, and Rae and Oliver describe their
experiences in the industry may be attributed to their different entry points into the institution
and their overall politics of representation as they relate to the role of race in television
storytelling. Rhimes was the only showrunner who had experience working on productions that
featured Black and white casts. For this reason, she was able to avoid being typecast as a writer-
producer who was only capable of working on programs with Black characters. Moreover,
because of her emphasis on a colorblind approach to casting, and her lack of interest in using
race as a focal point in the development of her characters, she has been better able to navigate an
industry that sees diversity as a tool to bring in viewers, but does not want to focus on difference
in experiences as this could potentially be isolating for mainstream audiences and they
(presumably) will not tune in. In comparison to Rhimes, Akil, Rae, and Oliver each got their start
in the industry working on series that featured predominately Black casts, and in the shows they
pitched to network executives they focused on narratives about Black characters. In an industry
that has moved away from Black-cast programming towards shows with multiracial or

103
Murray, “(Un)Scripted: Five of Our Most Influential Storytellers Gather for One Epic
Conversation,” 89.

100
multiethnic casts that again do not centralize narratives on difference, the stories that these three
women want to tell are only welcome in niche cable markets (e.g. BET), or premium networks
such as HBO that continue to seek out “edgy” programming.
A Tale of Three Protagonists: Olivia Pope, Mary Jane Paul, and J

In a 2005 interview with The New York Times, Rhimes comments that she and her friends
do not “sit around and discuss race.” She describes herself and her friends as “post-civil rights,
post-feminist babies, [who] take for granted that we live in a diverse world.”
104
The statements
materialize or are put into practice within Scandal, as Rhimes’ ultimately manifested Olivia Pope
as a post-racial, post-feminist protagonist who embodies her representational politics. Olivia is a
confident, independent, successful woman often called in to save the day. She is not the
conventional heroine, however. Olivia is an anti-heroine; a character who is viewers’ “primary
point of ongoing alignment, but whose behavior and beliefs provoke ambiguous, conflicted, or
negative moral allegiance.”
105
Beginning in the pilot episode Olivia is positioned as a morally
questionable figure when she commands her Associates to destroy evidence of the murder of an
intern. In the same episode, it is revealed that she has been engaged in a long-term extramarital
affair, with President Fitzgerald Grant, who is married and has two children. Moreover,
throughout the seasons Olivia illustrates that she is not above manipulating innocent people in
order to misdirect attention from her clients. Pope—a character that Rhimes says emerged from a
desire to create show that was “steamy a little bit dark, [and] where the morality is murky”
106
—
as an antiheroine is situated within a position frequently occupied by white male characters in the

104
Matthew Fogel, “‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Goes Colorblind,” The New York Times, May 2005.
105
Jason Mittell, ComplexTV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York:
New York University Press, 2015), 142–143.
106
Michelson, “Kerry Washington’s Scandal Role Breaks Rules, Makes History.”

101
post-network era television landscape.
107

Rhimes situates Olivia within a predominantly white political world where none of the
characters take notice of her blackness, and her racial identity—or her gender identity for that
matter—means nothing to those around her. Olivia is simply loved—or hated—by her clients
and those around her, for her skills, which are primarily defined by her ability to handle
situations under pressure and get the desired outcomes. The ways in which Rhimes has crafted
Olivia Pope as a character is representative of the formula she has successfully replicated for
each of her ABC dramas. The components of that formula are as follows: first, feature an
intelligent, strong, yet flawed female character, who viewers can—for the most part—identify
with and want to root for; second, giving that female character an attractive male romantic
partner, who is also flawed; lastly, surrounding that female character with a host of other
characters who are diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, but whose
difference—in terms of race and ethnicity—is made to seem inconsequential to their lived
experiences in Rhimes’ fictional multicultural world. This last component of the Rhimes’
formula is something that she and the network have been able to strategically market to viewers:
representing difference that is yet not too different.

107
Jason Mittell explains that antiheroes are nearly always male and suggests that this is the case
because “there are broader cultural norms at place; men are more likely to be respected and
admired for ruthlessness, self-promotion and the pursuit of success at any cost, while women are
still constructed more as nurturing, selfless, and objects of actions rather than empowered agents
themselves—or when women do embrace powerful agencies, they are often recast as the
comedic ‘unruly woman.’” (150) Antiheroes range in character types, but there are certain key
features to the antihero narratives. First, such narratives feature an “ethnically questionable
character [who] is juxtaposed with more explicitly villainous and unsympathetic characters to
highlight the antihero’s more redeeming qualities.” (143) Secondly, the narratives create
audience alignment or allegiance to an antihero through elaboration; revealing the characters’
backstory, relationships, and interior thoughts, all of which will guide the audience in regarding
them in a more positive light. Mittell argues that one way in which this is done is through
charisma, which helps viewers “overlook the hideousness of many antiheroes, creating a sense of
charm and verve that makes the time spent with them enjoyable, despite their moral
shortcomings and unpleasant behaviors.” (144) Third, the immoral actions of antiheroes prompt
fascination, or viewer intrigue.

102
Rhimes’ personal perspectives on race in relation to her life means that while she is an
advocate of representing Americans’ multicultural world, she often does not want to talk about
race and racial difference, as it relates to how she crafts her characters. For Rhimes, both race
and gender are important, but she feels others spend too much time talking about differences on
the basis of these categories of identity.
108
For instance, Rhimes says in a 2013 The New York
Times Magazine article:
When people who aren’t of color create a show and they have one character of
color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as
‘I’m a black man blah, blah, blah. That’s not how the world works. I’m a black
woman every day, and I’m not confused by that. I’m not worried about that. I
don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman,
because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.
109

Rhimes’ comments parallel those of Suzanne de Passe, who in a 1985 interview with Harper’s
Bazaar had this to say about her lack of preoccupation with her status as a “Black woman with
power”:
I am conscious of it because I’m always reminded of it. But when I get up in the
morning I don’t go, ‘Hi, you black woman you.’ I would like to think of myself as
perhaps being every bit as successful in what I do as Eddie Murphy has been at
the box office. Not that I want anybody forgetting I’m black. But if I’m talking
about a certain script not working, that’s not ‘black me’ or ‘woman me’ saying
what’s wrong; its someone who knows her business and know what it takes to
make a good script.
110

De Passee further reiterated her point in Vogue in 1992, saying: “If I had to come to work every
day under the burden of being a black and a woman, I wouldn’t be able to get out of the car. I
just think that at a certain level you have got to put your labels aside and just do the work.”
111

108
Lacey Rose and Mary Rozzi, “Hollywood’s Most Powerful Black, Female Showrunner,”
Hollword Reporter, October 14, 2014.
109
Willa Paskin, “Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?,”
New York Times Magazine, May 9, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/shonda-rhimes.html?pagewanted=all.
110
Miles Beller, “Making Motown’s Movies: Suzanne de Passe,” Harper’s Bazaar, September
1985, 466.
111
Alleman, “Vogue Arts: Television: American Dream Girl.”

103
Rhimes takes the view that within the contemporary television landscape, she does not
have to be the type of showrunner who explicitly highlights characters’ racial difference, saying
in a 2009 interview in TV Guide: “A lot of other people older than me fought very hard so that I
could get to write a television show and let people just be people. We don’t have a black
character on the show and just talk about it all the time that they’re black, or they have these
shoes because they’re black. Characters just get to be characters.”
112
In Rhimes’ remarks she
situates herself as a creative professional who no longer has to fight the battles once fought by
those before her. She seems to indicates that she benefits from the freedom gained from
predecessors who made it possible for her to write the characters she wants, how she wants, thus
once again suggesting that the industry is now accommodating to creative professionals like her.
Rhimes’ comments about letting “people just be people” and the assertion that “Characters just
get to be characters” are also important and in many ways connected to her comments discussed
earlier about normalizing television.
In White, Richard Dyer notes how race is something that is often only applied to non-
white people, leaving white people as not racially seen and named, and thus privileged by their
“function as a human norm.”
113
As Dyer writes:
[I]n Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately
predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all are place as the
norm, the ordinary, the standard…Yet precisely because of this and their placing
as norm the seem to not be represented to themselves as whites but also people
who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled. At the level of racial
representation in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the
human race.
114

White people are allowed to be, or are seen as “just people” and as a consequence persons of
color are situated as “something else.” Therefore, Rhimes, as with her dismissal of “diversity” in

112
Ibid.
113
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.
114
Dyer, White.

104
favor of using “normal” to describe her commitment to being inclusive on her shows, uses “just
people” as a way to normalize racial and ethnic difference; that is, she seeks to make it not
different. This approach can be understood in two ways. First, Rhimes can be viewed as situating
herself within the colorblind or post-racial logic of post-network television, which is
characterized by broadcasting shows with characters that allow audiences to see past cultural
specificity in order to find commonalities.
115
Secondly, Rhimes’ perspective can be understood
as an attempt to not acknowledge cultural specificity and difference so that it just exists as is
without intense scrutiny or recognition. If the latter is the case, I find it to be an interesting
strategy. Cultural, or racial specificity reflects the complexities of the experiences of racial and
ethnic groups at the moment and “adds those details [that enable] characters to become more
than types.”
116
Differences should be recognized—they simply do not need to then become the
basis upon which people are marginalized in society or stereotypes within television.
For Mara Brock Akil, Issae Rae, and Tracy Oliver, getting across the humanity of their
characters is also important. However, in contrast to Rhimes, they seek to grapple with the
unique challenges and experiences of Black people through their characters and highlight
personal, professional, and family issues that may be universally relatable. Brock Akil for
instance, describes Being Mary Jane as a show about a “specific black woman and her
experience” but says that many of the things she does through is universal to all women.
117
Being
Mary Jane’s protagonist Mary Jane Paul is a young 30-something, middle-class cable news
anchor working in Atlanta, Georgia. She has a highly successful professional career, but she

115
Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting.
116
Ibid.
117
Greg Braxton, “BET Seeks to Broaden Audience with Its First Scripted Drama, ‘Being Mary
Jane,’” Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2014,
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/03/entertainment/la-et-st-preview-being-mary-jane-
20140105.

105
faces problems in her dating life and with her family. She has anxiety about her marriage
prospects and the fact that the clock is ticking on barring children. In the first season of the
series, Mary Jane finds out that the man she has been dating is married, but his marital status is
only a temporary issue; she continues her relationship with him until he returns to his wife later
in the season. An ex-boyfriend who she continues to have feelings for drifts in and out of her life,
causing her to second guess her decisions. Mary Jane also bares the weight of her family; she is
the most successful and is often called in to mediate the problems of her siblings, who are either
battling addiction and unable to care for their children, or without a stable job and have turned to
illegal means of acquiring income.
Brock Akil see’s Mary Jane as a beautifully flawed character who makes some terrible
decisions. Mary Jane’s flaws are part of her effort to expand the humanity and depth Black
women characters on television. Brock Akil recognizes what is at stake in presenting a character
whose flaws may rub viewers, particularly Black viewers, the wrong way, stating in Vulture in
2015:
Oftentimes the African-American audience will ask for a positive image because so much
of the stereotype has been what gets in the landscape of our images. They want to
counteract that with a positive image, but I personally believe strongly that the positive
image is just as damaging as the negative image. Humanity does not exit in those polar
extremes. One day you can be both good and bad. Your intentions can be good, your
actions can be bad. Oftentimes you’ll see Mary Jane doing a good deed but frustrated and
agitated in the doing.
118

Brock Akil attempt to create a multidimensional character does not include erasures of her
intersecting racial and gender identities. Brock Akil creates a world in which Black female
friends surround Mary Jane. Professionals in various fields, these Black women struggle with
multiple demons, including dealing with depression. They frequently gather to share their

118
Gaffney, “Being Mary Jane Creator Mara Brock Akil on Her Flawed Heroine, the Rise of
Diverse TV, and Why She Hates Color-Blind Casting.”

106
encounters in the world as Black woman; that is, as seen by others as Black women. Although
the nature of some of the issues they discuss may be universal, or relatable to women of different
racial or ethnic groups, Brock Akil does not avoid situating these Black female characters as
Black women.
Rae’s protagonist J from ABG, and the characters around her are also fashioned in ways
that are culturally specific, but framed through a strategy that seeks to make the cast relatable to
multiple audiences. Diversity was an important element that Rae wanted to feature on ABG
because it is something that reflects her own life experience.
119
Actor Andrew James, who played
the role of A, J’s awkward co-worker, says that through ABG “Issa is telling universal stories
with characters we’re not used to seeing. I believe black people and nonblack people are
yearning for these characters without even realizing it.”
120
Rae describes feeling awkward as “a
very human element,” which is why she believes that “so many people relate to J, despite the fact
that she is black.”
121

The episode “White Date,” illustrates how Rae tells a universal story about two people
preparing for the first date, but nuances it through grappling with perceptions and assumptions
about racial differences. In the episode, J prepares for a date with “white” Jay. She asks her best
friend CeCe—an Indian woman with interracial dating experience—for advice on how to
prepare. CeCe, who is excited for J’s first “white date,” draws upon a number of stereotypes
about white men in order to help J select the appropriate outfit for a casual dinner date: gym
clothes. Once J arrives for her date, she discovers that she is under dressed and instead of the

119
Anderson, “Diverse Web Series Grows Through Social Media.”
120
Helena Andrews, “Awkward Black Girl Interview: Issa Rae Talks to The Root,” The Root,
July 2011.
121
Brown, “Issa Rae and Her Web Series ‘The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl’ Are
Rising Stars.”

107
sushi she was expecting, Jay takes her to a fried chicken restaurant where she runs into her ex-
boyfriend who dumped her because she cut her hair into an short afro. J and Jay sit awkwardly at
the restaurant until they move on to the next part of the date: attending a spoken word poetry
event. Through a voice over the audience learns that J hates spoken word, but she attempts to sit
through it anyway. The two eventually leave in a hurry after one of the poets points out the
presence of J and Jay as in interracial couple surrounded by a sea of Black people, and uses it as
part of her poem. When the two arrive outside J asks why Jay planned the date the way he did
and he questions why she did not make an effort to dress up. They both come to realize that they
had certain assumptions about what the other person would like based on their racial identities.
In the end they find that they have similar tastes and thus were not so different.
Brock Akil and Rae demonstrate that series can have racially aware Black characters and
still articulate universal themes that will likely resonate with multiple audiences. However,
because these women’s works are frank in their “race talk” they are not viewed in the same way
as Rhimes’ programs. What this illustrates is the limitations of the current trend of Black
women-led series: only shows that minimize characters’ racial identities have an opportunity to
be presented to mainstream audiences. Those that do not follow the industry logic of accessible
diversity must find alternative spaces, either on the web or on niche cable markets.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter I have explored the politics of representation and individual
experiences of four Black women creative professionals working within various avenues of post-
network television. I have illustrated the ways in which these experiences and politics are similar
to or diverge from each other, and how they connect to those Black women who were working in
the industry during the height of Black cast sitcoms in the 1990s and early 2000s. The woman I

108
have discussed in this chapter—Rhimes, Brock Akil, Rae and Oliver—have achieved different
degrees of success in their careers. The point I want to make with regard to these women’s’
politics of representation and the role such politics play in the types of characters they develop
and how they are seen by network executives in broadcast and cable television is this: if creator-
producers of color want to have a place to make television for broader audiences they have to
tiptoe “around the peripheries of blackness” in order to achieve mainstream acceptance.
122
In
other words, they must create Black characters, or characters of color in general, that are
accessible—that is, devoid of racial specificity. If creator-producers of color are willing to forego
mainstream audiences, they will likely find opportunities of niche cable channels, or premium
cable networks that continue to be open to “edgy” content (i.e. representations of blackness).
Rhimes reputation and her politics of representation, which are rooted in colorblind diversity
discourses—even as she eschews diversity as a term—have made her marketable and profitable
brand for ABC. The network is able to present Rhimes as the face of the network, and in so
doing, highlight their commitment towards being inclusive in giving access to people of color
and women both behind the scenes and on screen. ABC also demonstrates, via Rhimes’ success,
that crossover television is once again possible.
Maryann Erigha describes crossover television as “an effort to appear racially non-
threatening, especially to middle-class white audiences.” It “submerges race in the televisual
landscape, thereby obscuring the presence of race or the persistence of racial inequality.”
123

Characters within crossover television programs are often immersed in white environment and
“lack cultural markers—such as vernacular, diction, fashion, hairstyles, extended family, or

122
Maryann Erigha, “Rhimes, Scandal, and the Politics of Crossing Over,” The Black Scholar:
Journal of Black Studies and Research 45, no. 1 (2015): 10,
doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.997598.
123
Ibid., 11.

109
accompanying traditions associated with kin folk.”
124
In contrast to Rhimes, Black creators for
shows that engage the racial identities of their characters “are exiled from mainstream markets
and push to the margins in specialty markets,” for example BET, OWN, TV One, and Centric, all
cable channels that either predominately or solely broadcast programs for Black audiences.
Erigha asserts, “Mainstream television appears to accept one version of black life—crossover
blackness—but not diversity of blackness.”
125
What Rhimes’ success means then is that “the
possibility for black women to enter the mainstream only exists if they limit blackness on
screen.”
126

Rhimes’ television shows are “not too far removed from the preconditions of success for
black creative workers at major media organizations: namely, ‘be black but not too black.’”
127

Rhimes is lauded within the industry, and amongst audiences, because she is able to
accommodate each of these stakeholders: for network executives and advertisers, she features
multiracial casts on her shows in such a way that attracts a broad audience; for audiences, she
provides opportunities for viewers to see characters who look like them, which, given the history
of invisibility of people of color on television, is a feat to be celebrated. However, what is also
key is how Rhimes positions characters in the worlds she creates on television; that is, how she
normalizes her characters in her attempts to undercut actually seeing the diversity that exists on
her programs. Black creative workers like Brock Akil, Oliver, and Rae instead are type cast as
screenwriters who write “Black characters” that are inaccessible for mainstream audiences, and
they thus struggle have access to network or cable venues to tell the stories they want to tell.
And added issue is that there is a long-standing assertion amongst primarily white

124
Ibid.
125
Ibid., 14.
126
Ibid., 13.
127
Ibid., 11.

110
network executives and production studios that scripts featuring Black cultural themes, or films
and television shows that feature Black people in leading roles, have limited appeal in overseas
markets.
128
In addition to achieving a network run of three to four seasons in order to ensure that
enough episodes are produced to make a series profitable in syndication,
129
those within the
television industry increasingly make decisions about investments in programs based on
assumptions about their ability to generate revenue from syndication and licensing rights abroad.
As a result networks and production studios are unlikely to green-light programs that do not have
“crossover” appeal. Despite efforts the be inclusive in terms of gender, race, an sexual
orientation on screen, this push towards shows that have crossover potential is increasingly
important in the post-network era, as broadcast and cable networks have to compete with online
subscriptions services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu who are further eroding audience
viewership by producing original programming instead of just distributing content that is created
by the networks.
I find myself conflicted about Rhimes’ politics of representation and her approach to both
the casting and to character development. In some ways I see her politics of representation as
subversive. Through her casting methods she directly challenges the institutionalized norm,
essentially highlighting the implicit bias that exists in presuming that a character in a script that
is not described in ways that point to their race or ethnicity racially or is automatically white. I
also applaud Rhimes’ aims to dismantle the entire notion of “diversity”—it is an overused term
that now has a negative connotation. People of color should be understood as also the norm and
not other. At the same time, however, differences in experiences that materialize as a result of
racial identity should not be erased. This is where I am inclined to disagree with Rhimes. It is my

128
Havens, Black Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe.
129
Bielby and Bielby, “‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized Decision Making and the Rhetoric
of Network Prime-Time Program Development.”

111
view that Rhimes envisions an ideal, race-less, or race-neutral world, one that is very much
informed by her own relationship to how she utilizes racial and gender categories in her own life,
and her own experiences of not feeling marginalized, or oppressed based on her identity as a
Black woman. Rhimes’ does not interrogate the fact that her ideal, race-less, or race-neutral
world, means to manifest characters of color within normative discourses of whiteness. It is not
that the differences, or the racial specificity of characters of color are normalized, but rather they
are erased so that they can become “normal”—a privilege afforded whites within representations.
To be clear, through my critique of Rhimes’ strategies for casting and her development of
Pope as a character I do not mean to suggest that there is “correct” way in which to represent
blackness on television; to do so would be to essentialize blackness and proclaim that there are
definitive, and measurable qualities or characteristics that need to be visible to mark her as a
Black woman. Instead, I go back to Warner’s discussion about racial specificity, which I view as
characters’ awareness of themselves as racalized subjects. I view these awareness as a feature
that is especially important within fictionalizes dramas, since although there may be significant
narrative elements that highlight the fact that “yes, this is a television show,” it also is a genre
that operates in the realm of reality. As such, the removal of characters’ racial awareness
manifests a fiction that is difficult to reconcile with what is happening in the real world in terms
of how race categories and racial identity shape the daily interactions and experiences of people.

112
Chapter Three: The Online Promotion of Scandal and the Harnessing of Black Fans’
Labor

Scandal is often referred to as the show that Twitter built. The program was not an
immediate hit; an average of 7 million viewers tuned in to the program each week for its brief
seven-episode first season. By industry standards, those numbers are lackluster. If a series fails to
deliver a sizable audience, especially amongst the desired 18-49 demographic, it will be seen as
unprofitable for the network and advertisers. However, Scandal was renewed for a second
season. Why did the program get a second chance? There are two probable reasons. First, ABC
likely banked on Rhimes to turn the show around and bring in more viewers. Rhimes’ two other
shows had been extremely profitable for the network. Grey’s Anatomy was in its eighth season
when Scandal premiered and was ABC’s highest rated drama amongst the desired demographic
audience. Moreover, the program brought in over $200,000 in revenue per 30-second
advertisement each episode. Rhimes’ second medical drama, Private Practice—a Grey’s
Anatomy spin-off—secured nearly $130,000 per 30-second ad.
1
Thus, despite not amassing the
same number of viewers as Rhimes’ other programs in its first season, Scandal got a second
chance likely because of Rhimes’ reputation as a revenue generator for the network.
The second likely reason the program got a second season has to do with what executives
at ABC and the cast began to take notice of with respect to viewers on social media: those
viewers who loved the program also loved to talk about it online, especially on Twitter. The
network took a chance on using the micro-blogging platform to bolster interest in the show,
essentially relying on word-of-mouth via-tweeting to get non-viewers interested in the program.
From the networks’ point of view, there was an audience watching live—something they

1
Ogunnaike, “The Drama Queen.”

113
desperately needed audiences to do if the show was going to generate advertising dollars—and if
they could grow that audience, Scandal would potentially be a hit. With Rhimes’ reputation and
online viewers in mind ABC gambled; they gave the show a second season and devoted time and
resources to designing a social media strategy that involved utilizing the cast, production staff,
and Rhimes herself to promote the program simply by watching it along with viewers each week
and talking about it online. Their efforts paid off; by mid-season two Scandal grew its audience
from a modest 6.5 million viewers from the start of the season to an average of 10 million
viewers each week.
2
In the view of many, Scandal had officially risen to the level of a cultural
phenomenon. Other networks began to pay attention to ABC’s social media strategy for the show
in hopes of replicating its success. By the end of its second season Scandal had become a
significant a revenue generator for ABC; together with Grey’s Anatomy, the show pulled in
“more that $13 million in advertising for [the network] each week—just shy of $300 million a
season, or about 5% of the network’s total revenue.”
3
Additionally, the network also started to
profit from licensing Scandal in other countries, including in Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong
Kong, Australia, and South Africa.
There are two narratives about Scandal’s rise to popularity through Twitter. The first
story is that “Social media was part of the [Scandal’s] strategy from the beginning.”
4
Kerry
Washington, who plays the role of Olivia Pope, has been situated at the center of that strategy.
When the program debuted in 2012, Washington suggested to Rhimes that the cast use Twitter to

2
Sandra Gonzalez, “Addicted to Scandal,” Entertianment Weekly, April 12, 2013.
3
Meghan Casserly, “How ‘Scandal’s’ Shonda Rhimes Became Disney's Primetime Savior,”
Forbes, May 8, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/05/08/how-scandals-
shonda-rhimes-became-disneys-primetime-savior/#1592152d4670.
4
Mary McNamara, “‘Scandal’ Has Become Must-Tweet TV,” Los Angeles Times, May 11,
2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/11/entertainment/la-et-st-scandal-abc-social-media-
20130511.

114
generate buzz. Rhimes agreed and requested the cast members to become active on the platform.
5

For these reasons the cast and Rhimes are frequently credited with coming up with the “show's
live-tweeting campaign on their own.”
6
In the second story, however, Scandal’s fans are
credited with generating fervor for the program, with Washington saying there was a “grassroots
movement” responsible for the programs’ success. Both stories are valid and should not be
understood from an “either”/ “or” perspective; fans and those associated with the show (i.e. cast,
producers, writers, social media strategist) collectively worked to build towards the success of
the show. However, it is my view that Black fans in particular were the generative force that
pushed Scandal to its status as “must-tweet TV,”
7
and they continue to be important in driving the
success of other Black women-led programs.
Black Americans watch 37 percent “more television than any other group, spending
seven hours and 17 minutes per day viewing TV, compared to five hours and 18 minutes of total
viewing” for the rest of viewing audiences.
8
In its first season, Scandal quickly became the most
watched scripted drama amongst Black viewers, drawing in an audience of 2.8 million per
episode. For Black viewers aged 18-49 Scandal ranked as the second most watched primetime
program behind Vh1’s Love & Hip-Hop Atlanta. In fact in 2013, Scandal and Fox’s American
Idol—the reality singing competition that features a diverse case of contestants—were the only
two broadcast network primetime programs in the top ten for Black households according to
Neilson. Black viewers tend to watch cable programming, particularly on BET, Vh1, TV One,

5
Lorne Manly, “How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age,” The New York Times, August 9,
2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/arts/television/how-to-make-a-tv-drama-in-the-
twitter-age.html.
6
Saba Hamedy, “Twitter at Heart of ABC’s Marketing Campaign for Thursday Lineup,” Los
Angeles Times, November 25, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-
et-ct-tgit-abc-20141126-story.html.
7
McNamara, “‘Scandal’ Has Become Must-Tweet TV.”
8
Resilient, Receptive And Relevant: The African-American Consumer (Nelison, 2013), 15,
http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2013 Reports/Nielsen-
African-American-Consumer-Report-Sept-2013.pdf.

115
Bounce, TV, and Centric, since these channels tend to provide Black viewers with diversity in
casts and characters that reflect Black culture and experiences.
ABC and Rhimes have frequently glossed over the popularity of the series amongst Black
viewers; as Tanzina Vega explains in a 2013 New York Times article, while network
representatives expressed excitement “about the show’s success among African-Americans
audiences they were eager to point out the show’s success among all audiences.”
9
Rhimes and
the network have likely avoided discussing Black viewers specifically because they have no
interest in framing Scandal as a “Black show,” since to do so would undermine the efforts to
illustrate how the program can appeal to multiple audiences even when it is prominently
featuring a Black female protagonist. However, what I find fascinating is that their core social
media campaign has taken place on Twitter, a platform that is predominately used by Blacks
Americans. Therefore, I see the convergence of television and social media as a space that is not
neutral when it comes to such understanding how discourse of race operate in the industry. Race,
particularly the racial identities of those who labor in support of a show like Scandal, is
subsumed and obfuscated under generic markers such as “audience,” “viewers,” or “fans,” which
hint at an undifferentiated mass. These markers or labels erase the contributions of the groups
whose creative labor is appropriated and repackaged by networks and other entities in order to
profit from expanding interest in Scandal and other Black women-led shows.
I begin this chapter by exploring how television audiences have been conceptualized
historically within the television and the ways in which the construction and perceptions of “the
audience” has and has not been altered in the post-network era. Although media convergence has
impacted the relationship between viewers and content producers as the latter seeks to find new

9
Tanzina Vega, “A Show Makes Friends and History: ‘Scandal’ on ABC Is Breaking Barriers,”
The New York Times, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/arts/television/scandal-on-abc-
is-breaking-barriers.html?pagewanted=2.

116
ways to engage media consumers across multiple spaces, viewers are still abstracted in ways that
are dismissive of the actual role they play in the success of television programs today. Within my
examination of media convergence I highlight the phenomenon of “connected viewing,” propose
an alternative term, “networked co-viewing,” and interrogate the ways in which viewers and
those within media industries make use of it. Next, I transition to a conversation about live-
tweeting and as a networked co-viewing practice, and identify the ways in which Twitter has
become an important entertainment and political tool within Black American communities,
facilitating creative expression and cultural dialogue. I end the chapter by documenting the labor
of Black fans and how it is used to the advantage of ABC.
The “Audience” in the Post-Network Era: Media Convergence and Networked Co-
Viewing

In order to understand the reasons why the ABC network have chosen to construct the
narrative around Scandal’s audience the way that they have, it is necessary to consider historical
conceptualization of the “television audience” within the industry, and the ways in which the
definition has, and has not changed. Ien Ang argues in Desperately Seeking Audience that from
the television industry point of view, the “television audience” is an “imaginary entity” that is
“defined as an unknown but knowable set of people” and as such “becomes an object of
discourse whose status is analogous to that of ‘population’, ‘nation’ or ‘the masses.’”
10

Moreover, “the audience” is made to represents a particular “structural position in a network of
institutionalized communicative relationships: a position located at the receiving end of a chain
of practices of production and transmission of audiovisual materials through TV channels.”
11

The subjective dynamics of audiencehood—or the “range of informal activities, uses,

10
Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, 2.
11
Ibid., 4.

117
interpretations, pleasures, disappointments, conflicts, struggles, compromises” of those who
consume television—are not considered by the institutions involved in producing and regulating
television because of the need to abstract the “audience” in order to fulfill large-scale economic
and cultural aspirations and expectations.”
12

The abstraction of the “television audience” is made clear through audience measurement
techniques that have been in place in the United States since the 1970s. Nielsen Media Research
is the dominant independent research firm tasked with providing broadcast networks, advertisers,
and advertising agencies with data on ratings for television programs. Ratings consist of
“collections of statistics, numerical summaries of the outcome of the rule-governed calculations
involved in measuring the audience.”
13
There are two features of measurement for ratings: the
size or number of people who tuned in to a specific program of channel at a certain time, and the
composition or demographics (e.g. age, sex, location, income, etc.) of the people watching.
14

Because measurements “are taken in relation to both the total potential audience and to the actual
audience” a rating represents the estimated percentage of “all people within a demographic group,
within a certain survey area, who view a specific [program] or station” while a share “expresses
the percentage of all households having a TV set on and tuned to a certain [program] or channel
at a particular time.”
15
Ratings play a critical role within the commercial television industry as
they impact everything from the price paid for programs and the pay received by those involved;
the rates advertisers pay for advertising during a program; the profitability of networks; the

12
Ibid., 2.
13
Ibid., 46.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.

118
salary and excess compensation of network executives; and the likelihood that top management
retain their jobs, are promoted, or demoted.
16

In the network-era data from audience measurement was collected either through diary
entries in which sample households kept track of their viewing activities and then that
information was processed into reports, or through an electronic meter devices attached to the
television set that provided a “minute-by-minute automatic registration of the times that the
television set is on or off, and to which channel it is tuned.”
17
The first electronic metered device,
the Storage Instantaneous Audiometer,(?) was introduced in 1973 and it sent viewing
information to Nielsen’s computers using phone lines.
18
At the start of television’s multi-channel
transition in the mid-1980s, the company introduced the People Meter, which essentially
functioned in a similar way as its predecessor. In the post-network era audience measurement
techniques have not developed as quickly as the changes that have been occurring within the
industry. Amanda Lotz explains that Nielsen has been unsuccessful in its efforts to account for
out-of-home viewing. However, in 2013 Nielsen, through a partnership with Twitter, began
testing new techniques for gauging audience consumption of specific programs. These new
methods function in similar ways as prior approaches as they continue to be primarily focused on
quantifying audiences via how many users of the platform tweet about a show, and the reach of
user’s tweet within their network, what the research firm calls “impressions.” In other words, the
industry continues to be uninterested in the subjective dynamics viewers engagement, interest,
pleasures, etc. beyond the extent to which that those things can be appropriated and used as tools
to draw viewers in and keep track of them.

16
Hugh Malcom Beville, Audience Ratings: Radio, Television, and Cable (New York:
Routledge, 1988).
17
Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, 47.
18
Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized.

119
I offer this brief overview of the ways in which the “television audience” has been
conceptualized within the industry and measured in order to foreground some of the minute
changes that have taken place. Within the television industry, the audience is still and abstraction,
but because of the proliferation of digital media technologies, the ability for viewers to access
content outside the physical television set, and the interactive ways in which viewers consume
television, commercial and cable networks have had to find new ways of directly engaging with
the audience—as opposed to keeping them at a distance—while maintaining its power and
control over the television process. Thus, as a result what Henry Jenkins describes as “media
convergence” the television industry has sought out and devised new methods for luring in
viewers; mainly through providing them with outlets and the means to consume televisual
content in different ways.
In Convergence Culture Henry Jenkins details the variety of social, economic, and
material relationships that manifests in an age of increased interactions between media producers
and consumers, and amongst consumers who collectively derive meaning from the media they
consume. Drawing on the notion of “media convergence” Jenkins describes the current age as
characterized by the “flow of content across multiple platforms, the cooperation between
multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost
anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”
19
For the television
industry, media convergence has meant that networks have had to reconsider how and where to
reach and engage viewers. The resulting strategy has been to expand television content across
different delivery systems (e.g. iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, etc.), and utilize various social media
platforms to promote or market programs, and to encourage audience participation. The industry

19
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Revised ed (New
York: NYU Press, 2008), 2.

120
has also come to rely heavily on consumers’ active participation. The convergence of television
viewing and use of online communication networks is part of a trend within the post-network
television landscape described as “connected viewing.”
20
“Connected viewing” has been
conceptualized as the use of a web-enabled second screen device to access additional television
content designed to “enhance” or complement the viewing of broadcast or cable programs.
21

Such content is made available through media-conglomerate-owned digital platforms such as
official websites and mobile applications. Since the industry is haunted by a constant sense of
uncertainty marked by the perpetual concern as to whether viewers will tune in and stay tuned in
each week,
22
the value in connected viewing is twofold: first, it keeps “audiences engaged and
active for the duration of a broadcast,” and second, this “increased attentiveness to a
program...may lead to increased attentiveness to its commercials as well.”
23

Rather than using the term “connective viewing,” I prefer to use “networked co-viewing”
as I believe it is more indicative of the participatory and communal nature of media convergence
in relation to television and new media technologies. Connected viewing is used more in
reference to the connection between viewer and digital platforms, applications and mobile
devises, rather than with a network or community of viewers and content via those technologies.
Networked co-viewing then is not so much about the technologies viewers use to access or
connect to content, but instead how they interact through social and digital media technology
with that content in relation to the producers and others viewers. Networked co-viewing involves

20
Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson, Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in
the Digital Era (New York: Routledge, 2013).
21
Ethan Tussey, “Connected Viewing on the Second Screen: The Limitations of the Living
Room,” in Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Era, ed.
Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 202–216.
22
Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience.
23
Matthew Pitmman and Alec C. Terfertiler, “With or Without You: Connected Viewing and
Co-Viewing Twitter Activity for Traditional Appointment and Asynchronous Broadcast
Television Models,” First Monday 20, no. 7 (2015),
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i7.5935.

121
various forms of participatory engagement or mediated interactivity whereby viewers
simultaneously “talk back” to television through participating in online or text message voting
for competition shows, commenting on their favorite programs via social media, and spreading
the word about a series within their personal social networks. In this participatory landscape, the
public is not situated “as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are
shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been
previously imagined.”
The misconception that “audiences”—or consumers of media—are passive, originated
within the theoretical writings of Frankfurt School theorists Theodore Adorno and Max
Horkheimer and led to critical debate within communication and television studies about the
passivity of spectators. Cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, David Morley, John Fiske, Ien Ang
understand audiences as is active; they make use of their social positioning/experiences,
knowledge of shared codes. When I use the word “interactive” to describe contemporary
television viewers, it is not in juxtaposition to notions of an inactive or passive viewing audience,
but rather to signal the ways in which viewers are “shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing
media content,”
24
and doing so though and within relationships with other viewers. This
interactively provides viewers with an “an alternative source of media power.”
25
However, while
such participatory engagement may be viewed as something guided by viewers’ pleasures, it also
“doubles as a form of labor” for the television industry.
26
Social media, digital applications, and
other online spaces in which viewers can connect with television, not only provide opportunities
for media producers to secure instant feedback about their programming—thus functioning as a

24
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning
in A Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 2.
25
Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 4.
26
Mark Andrejevic, “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,”
Television & New Media 9, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 43, doi:10.1177/1527476407307241.

122
form of audience measurement—but viewers, according to Megan Wood and Linda Baughman,
also participate in “marketing to themselves as well as to those who follow them, intentionally or
not. They market products they see as related to the program...and they market products they
relate to the narrative identities of the characters from [those programs].”
27
However, I, like
Wood and Baughman do not believe that those engaged in this labor “are dupes of the capitalism
machine,” but instead it “straddles a dialectic of agency and constraint.”
28

Live-Tweeting During Television Broadcasts
Television discussion forums such as Television Without Pity had existed on the internet
for some time and served as spaced where viewers could go to talk about their favorite
programs.
29
The online social experience of viewing and commenting on television programs
began to evolve, however, beginning in 2006. This marked the year when ABC, CBS, and Fox,
and the upstart streaming service Hulu, began uploading full-length episodes on their websites
for free.
30
These spaces enabled viewers’ opportunities to comment on programs while they were
watching. These were not live broadcasts of shows, however. Synchronous messaging while
watching a live broadcast gradually emerged as people started to use Twitter in new ways.
Twitter was introduced in 2006 as a platform designed to deliver short, 140-character
messages. Users of the platform were prompted with a single question: “What are you doing?”
The structure of Twitter can be reminiscent of a chat room, but often parts of the conversation

27
Megan M. Wood and Linda Baughman, “Glee Fandom and Twitter: Something New, or More
of the Same Old Thing?,” Communication Studies 63, no. 3 (2012): 341,
doi:10.1080/10510974.2012.674618.
28
Ibid.
29
Jonathan Gray, “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television Without Pity and Textual
Dislike,” American Behavioral Scientist 48, no. 7 (March 1, 2005): 840–858,
doi:10.1177/0002764204273171; Andrejevic, “Watching Television Without Pity: The
Productivity of Online Fans.”
30
D. Yvette Wohn and Eun-Kyung Na, “Tweeting About TV: Sharing Television Viewing
Experiences via Social Media Message Streams,” First Monday 16, no. 3 (2011),
http://firstmondy.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3368/2779.

123
are missing or obscured from view. Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess describe Twitter’s
communicative structure as composed of two overlapping and interdependent networks.
31
This
first structure is relatively stable and long-term and consists of a follower-followee relationship.
The second is short-term or emergent and is based on shared interest in a topic and is coordinated
by a common hashtag. Hashtags “enable users to communicate with an ad hoc community
around the hashtag topic without needing to establish mutual follower/followee relationships
with any of the other participants.”
32
The caveat is that not all users posting to a hashtag
conversation follow that conversation, but instead, use a specific hashtag to make their tweets
visible to others. The use of the hashtag has come to play an important function within the
context of live-tweeting television, as viewers are able to weed through the potential “noise” of
Twitter’s endless streaming of tweets to locate conversations about their favorite programs.
Live-tweeting, is a connected viewing practice whereby viewer use the space of Twitter
“for 'live' (that is, real-time, relatively unmediated, communal discussion of television
[programs]. Users are able to offer their own commentary on the...broadcast as it unfolds, to
engage with other viewers doing the same, and perhaps even...see those comments become part
of the television broadcast itself.”
33
A few existing studies have explored the nature of the
messages sent during live-tweeting live broadcasts. D. Yvette Wohn and Eun-Kyunh Na, for
instance, found in their examination of viewers live-tweeting during the reality competition
program So You Think You Can Dance? and president Barack Obama’s live speech at the White
House announcing his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009, that those who live-

31
Axel Bruns and Jean E. Burgess, “Researching News Discussion on Twitter,” Journalism
Studies 12, no. 5–6 (2012): 801–814.
32
Ibid., 804.
33
Tim Highfield, Stephen Harrington, and Axel Bruns, “Twitter As a Technology for
Audiencing and Fandom,” Information, Communication & Society 16, no. 3 (2013): 316,
doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.756053.

124
tweet programs tend to post four types of messages: emotional messages were characterized by
the use of verb—such as "love, hate, hope, excited, congratulation," etc. —words written entirely
capital letters, multiple explanation marks, or emoticons; attention-seeking messaged contained
phrases illustrating pondering of a question or soliciting response; informational messaged
"consisted of dry, objective content about [a] program...but also included posts that had links to
articles or blogs; opinion messages consisted of subjective assessment about a program.
34

One key debate that has surface is how social or interactive live-tweeting is when it
comes to communication between users. In Matthew Pitmman and Alec Tefertiller’s examination
of patterns of second screen co-viewing—which they define as the use of a second screen to
augment television consumption along with other viewers virtually—of the live broadcast of
Parks and Recreation and Downtown Abbey and the asynchronous streaming of Netflix’s
original series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and House of Cards viewers posted more original
non-social tweets, or retweeted others’ messages rather than directing tweets at individual users
on the platform, what they call “social tweets.” Alice Marwick and danah boyd’s exploration of
Twitter user’s imagined audience however, illustrates the problem in the categorization of
“social tweets” as those directed at others through the use of the @ mention function. Marwick
and boyd discovered from their interviews with Twitter users that they conceptualize their
audience in diverse in varied ways. For instance, respondents said that their tweets were for
them, functioning as a diary of sorts; for their "friends" or followers, even when they did not
explicitly direct tweets to others; and for a fan base of community with whom they wanted to
connect. For those viewers who live-tweet during broadcast, the @ mention is not the only
indication of “social” interaction, as the use of hashtags to mark tweets, I would argue, is

34
Wohn and Na, “Tweeting About TV: Sharing Television Viewing Experiences via Social
Media Message Streams.”

125
directed as it is used to “address an entire community of users who are tracking the hashtagged
discussion.”
35

“Black” Twitter
Amongst Internet users who utilize social media platforms, Twitter use varies amongst
racial and ethnic groups. The Pew Research Center reported in 2010 that only 8 percent of
Americans used Twitter, and of those users 5 percent were white, 16 percent Black, and 18
percent Hispanic.
36
The percentage of users Twitter doubled to 16 percent in 2012, with whites
accounting for 14 percent of users, Blacks 26 percent, and Hispanics 19 percent.
37
In 2013,
Nielson reported that young, Black Americans aged 18-34 tend to be the most frequent users of
Twitter.
38

Although Eszter Hargitati and Eden Litt observed that young Black Americans use of
Twitter was driven by celebrity and entertainment news,
39
they also convene on the platform to
discuss issues of representation within the media, social equalities, politics and racism. Activists
leading the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, have wielded Twitter to circulate
images, critiques, and hashtags (e.g. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown) to bring attention to bias within
news media coverage of Black victims of gun violence and police brutality. Black Americans’
adoption of Twitter and their use of the platform for the purposes collective action and building
racial solidarity through sharing ideas and experiences, exchanging jokes, and engaging in the

35
Highfield, Harrington, and Bruns, “Twitter As a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom,”
316.
36
Aaron Smith and Lee Rainie, 8% of Online Americans Use Twitter (Pew Research Center,
December 9, 2010), http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Twitter-update-2010.aspx.
37
Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner, The Demographics of Social Media Users — 2012
(Washinton, D.C.: Pew Research Center, February 14, 2013).
38
Resilient, Receptive And Relevant: The African-American Consumer (Nelison, 2013).
39
Eszter Hargittai and Eden Litt, “The Tweet Smell of Celebrity Success: Explaining Variation
in Twitter Adoption Among a Diverse Group of Young Adults,” New Media & Society 13, no. 5
(May 10, 2011): 824–842, doi:10.1177/1461444811405805.

126
consumption of media texts as a community of invested spectators, have resulted in the
emergence of what some call “Black Twitter.”
In 2008, journalists and bloggers began to take notice of the visibility of Black users of
Twitter,
40
primarily because of the use of signifyin’ marked by what Sanjay Sharman calls
“Blacktags,” a particular type of hashtag that has come to be associated with Black Twitter users
because “the tag itself and/or its associated content appears to connote ‘Black’ vernacular
expression in the form of humour and social commentary.”
41
Signifyin’ is a practice within
Black American oral traditions that provides a means of expressing Black cultural identity.
42
It is
a mode of communicative play or “linguistic performance that allows for communication of
multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, most frequently involving wordplay and
misdirection.”
43
Invention, “dexterous use of language and skilled verbal performance are key
elements of signifyin’”
44
as is audience participation.
The hashtag plays a pivotal role in signifyin’ on Twitter as it has evolved into an
expressive modifier meant to not only to mark and contextualize a tweet, but also to function as a
call, inviting response from followers or members of the broader Twitter community.
45

40
Anil Dash, “Yo Mama’s So Fat,” Anil Dash: A Blog About Making Culture, October 22, 2008,
http://anildash.com/2008/10/yo-mamas-so-fat.html; Sicha Choire, “What Were Black People
Talking About on Twitter Last Night?,” The Awl, November 11, 2009,
http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/what-were-black-people-talking-about-on-twitter-last-night;
Farhad Manjoo, “How Black People Use Twitter,” Slate, August 10, 2010,
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/08/how_black_people_use_twitter.ht
ml.
41
Sanjay Sharma, “Black Twitter?: Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion,” New
Formations: A Journal of Culture/theory/politics 78, no. 1 (2013): 51.
42
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
43
Sarah Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’ Communication and Cultural Performance on
‘Black Twitter,’” Television & New Media 15, no. 3 (March 2014): 224,
doi:10.1177/1527476413480247.
44
Ibid., 226.
45
André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter As A Cultural Conversation,” Journal of
Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–549,
doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.732147.

127
According to André Brock, this evolution of the hashtag—which was initially "intended as a
curational feature" offering users the ability to "filter and organize multiple [tweets] on a
particular topic”—as an expressive modifier "led to the 'discovery' of Black Twitter.”
46
Black
discourse, made visible through hashtag domination of Twitter’s real-time list of the most
tweeted subjects, “Trending Topics,” allowed others within the platforms’ community of users to
observe exchanges that were “unconcerned with the mainstream gaze.”
47
In early discussions
about Black Twitter users’ deployment of the platform, non-Black bloggers witnessed activity as
if drawn in by a spectacle; unsure of what exactly was occurring. This “foreignness” of Black
Twitter discourse to outsiders can be explained by the fact that signifying’ is a discursive
practice that “requires participants to possess certain forms of cultural knowledge and cultural
competencies.”
48

Black Twitter has been theorized as a “social public”; a community constructed through
their use of social media, shared communication practices and performative techniques.
49
Sarah
Florini acknowledges the substantial presence of Black users on Twitter, but is cautious in in
using the term “Black Twitter” in any unified or monolithic sense, explaining: “Just as there is
not a ‘Black America’ or single ‘Black culture,” there is no ‘Black Twitter.’”
50
Instead,
according to Florini, “What does exist are millions of Black users on Twitter networking,
connecting, and engaging with others who have similar concerns, experiences, tastes, and
cultural practices.”
51
Meredith Clark takes a similar position, conceptualizing Black Twitter as

46
Ibid., 534.
47
Ibid.
48
Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’ Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black
Twitter,’” 227.
49
Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter As A Cultural Conversation.”
50
Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’ Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black
Twitter,’” 225.
51
Ibid.

128
the amalgamation of small-scale personal networks that become linked together through
“thematic nodes” such as cultural politics, entertainment, news, etc. The personal networks and
their connections through thematic nodes give rise to a mass-scale “meta-network” defined by a
shared “Black experience of America.”
52

I view Black Twitter as is a dynamic, fluctuating collective of Twitter users who deploy
the platform to discuss, interpret, and critique political, cultural, and media events that resonate
with the concerns, interests, tastes and experiences of African-American and other Black users,
as well as those with cultural knowledge of, and interest in, Black culture(s). Black Twitter is not
merely constituted on the basis of the physically embodied racial identities of the users of the
platform, but rather also through the visual, cultural, and rhetorical practices that signify
blackness or index racial identity.
53
In other words, as Brock’s conceptualization of Black
Twitter indicates, racial identity is performative and socially constructed though use of the
infrastructure and technological tools afforded by Twitter.
In Chapter 4, I explore Black Twitter in terms of participatory engagement around
Scandal. However, I make mention of Black Twitter in this chapter because it is my view that it
has been through the collective efforts of this community of networked users that Scandal was
able to gain its visibility and grow its viewership. Prior research has shown that Blacks are more
likely than white and Latino viewers to post comments online when watching television.
54
In my
exploration of fan activity around Scandal, which I discuss later in this chapter in terms of fan
generation of “buzz” around the program, it became clear through examination of pictures,

52
Meredith D. Clark, “To Tweet Our Own Cause: A Mixed-Method Study of the Online
Phenomenon ‘Black Twitter’” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014), 63.
53
Lisa Nakumura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007).
54
Aaron Smith and Jan Lauren Boyles, The Rise of the “Connected Viewer” (Washinton, D.C.:
Pew Research Center, July 17, 2012), http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Connected-
viewers.aspx.

129
rhetorical and linguistic practices, jokes, etc., that a large segment of the population who live-
tweet are Black. Thus, it is my assertion that ABC has been able to harness the productive labor
of Black Twitter through its online promotional strategies, while at the same time minimizing the
contributions of Black viewers and fans in favor of a narrative about the universal popularity of
the program. In other words, because it is in their best interest to keep Scandal from being
labeled a “Black show,” in their discourses about their Twitter campaigns the network has
obscured the ways in which race is a factor in their strategy to draw in viewers and keep them
committed to watching the series.
ABC’s Twitter Strategy for Scandal
In order to make use of viewer participation, the television industry has developed
“strategies for promoting, harnessing, and exploiting the productivity of [viewer or fan]
activity.”
55
For Scandal, the cast and social media strategists for ABC set out to draw upon
viewers’ affective relationship to the show in order to make them want to tune in each week in
real-time, and while online. As Rhimes explains, “[Part] of the creation of how we tell the story
on ‘Scandal’ is that we want it to feel like if you’re not watching it live, you’re missing a whole
other experience. That’s why everybody got on Twitter, so that you’re part of this communal
experience of watching the show and live-tweeting the show and all that goes on with it.
56

Through the efforts of fans, Rhimes, and the cast, Scandal was transformed into an “appointment
TV” program. In the decades before the proliferation of multiple channels, time-shifting devices
such as videocassette recorders (VCR), digital video recorders (DVR), and Video of Demand,
and online streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, viewers watched programs “live” on the
day of the week and at the time specified by broadcast networks. Viewers relied on set

55
Ibid., 25.
56
Manly, “How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age.”

130
programming schedules and carved out time to view their favorite shows; they made
“appointments” in order to not miss out on the experience. In the post-network era, advanced
recording technologies and streaming services mean that viewers can view programs when and
where they want; they are not beholden to the broadcast schedule, or even watching a show in
front of a television set.
From an industry perspective appointment TV, theoretically, ensures that viewers will
also see accompanying advertisements that are aired alongside programming. Unlike cable,
commercial broadcast networks continue to rely heavily on generating revenue through
advertising revenue. If a commercial broadcast network can deliver a live audience—especially
viewers in the coveted 18-49 year old age demographic—to a television program, then they will
be rewarded with increased financial support from advertisers. However, in the contemporary
television climate, getting viewers to watch non-sports related prime-time broadcasts live is
challenging for commercial broadcast networks, but it is also imperative to the success of their
programs, since programs that cannot generate a sufficient live audience is subject to early
cancellation.
Scandal, and other shows that have similar popularity such as ABC’s How To Get Away
With Murder, and Fox’s Empire, have transformed into appointment TV programs because
networks and viewers have been able to mold them into “media events.” Dayan and Katz
theorize media events as those occasions where a televised event draws national and/or global
attention.
57
Focused on events of a historical nature, such as occasions of state (e.g. presidential
inaugurations, state of the union address, etc.) and breaking news of national interest, Dayan and
Katz characterize media events as those events, whether live or preplanned, that cause viewers to

57
Daniel Dayan and Eilihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994).

131
stop their daily routine to join in on the viewing experience. Regularly scheduled television
programming was excluded from Dayan and Katz’s conceptualization of media events, but
recently scholars have included such programming in the aftermath of viewers’ engagement in
live-tweeting television. This expansion of what constitutes a media event is likely due to several
elements of Dayan and Katz’s original theory, mainly that media events are “characterized by a
norm of viewing in which people tell each other that it is mandatory to view, that they must put
all else aside” and that the event must be celebrated by gathering as a group rather than alone.”
Furthermore, media events are ceremonially unveiled, and “electrify very large audiences.”
58

Figure 1 #AskScandal Promo

ABC’s digital marketing team began promoting Scandal as a media event over the course
of the programs’ second season. Although a Twitter profile with the handle @ScandalABC was
created for the program in April 2011, a year before Scandal premiered it was not put into full
use until October 2012 when ABC launched the promotional hashtag #AskScandal, inviting
viewers to directly ask the cast, Rhimes, and writers (@ScandalWriters) questions during live

58
Ibid.

132
broadcasts each week (Figure 1). Social media strategists for ABC also generated theme-based
hashtags to tease forthcoming episodes and plots, for instance #WhoShotFiz for the season two
episode “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” and #TheStormIsComing as a teaser for season three.
Other types of content generated and circulated to promote the show include gifs, backstage
pictures of the cast, and character photos that include lines of dialogue from the show.
Going into season three, ABC began the use of “gladiators” to refer to Scandal fans.
“Gladiators” was initially taken up as a moniker by Scandal fans themselves sometime during
the first season. The name came about in reference to a scene in the first episode when Harrison,
one of the associates in Olivia’s firm, tells the new recruit Quinn that Olivia’s team of fixers are
like “Gladiators in suits.” What Harrison meant through this comment was that Olivia’s team of
“gladiators” were responsible for going in the trenches and fighting the good fight all in an effort
to provide their leader with what she needed to support her clients. Harrison also meant that
gladiators asked few questions; Olivia was the best fixer and their fearless leader who was to be
trusted at all costs.
Figure 2 #ScandalRecruitment Promo

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ABC took notice of fans’ use of the term and embraced it in their marketing strategies.
As Ben Blatt, ABC Entertainment’s director of digital strategy has said of the nickname: “the
fans call themselves ‘gladiators’…suddenly out of nowhere you have millions of people
watching the show and this huge base, all with their own nickname that’s organic. It wasn’t
manufactured.”
59
In online advertisements for the show (see Figure 2) the term “gladiator” was
used to hail participation from fans to spread the word about the series’ return. “Gladiator” also
has made several more appearances in the dialogue of the show. For instance in episode in
season three opener, “It’s Handled,” Harrison turns to the hesitant staff at Pope and Associates
and asks: “Are we Gladiators or are we bitches?” As fans tweeted out the line during the
broadcast, ABC began to circulate an image (Figure 3) of Harrison that featured the same line
accompanied by the hashtag #SCANDALISBACK.
Figure 3 #ScandalisBack Promo

According to a report compiled by Twitter titled “ABC’s Scandal Recruits Fans on
Twitter,” the efforts by ABC proved fruitful; there was a dramatic jump in the number of tweets

59
Max Follmer, “How Twitter Turned ABC’s ‘Scandal’ Into a Bona Fide Hit,” Brief, September
11, 2013, http://brief.promaxbda.org/content/how-twitter-turned-abcs-scandal-into-a-bona-fide-
hit.

134
during the season two premiere episode (87, 525) and the finale (583,111). The season three
opener saw an even greater number of tweets (724, 359). The more people discussed the show on
Twitter, the more those who were not watching the show questioned whether they should start
viewing it seen “everyone” in their feed was talking about Scandal. Similar to Dayan and Katz’s
understanding of media events, Scandal began to electrify a bigger audience and in so doing
made those who were not watching feel isolated when it came to “water cooler” conversation
about the show.
Black Fans’ Networked Co-Viewing of Scandal
On October 3, 2013, Scandal’s Season 3 premiere episode, “It’s Handled,” was
broadcast. The program was watched by 10.5 million viewers, and according to Nielsen’s
Twitter TV Ratings, viewers sent more than 700,000 tweets in total.
60
Through the data
collection methods employed by myself and a team of researchers at the University of Southern
California, we gathered 192,383 tweets, over sixty-four percent (N=124,456) of which were
identified as “original” (not retweets.) Within these tweets, 3,237 linked to images from publicly
accessible Instagram accounts. The original tweets in our sample were sent by 49,245 unique
Twitter accounts. Over half of the individuals live-tweeting or referencing Scandal during the
time that it aired on the East Coast, sent just one message, and over a quarter (N=7,370) posted
their sole tweet during the first ten minutes. The remaining viewers live-tweeting the show sent
half a dozen tweets following dramatic events within the narrative, while 519 highly active
viewers generated 11,756 tweets at an average rate of one tweet every 2-3 minutes.

60
Amanda Kondolojy, “‘Scandal’ Tops Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings for the Week of September
30-October 6,” TV By The Numbers, October 7, 2013,
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2013/10/07/scandal-tops-nielsen-twitter-tv-ratings-for-
the-week-of-september-30-october-6/207432/.

135
The statistics related to how many people were tweeting about the show, how often they
tweeted about the show, and the volume of tweets they generated, is information that is most
useful for the television industry’s audience measurement goals. However, it relays nothing
about what viewers, fans, and bystanders/lurkers, are doing when they tweet, who they are, and
how they are interacting with each other and the show. For the remainder of this chapter, as well
as in the next, I will focus on what the tweets generated while live-tweeting Scandal can tell us
about Black fan’s relationship to the program in terms of leisure, labor, and representational
politics (Chapter 4).
Fans of Scandal, participated in a pre-broadcast ritual in which they counted down the
hours, and minutes before the show aired, warned others within their network that they should
log off if they did not want to see any spoilers, and implored those who remained—or anyone in
general—not to disturb them once the program was on. In fact, it seems that “Do Not Disturb”
tweets and memes are their own genre of Scandal fan-produced artifacts. These tweets and
memes often threatened to act violently if fans were interrupted while viewing Scandal. For
instance, one of the popular “Do Not Disturb” memes that was circulated featured Tyler Perry’s
character Madea from the film Diary of a Mad Black Woman, wielding a gun (Figure 4). Another
meme featured the character Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), from the film The Color Purple, holding
a knife to her husbands’ throat with the accompanying text warning that “It’s Scandal Thursday”
which means the viewer does not want to be disturbed.

136
Figure 4 Madea "Do Not Disturb" Meme

Figure 5 The Color Purple "Do Not Disturb" Meme

Through my examination of the Instagram photos, it appeared that those engaged in live-
tweeting the show were mostly Black fans. Within single, duo, and group shots, the individuals
posing were Black. Black fans posted photos of viewing parties, and gatherings with other Black
fans inside of homes, at restaurants, and at hosted and sponsored events in auditoriums, lounges,
and other venues (Figure 5). The viewing of Scandal was situated via photographs as a leisure
activity that includes a relaxing chair or coach allowing for one’s feet to be stretched out or
propped up, and food and drink—often red wine and popcorn, what Olivia eats and drinks on the
show in order to unwind (Figure 6). There were a number of other practices that viewers and fans

137
of the program participated in such as taking pictures of the television as they are watching, re-
circulating official promo materials, often remixing them, or combining them into collages, and
playing self-designed drinking and bingo games or those promoted by the network such as the
Season 3 Crossword Puzzle. These images illustrate, is at least in terms of the season premiere,
that live-tweeting Scandal is a multi-social, interactive ritual activity and media event that rises
to the level of the Super Bowl for some fans.
Figure 6 Scandal Viewing Party

Figure 7 Networked Co-Viewing With Wine & Popcorn

138
Besides creating hype for the premiere through the pre-show countdown, and re-
circulating the official digital promo ads and other images posted by the social media team at
ABC, Rhimes, the cast, and Scandal fans also actively tagged their tweets and images. Fans
primarily used #Scandal, #ScandalIsBack, and to a lesser degree, #AskScandal, which is the
official hashtag to use for fans to have their questions about the show answered by someone
affiliated with the program. #Gladiators was also a frequently used hashtag amongst fans.
Although a sizable number of hashtags were generated, the aforementioned ones dominated,
indicating that in order for fans to stay visible within the community fans watching, they tend to
utilize the standard #Scandal tag or those promoted by ABC. This also means that the tweets
generated by fans are easily identifiable and counted within the algorithm Nielsen now uses as
part of its Twitter TV ratings.
Figure 8 Olivia's Burberry Prorsum Trench Coat

In addition to fan labor in promoting the show, there was at least one moment during the
“It’s Handled” episode where fans, likely unintentionally, turned their focus towards advertising
for Burberry, a high-end fashion brand. In a much-discussed scene featuring Olivia, Fitz, and his
wife Mellie, Olivia is seen wearing a white trench coat (Figure 7). Black fans immediately

139
responded by commenting on her attire, using Black vernacular slang terms such as “slaying,”
“stunting,” “working” and “bad” to articulate their appreciation for how “fly” (i.e. good, well put
together, fashionable) Olivia looked (Table 1). Some fans went to work searching for details
about her coat, and once information was located, images of models wearing the coat were re-
tweeted, and screen shots of the Neiman Marcus website where the coat could be purchased at a
discounted price of $908—down significantly from is original price of $2,595—were circulated.
One fan took the image of a model wearing the coat and in black lettering referred to it as the
“Pope Power Coat.”
Table 1 Tweet Responses to Olivia's Trench Coat
I need Olivia’s coat in my life #Scandal
That was a baddddddd white coat tho #Scandal
COME ON COAT! Olivia stay stunting. #Scandal
To clearance and I liveeee for that white trench coat #scandalisback
Olivia Pope is slaying my soul with that coat! #Scandal
That jacket is everything...pure fiyah! #Scandal
that jacket that olivia pope has on is so mutha fuckin nasty that I can’t even watch the rest of the show! #Scandal
[Ok] so this white trench that Olivia Pope’s rocking is EVERYTHING. Who’s making coats like this for plus size
ladies to get?
Yall think I can cop a believable replica of that coat at Target or nah? GAP #Scandal?

The various ways in which Black fans made themselves visible via the practices they
employed in live-tweeting during the broadcast of the premiere episode of Scandal was likely not
a part of the data ABC received as part of their de-briefing on engagement around the program.
However, what is interesting is how the network took notice of Black fans’ Twitter chatter
around Olivia’s coat and sought to profit from it by teaming up with The Limited to debut an
Olivia Pope-inspired clothing line in 2014. With items such as gloves, blouses, tailored wide-leg
trousers, hang bags, and of course coats, ranging from $49-$248, fans were given access to
Olivia’s style at more affordable prices. Kerry Washington, who also played a role in the
clothing line, said in a press release: “The collection is a nod to our devoted fans, to fans of
fashion and to women everywhere who are inspired to boldly pursue their passions and look

140
good while doing it.”
61
The collection was so successful that The Limited rolled out a spring
collection in 2015, and Washington told HuffPost Style that in discussing fans’ response to the
clothing line with The Limited’s head of design, Elliot Staples, and Scandal’s costume designer
Lyn Paolo, they took note of “what people were loving and gravitating towards.” As Washington
says, “That direct fan and consumer response really informed the new pieces of the spring
collection.”
62

Figure 9 #WhatMJWore Ad

The Olivia Pope-inspired clothing line served as a springboard for BET’s marketing of
Being Mary Jane. The network promoted fans to watch the show for code words that they could
then use one its website to enter to win one of the outfits worn by Mary Jane. By the second
season BET partnered with Polyvore to promote clothing and accessories featured in the drama
and to advertise when the show aired (see Figure 8). Thus, for both Scandal and Being Mary
Jane, fan engagement around programs was utilized to survey their interests in order to facilitate

61
“‘Scandal’ Clothing Collection: First Look At the Olivia Pope-Inspired Line,” Hollywood Life,
September 17, 2014, http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/09/17/scandal-clothing-collection-the-
limited-olivia-pope-style/.
62
Julee Wilson, “Kerry Washington Reveals Lates ‘Scandal’ Collection For The Limited Will
Include Looks From Other Cast Members,” Huffpost Style, February 3, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/03/kerry-washington-the-limited-scandal-collection-
spring-2015_n_6600884.html.

141
partnerships that could potentially generate revenue for those involved. This illustrates how the
television industry utilizes networked co-viewing as a way to understand “the emotional
underpinnings of consumer decision-making” in order to mold their desires.
63

Conclusion

In this chapter I explored how television audiences have been conceptualized historically
within the television industry and identified some of the ways in which the construction and
perceptions of “the audience” have been altered in the era of media convergence. I have argued
that while viewers’ post-network era interactivity means that they have opportunities to “talk
back” to television and to other viewers in new ways, it also means that they are subject to
surveillance or monitoring by advertisers, television networks, and other cultural institutions
seeking to harness the affective economy
64
of viewers’ labor. The abstraction of viewers as “the
audience” and the quantifying of their presence, means that the ways in which they actively
engage with television online is only useful if it can be used as a focal point to market additional
content or products.
In the second half of this chapter I sought to rise above the abstraction of “the audience”
and move away from their visibility as statistics by way of number of tweets they generate. What
I uncovered in my analysis of tweets and Instagram photos from the Season 3 premiere of
Scandal is that Black fans are the most visible in their networked co-viewing of the program.
The viewing of Scandal is situated not only appointment television, it also becomes a media
event where Black fans gather within multiple audience communities both online and offline.
And as I will illustrate in the following chapter, Black fans circulate various forms of
participatory culture that foster connections and articulate the salience of Black identity.

63
Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 61.
64
Jenkins, Convergence Culture.

142
Chapter Four: Black Fans and the Politics of Viewing Scandal

In early reviews of Scandal, some critics lauded the show for its refusal “to buy into
stereotypical racial dynamics.”
1
However, others did not see the program in the same way. Tom
Burrell, an activist who has worked to promote “positive and realistic images of African
Americans,” criticized Scandal for masquerading as something new, explaining that it continues
the “perpetuation of the stereotype of a black woman whose libido and sexual urges are so
pronounced that even with an education and a great job, and all these other things, she can't
control herself.”
2
In a scathing critique of the program, Brandon Maxwell wrote in his post for
The Feminist Wire that Olivia Pope is “flat character” who “possesses no real depth” and in
“most episodes [she] is little more than a political mammy mixed with a hint of Sapphire who
faithfully bears the burden of the oh-so-fragile American Political System on her shoulders.” He
continues: “When Pope is not gleefully maintaining the house of being overbearing, thus
undesirable, she’s in the back shed with massah—the Oval Office—Fitz where we realized that
she’s actually quite desirable.”
3
In the span of his short post, he links Pope’s character to three
controlling images: the mammy, the angry Black woman (Sapphire), and the jezebel.
Criticisms of Scandal’s representation of Black female subjectivity reflect a reading of
Olivia Pope as a character situated solely in relation to controlling images, which forecloses
alternative interpretations of Olivia as she is then maligned as a “negative” or “bad”

1
Shani O. Hilton, “Why Twitter Loves ‘Scandal,’” Buzzfeed, February 28, 2013,
http://www.buzzfeed.com/shani/why-twitter-loves-scandal.
2
Jenée Desmond-Harris, “‘Scandal’ Exploits Black Women’s Images?,” The Root, October 13,
2012,
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2012/10/black_television_stereotypes_tom_burrell_inter
view.html.
3
Brandon Maxwell, “Olivia Pope and the Scandal of Representation,” The Feminist Wire,
February 7, 2013, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/02/olivia-pope-and-the-scandal-of-
representation/.

143
representation of Black womanhood. As I illustrate in this chapter, viewers of fans of Scandal
have a complex affective relationship to it; while they revel in seeing a powerful Black woman
on screen, some voice frustration at the how Washington’s character is characterized both within
and outside of the show. I write this chapter as a former fan of Scandal who also experienced
similar tensions when viewing the show.
4
My interest in other Black fans and non-fans’ views of
the show stems, in part, from my own experience with the series. As both a former fan and as a
Black feminist media scholar, I navigated the terrain of balancing these identities in my leisurely
viewing of the show and later in my analysis of viewer-generated commentary. These
positionalities provide me with various competencies that allow me to comprehensively digest
the nuances of Black viewers’ and non-viewers critiques of the shows’ depiction of Black female
identity.
Throughout this dissertation I have interrogated how discourses of race have contributed
to programming shifts throughout the history of television, the ways in which such discourses are
framed and utilized by Black women who produce representations of Black womanhood in the
post-network era, and how race is obscured within the promotional practices of Black women-led
series. This chapter presents a case study of Black American viewers’ live-tweeting Scandal
during its third season in order to explore the interlocking discourses of race gender, and
sexuality that are circulated. I use this chapter to assess how Black viewers and non-viewers
make use of social media platforms like Twitter to engage in commentary about the
representation of Black womanhood embodied in this series. The conversation, the
communication practices, and cultural artifacts that circulated during live-tweeting worked to

4
My love of Scandal sadly ended at the conclusion of season three—the very season I focus on in this chapter.
There are many reasons I turned away from the series, but ultimately I no longer had interest in the increasingly
over-the-top melodramatic elements of the show. In this respect, I’m not any different from many of the fans in this
study who felt that Scandal had “jumped the shark” at the mid-way point of the season.

144
situate Scandal within discourses of blackness, thus undermining the colorblind or post-racial
discourses articulated by the network and Rhimes. This chapter teases out a theory of Black
television viewing practices in the digital age that I term “politics of viewing.” I frame politics of
viewing within the broader discursive struggles over how to talk about race, gender, and
representation in the twenty-first century.
The Politics of Viewing in the Age of Black Twitter
In speaking about Black British filmmakers in the 1980s, Stuart Hall discusses a new phase
of political struggle over Black representation. According to Hall, the original critique and
source of struggle for Black British filmmakers was lack of access to create representations, and
the stereotyped quality, objectification, and fetishized nature of Black images that did exist. Once
Black British filmmakers began to make inroads in terms of access, Hall argues, the nature of the
struggle shifted “from a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of
representation itself.”
5
What Hall is referring to is a struggle related questions related to how not
to essentialize Black subjectivity within artistic works and instead recognize the “extraordinary
diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the
category ‘black’; that is, the recognition that ‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally
constructed category.”
6
Within the context of Britain, it is important to note that “Black” was not
simply a category of identity for groups of African descent; instead, “Black” was “coined as a
way of referencing the common experience or racism and marginalization…and came to provide
the organizing category of a new politics of resistance among groups and communities
with…very different histories, traditions and ethnic identities.”
7

5
Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 442.
6
Ibid., 443.
7
Ibid., 441.

145
For Hall, shift towards a politics of representation is about engaged criticism of media
made by Black people, not merely accepting it and embracing it because it was crafted by a
Black artists, but instead considering and interrogating how their work represents Black
subjectivity and recognizes “that the central issues of race always appear historically in
articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed and
recrossed [sic] by the categories of class, or gender and ethnicity.”
8
As Hall explains:
Films are not necessarily good because black people make them. They are not
necessarily ‘right-on’ by virtue of the fact that they deal with the black experience.
Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject you are plunged
headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed, political
argument and debate: a critical politics, a politics of criticism.
9

Instead of a focus on a strategy of reversals—replacing “bad” or “negative” images of black
subjects with “good” or “positive” images—Hall argues, Black British filmmakers should refuse
to represent the Black experience as monolithic and always and only “positive.”
bell hooks speaks of the utility of a politics of criticism, asserting:

Experiencing black cultural production from the standpoint of progressive critique
does, in fact, change the nature of our pleasure. It compels the black consumer to
make a break with modes of passive consumption. It intervenes in the kind of
essentialist thinking that would have us assume anything done in the name of
blackness is righteous and should be celebrated. As well, it breaks with the other
critical tradition that merely raises the simple question of negative and positive
representation.
10

Drawing on Hall and hooks’ conversations, I conceptualize “politics of viewing” as dialogue and
an active debate that manifests as “a critical politics” whereby media representations are not
merely evaluated on the basis of “negative” or “positive” qualities, but are also interrogated in
ways that illustrate a wrestling with a host of concerns and (competing) interests, simultaneously.

8
Ibid., 444.
9
Ibid.
10
bell hooks, “Dialectically Down With the Critical Program,” in Black Popular Culture, ed.
Gina Dent (New York: The New Press, 1983), 48–55.

146
For instance, Black television viewers struggle to negotiate their pleasures in consuming media
texts, concerns over the potential power a specific media text may have in affirming existing
racist and sexist ideologies, and deciding who should be held accountable for media images that
maybe detrimental to out-group perceptions of Black Americans. I do not introduce politics of
viewing as an entirely novel concept. Prior studies of Black audiences touch on the ways in
which the viewing experience for Black Americans is actively negotiated in light of many of the
concerns articulated above. However, what I aim to do is encapsulate this activity of negotiation
by putting forth politics of viewing as a theoretical model that articulates the processing of such
concerns. Moreover, I situate new communication platforms, such as social media sites, blogs,
etc., and their integration with or connections to “traditional” media forms such as television, as
integral to contemporary politics of viewing. Such online mediums of communication afford
Black Americans new counter-public spaces in which to wrestle with interpretations of texts, and
seek to collectively define and police the boundaries of what is acceptable to watch and take
pleasure in.
Twitter has emerged as an ordinary space of “everyday talk” for some Black Americans;
an arena in which they can “jointly develop understandings of their collective interests and create
strategies to navigate the complex political world.”
11
Traditionally, Black counterpublics have
existed within physical spaces such as barbershops and churches, and with Black media such as
radio and local television. Black counterpublics are defined by their relative exclusion of non-
Blacks, as their primary goal is to facilitate dynamic open-ended discourses in which Black
interlocutors may speak freely without being either incidentally overheard or actively surveilled

11
Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black
Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1.

147
by others.
12
Black counterpublics are not historically static or ideologically cohesive; they are
internally contested spaces. However, within these spaces, Black Americans produce “hidden
transcripts, not with a single unchanging voice, but with many that are all distinctly shaped by
the position of blackness in American society.”
13

Twitter enables some of the traditional characteristics of Black counterpublics at the same
time as it challenges others. As with more traditional Black counterpublic spaces, Twitter offers
a dynamic, contested discursive space in which Black users come together to debate and
negotiate the meaning of Black identities and cultural experiences in society. Unlike traditional
Black counterpublic spaces, however, the population of Twitter users participating in this open-
ended discourse is not limited to Black users. Melissa Harris-Perry explains that the collective
hidden transcripts that are crafted within Black counterpublics happen “beneath the surveillance
of dominant classes.”
14
However, in the age of Black Twitter, the use of hashtags and Trending
Topics not only makes the everyday talk of Black users visible and accessible to others, but it
seems to explicitly invite the eyes, if not the tweets, of racial others.
Making Scandal a “Black Show”

Drawing upon Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, cultural
studies scholars conceptualize culture as a site of cultural struggle. During any particular period,
every society has, and maintains, a dominant system of practices, meanings and values. This
dominant system of practices, meanings and values saturate the consciousness of a society and
inform and structure the lived experiences of those within a society.
15
As Raymond Williams

12
Ibid., 9.
13
Ibid., 6.
14
Ibid., 7.
15
Raymond Williams, “Base and Supersturcture in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in
Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 31–49.

148
argues, this dominant system provides “a set of meanings and values which as they are
experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.”
16
Hegemony—the dominant system
of practices, meanings and values—is neither singular nor static; it must be continually
“renewed, recreated and defended.”
17
Thus, in any society there is constant struggle over
alternative meanings and values, opinions and attitudes, and practices. These alternative ways of
viewing the world compete against the dominant system. However, the competition is not about
“winning” but instead a jockeying for “position.” Stuart Hall explains: “Cultural hegemony is
never about pure victory or pure domination (that’s not what the term means); it is never a zero-
sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture; it
is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting
out of it.”
18

Post-race and colorblind racial discourses exist as the dominant lenses through which to
understand social relations in American society today. Such discourses inform the practices that
are employed within the television industry more broadly, and in the politics of representation
Shonda Rhimes and the ABC network have articulated through the programs’ production and in
their conceptions of the audience for Scandal. Black fans of Scandal generate and circulate
alternative racial discourses and interpretations of the program in ways that subvert efforts to
situate the show outside of blackness. They transform Scandal into a “Black show,” a status that
Ada Gay Griffin would reserve for productions that have their artistic vision controlled “by
Black artists on subjects and forms that reference the Black experience and imagination.”
19

16
Ibid., 38.
17
Ibid.
18
Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” Social Justice 20, no. 1 (1993):
106–107.
19
Ada Gay Griffin, “Seizing the Moving Image: Reflections of a Black Independent Producer,”
in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (New York: The New Press, 1983), 231.

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Scandal would not necessarily fit within Griffin’s definition of a Black cultural production
because even though it is led by a Black female showrunner it very rarely grapples with “the
Black experience.” Nonetheless, there a sense in which Scandal “belongs” to Black people, and
according to Melissa Harris-Perry to the extent that Black Americans perceive a show as
“theirs,” it becomes a part of Black ideological development and cultural politics.
Image Memes
Image memes played a role in the discursive construction of Scandal as a Black
cultural text, and fans frequently referenced Scandal in general, or Olivia in particular, in relation
to Black public figures and celebrities (e.g. President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle
Obama, comedian Dave Chappell, etc.), and television and film characters that have resonance
within the community (see Table 2). Although some of the memes feature Black celebrities and
characters that are likely recognizable outside of the Black community, some, such as the memes
that featured Bernie Mac as Buster from the film How To Be A Player, Celie from The Color
Purple, and Fred Sanford from the television sitcom Sanford and Sons, are probably not as well
known within the mainstream. In several presentations I have given about these memes to
predominately white students, they have had difficulty naming the characters or the films. I
encountered a similar response when I showed them the meme featuring a side by side of Olivia
Pope and Iyanla Vanzant (Figure 10), an inspirational speaker, author, and “relationship expert”
who made frequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the late 1990s. In the meme
there is a reference to Vanzant’s Iyanla: Fix My Life, a reality television series she hosts on
Oprah’s OWN. Each episode Vanzant is charged with helping guests heal emotionally and find
closure through addressing past traumas such as domestic abuse, parental abandonment, drug
addiction, etc.

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Table 2 Black Celebrities, Personalities, Politicians and Characters in Memes
Film characters Television characters & personalities Other
Celie and “Mister” (Whoopi
Goldberg and Donald Glover, The
Color Purple)
Madae (Tyler Perry, Diary of a Mad
Black Woman)
Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson,
Pulp Fiction)
Felisha, Craig Jones, Smokey
(Angela Means Kaya, Ice Cube,
Chris Tucker, Friday)
Amanda Waller (Angela Basset, The
Green Hornet)
Buster (Bernie Mac, How To Be A
Player)
Will (Will Smith, Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air)
Dave Chappell (The Chappell Show)
NeNe Leaks (The Real Housewives
of Atlanta)
Whitley and Byron (A Different
World)
Iyanla Vanzant (Iyanla Fix My Life)
Evelyn (Basketball Wives Miami)
Cliff Huxtable, Olivia Kendall (Bill
Cosby, Raven Symoné The Cosby
Show)
Fred Sanford (Red Foxx, Sanford
and Son)
K. Michelle (Love & Hip Hop:
Atlanta)
President Barack Obama
First Lady Michelle Obama
Kevin Hart
Drake
Michael Jackson (from “Thriller”
music video)
Oprah

Although memes like the “Iyanla Fix My Life” meme work on its own to relay the
message—which is that Olivia needs someone to help her get her life in order after the decisions
she has made in her personal relationship with Fitz—there are additional layers to these memes
that require background knowledge. For instance, the irony of having Vanzant fix Olivia’s life is
that she is often viewed within the Black community as unqualified to give advice, as she has no
formal training as a mental health professional. On her show she often makes recommendations
she should not, uses abusive language when interacted with guests she is charged with helping.
Both Vanzant and Olivia are flawed “fixers” in different capacities, as one does not have the
proper tools to do her job, and the other can fix the problems of others by not her own. Thus, in
order to decipher these types of memes, viewers not only have to have the media literacy
necessary to decode memes they also need the cultural competency to understand “how one
message relates to other sets of representations [and] images” that viewers are familiar with.
20

All viewers bring to the moment of viewing television a wealth of experiences and knowledge of

20
David Morley, “Interpreting Television: The Nationwide Audience,” in Television, Audiences,
& Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), 77.

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other media texts. The cultural competency of Black fans is on display in their referencing of
media texts that may be familiar with other Black fans. The ability to read or interpret these
memes within the framework of these other media text is what creates the sense of shared
identification with other Black fans.

Figure 10 Iyanla Fix My Life Meme

Affirmations of Black Cultural Experiences and Collective Interpretations
When Rhimes says that she writes people of color as if they were human beings she
appears to mean that she erase their racial—and often times gender—specificity. Because of this
the tendency toward erasure, those moments in Scandal’s narrative where race and racial identity
are alluded to become hyper-visible moments as Black fans often celebrate them and use them as
points of identification, and even validation of their own experiences. In the season opener,
Olivia Pope, a woman who is usually quick to dole out rapid-paced verbal assaults that manage
to somehow be simultaneously polite and lethal, stands idly by as she is confronted by her irate
father Rowan Pope. Rowan and Olivia stand at an airport hangar after he whisks her away from
her home upon breaking news speculation that she is the president’s mistress. After telling Olivia

152
that she should have “aimed higher than First Lady,” he leans down, encroaches on her personal
space standing inches from her face, and asks, “Did I not raise you better? How many times have
I told you? You have to be…what?” After as seconds pause, Olivia slightly hesitates before
saying—in a quivering voice and with her eyes directed downward—“Twice…twice as good.”
Rowan then interjects, punctuating the words “twice” and “half”: “You have to be twice as good
to get half of what they have.”
Table 3 Sample Tweet Reactions to "Twice as Good" Line
Twice as good=lessons learned early in black households #scandal

Dear White Pals who are #Gladiators that live about “being twice as good to achieve half” is a standard Black parent
line!

Something every black parent tell their child ‘u have to be twice as good to get half of what they have” #Scandal

You have to be twice as good to get half of what they have.” #UniversalBlackGirlSpeech #Scandal @ScandalABC

The twice as good philosophy is real talk in black households nationwide. #truth #ScandalIsBack”

That twice as hard/half as far line resonated with every black person I know. Kudos! This is why we need more
black tv writers!

Joe Morton to Olivia: “You have to be twice as good to get half of what they have.” What every Black parent tells
their child”

The exchange between Olivia and Rowan became a moment that resonated with Black
fans of the show (see Table 3). During the East Coast airing close to one thousand original tweets
(N=997) referenced Rowan’s closing line of dialogue. Moreover, the same line was re-tweeted
over two thousand times. Although there was no direct mention of race by Olivia or Rowan,
Black fans interpreted “you” to not just mean a reference to Olivia as an individual, but as a
racialized subject. The “they” then was understood as meaning “Whites” even though “they” as
used by Olivia is not referencing a specific person or group. Black fans of Scandal deciphered
Olivia’s words as representative of the teachings learned at an early age about the need to work
exponentially harder than white Americans in order to merit a fraction of the success and

153
recognition that they are privileged to, possibly for less effort. This exchange serves as an
example of one of the few moments where Olivia’s racial identity is covertly brought to the fore
on Scandal. Usually, Olivia’s body serves as signification of her blackness and her experiences
in her political and personal worlds are never colored by that blackness. Black fan’s re-
circulation of the line functioned as a form of “testifying” meant to authenticate, or validate its
“truth” within Black cultural experiences.
Figure 11 Ne Ne Leaks "Read, honey" Meme

Black cultural identity was also signified by fans through their spontaneous collective
interpretations of specific scenes in the Season 3 premiere. During the opening ten minutes of the
program, fans sent 300 original tweets in response to the exchange between Rowan and Olivia
Pope. Many expressed awe and surprise, and praised the skillful delivery of Rowan’s critique of
Olivia’s lifestyle choices. Specifically, they used the word “read” or “reading” to describe
Rowan’s actions. “Reading” is a discursive practice in which the speaker engages the receiver in
an unfiltered, and unrestrained “truth telling” diatribe in order to set the receiver “‘straight,’ to
put them in their place or to reveal a secret about [them] in front of others” in a way meant to
embarrass them.
21
In the case of Rowan, his “reading” of Olivia was not playful, but rather

21
E. Patrick Johnson, “Snap! Culture: A Different Kind of Reading,” Text and Performance
Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1995): 125, doi:10.1080/10462939509366110.

154
serious and hostile as it was marked by aggression, a rapid pace in delivery, and invasion of her
personal space.
Reading is a “signifyin’” practice like “playing the dozens,” which is “a test of verbal
dexterity” whereby individuals aggressively attempt to best each other “through ritual insult” in
the presence of an audience.
22
Although the origins of terms “read” or “reading” to describe the
delivery of a message in a particular fashion is often attributed to Black gay men, usage of these
terms have become prevalent in Black communities due to depictions of Black gay male culture
in film and television, and the recent appropriation of the term by Black women like reality
television star Ne Ne Leaks (see Figure 11) from Real Housewives of Atlanta. Individuals
belonging to a group “tend to share a cultural orientation towards decoding messages in
particular ways,”
23
Black fans’ interpretation of the scene between Rowan and Olivia, and the
near simultaneous use of “read” and “reading” indicate a not only a shared lexicon, but also
shared cultural knowledge and practices. When Black fans tweeted their interpretations of the
scene then, they signified to other Black fans that they are “in the know.”
Jokes
Similar to the memes that were circulated, humor and intertextuality were also
incorporated into Black fans’ response to Rowan’s “reading” of Olivia and at other moments in
the broadcast. For instance, in one tweet—“You get a read! You get a read! You get a read!
#scandal” —a fan gestures to the moment in 2004 when Oprah Winfrey enthusiastically gave
away nearly three hundred cars to her studio audience, yelling and point at them: “You get a car!
You get a car! You get a car!” Another fan tweeted a joke in which, Joe Morton Jr., the actor
who plays the role of Rowan Pope, is called by his characters’ name from another show, the

22
Ibid., 124.
23
Morley, “Interpreting Television: The Nationwide Audience,” 88.

155
1980s sitcom A Different World. Morton appeared in only seven episodes of the series, playing
the role of Byron Douglas III, the jilted fiancé of Whitley Gilbert, one of the shows’ main
characters. However, fans often make reference to Rowan as “Whitley’s Byron,” and even
circulated a Scandal-related meme that featured Byron and Whitley at their wedding ceremony
(Figure 12).
Figure 12 Whitley’s Byron Meme

Jokes in general were one of the ways in which Black fans engaged in discussion of
Scandal’s plotline and characters. As with the memes, Black celebrities, artists, personalities,
and political figures were referenced. The most prominent jokes however, involved hair and/or
Jesus, which both have particular relevance within Black culture. The jokes often make use of
Black vernacular slang, reference Black hair-grooming practices, such as wearing a “wrap” to
keep one’s hair in place, getting a “blowout” at a Dominican salon, wearing a lace-front wig, and
getting a relaxer (see Table 4). There were also frequent tweets about “snatching edges” which is
used to describe when something so good happens that a person is left speechless, and in awe.
Black women are particularly protective of their “edges” because, when their hair is relaxed and

156
pulled back too tightly they can go bald around the crown of their heads. Thus, to have one’s
edges snatched is to be left in a fragile, vulnerable state.
Table 4 Tweet Sample of Hair Jokes
@shondarhimes what do we use in Kerry’s hair? shea butter, hope, aspiration, jealousy and tears of her haters
They need to start selling #oliviapopelacefron. I would buy it, her hair is tight!! @kerrywashington
Olivia's wrap is flourishing though just cascaded back into form #scandal
When did Abby visit a Dominican salon to get that blowout?! #Scandal
No one snatches edges like Shonda. It's Beyoncé and Shonda. Snatching edges down to the fucking follicle bulb!
Olivia Popes edges were bathed in the blood of Michelle Obamas post relaxer towel sweat
#laidoutllikeaCOGICrevival #Scandal

Critical Readings
Throughout season three, there was one recurring plot point that generated interlocking
discourses race, gender, and sexuality from fans. This plot point was related to other characters
unfavorable view of Olivia’s relationship with Fitz, and the use of the term “whore” to describe
her. The use of this word began in “It’s Handled,” the season three premiere episode. Upon
arrival that the airport hangar, Rowan begins his verbal assault on Olivia by saying to her:
“You’ve gotten yourself into a lot of trouble, Olivia, and I’m here to fix it. You raised your skirt
and opened your knees and gave it away to a man with too much power. You’re not rare; you’re
not special. Your story is no different from a thousand stories in this town.” Rowan’s words are
veiled in comparison to other characters who outright call Olivia a “whore” and a “slut”: Vice
President Sally Langston comes out and angrily upbraids the president for “sleeping with
whores,” while the White House Chief of Staff, Cyrus Bean, devises a plan to “play the
ambitious slut card” as a means of shifting blame for the affair to Olivia after he discovers she
has risen to success through romantic relationships with powerful, older men. Fitz’s wife Mellie

157
later calls Olivia a “whore” as they are gathered to discuss a plan for shifting the conversation
about Fitz’s affair. The use of the word “whore,” implicit in Rowan’s remarks, and explicit in
other characters’ comments, became widely remarked upon moments and emerged as the topic
of fans and anti-fans’ discursive struggle over how to interpret the Olivia/Fitz storyline, and what
to make of Rhimes’ decision to characterize Olivia in this manner.
Many of the fans live-tweeting the season three premiere episode did not offer their views
on Rhimes’ use of “whore” to characterize Olivia. When fans did have something to say about it,
however, comments were directed inward at the text as they often took issue with particular
characters hurling the term at Olivia. In these moments fans, situated Olivia as their imaginary
friend whom they had to defend, especially because she was being called a whore by the white
women characters on the show. These fans, in the moment of watching the program, were not
concerned with passing judgment on whether the characterization of Olivia as a whore is “good”
or “bad,” or might have ideological, political, or social ramifications outside of the television
context. Instead they are immersed in the act of watching the narrative unfold and as they do so
they voice their pleasures (or in the case of certain characters and plot points) and displeasures.
Warner suggests that in order to understand the affective response of Black women fans'
towards Olivia and Scandal, one must consider that Black women on television “are rarely
allowed to be main characters in stories about choice, desire and fantasy.”
24
Scandal affords
these viewers a romantic fantasy that they can experience remotely and use to escape the day-to-
day demand and cultural expectations of society.
25
It would be imprudent to think that fans that

24
Kristen J. Warner, “If Loving Olitz Is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right,” The Black Scholar:
Journal of Black Studies and Research 45, no. 1 (2015): 37,
doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.997599.
25
Ien Ang, ed., Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World
(London: Routledge, 1996); Janice A Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and
Popular Literature (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

158
raise no critical objections to Scandal’s characterization of Olivia are apolitical in their
consumption of the text. As Jacqueline Bobo’s exploration of Black women’s cultural readings
of films such as The Color Purple illustrate, sometimes subversive readings of a text can occur
as viewers actively tease out the parts of the narrative that give them pleasure and those that do
not. As indicated by a number of comments, Black fans of Scandal perceive Olivia to be a
complex character, and some find the romance between she and Fitz thrilling to watch—even if
it is perceived as inappropriate, it elicits multifaceted feelings.
Although the majority of tweets from fans I examined did not critique the shows’
characterization of Olivia as a “whore” in “It’s Handled” or in other episodes, some Scandal fans
were critical of Rhimes for using the term. They voiced outrage by tweeting all are part of their
tweets in capital letters, using multiple exclamation marks, or by using the words “No!” or
“Why?” followed by commentary on the scenes when characters used the word. Although most
fans, however, did not direct their criticism to Rhimes specifically by including her Twitter user
name in their tweets (@shondarhimes), others did, and often included Washington, other actors,
program writers, and ABC’s publicity staff. The fans that directed their comments to Rhimes and
others critiqued what they perceived to be an “obsession” with the use of whore as a description
of Olivia. Fans felt that the repeated use of whore diminished Washington’s character and lodged
complaints against Rhimes’ “garbage writing.” Some fans implored Rhimes to stop having
characters on Scandal refer to Olivia as a whore and stressed her other qualities, such as her
education, intelligence, and business acumen. The general tenor of fans’ critical of the discourses
used in reference to Olivia’s relationship with Fitz appeared to be that of frustration. For them
Olivia is a dynamic character who cannot be reduced to the label “whore.”
Black Anti-fan Discourses of Race, Gender, & Sexuality

159
In addition to those active viewers or fans engaged in the pleasurable experience of
viewing by posting their reactions in real-time, there is a small, but visible contingent of anti-
fans who frequently voice their opinions and dislike and in doing so contribute to the politics of
viewing Scandal. Jonathan Gray describes anti-fans as “those who hate a given text, personality,
or genre” but actively seek out these objects in order to deride them.
26
Anti-fans are active,
organized, and productive in that they generate “producerly texts” in similar ways as fans.
27

Scandal anti-fans for example, generate tweets and image memes that express criticisms of the
Olivia/Fitz relationship and those who take pleasure in that storyline.
Through my examination of the tweets generated throughout season three, I identified three
types of anti-fans. First, there are the purported “non-viewers” who circulate their dislike for the
series at moments when they know fans will be watching. These anti-fans make an effort to
tweet before and during the broadcast of Scandal, each week. Second, I would classify the next
group of anti-fans as those who “hate-watch” the show in order to deride it. This group of anti-
fans often voice being “over” the show, but continue to tune in and express their displeasure
online. Finally, the third group that I categorize as anti-fans are actually fans of Scandal, but they
either do not like Olivia Pope as a character or the narrative arc about her relationship with Fitz.
This last type of anti-fan is visible through comments made in support of Mellie—Fitz’s wife—
and in vocalizations of “hate” for Oliz (the pairing of Olivia and Fitz). I view this last category of
anti-fans as anti-fans in a limited capacity. I have chosen to include them in my discussion of
anti-fan discourse on Scandal because they express similar criticisms as those who are non-
viewers and hate-watchers. Therefore, I view these fans are against the Olivia/Fitz storyline
through the same lens as anti-fans.

26
Gray, “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television Without Pity and Textual Dislike,” 841.
27
Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.”

160
Interlocking discourses of race, gender, and sexuality surface in anti-fans’ criticism of
Scandal in several ways. First, Black anti-fans voice displeasure that the show perpetuates the
image of a Black woman as a “side chick.” Second, they take issue that not only is Olivia Pope
depicted as a “side chick,” she is a “side chick” to a white man. Third, anti-fans criticize the fact
that a Black actress of Washington’s caliber was given such a role to play to begin with. Finally,
anti-fans articulate interconnected discourses of race, gender, and sexuality when they voice
concern that Black female viewers who watch Scandal will be influenced to by its representation
of infidelity.
Most of anti-fans’ displeasure with Scandal stems from one primary assertion: Kerry
Washington’s character perpetuates the image of a Black woman as a “side chick.”
28
“Side-
chick” is a racially coded term used in reference to women of color engaged in a romantic
relationship with a man already in a committed relationship (i.e. has a wife or girlfriend). Side
chicks “are limited to booty calls and late night texts, [and] are expected to play their position
(never interfering with a man’s ‘real relationship’).”
29
In any other instance where a female
character is engaged in a romantic relationship with a married man she would be called his
“mistress”; however, Boylorn notes that this is a privilege reserved for white female characters.
Black women characters are viewed through a radicalized and gendered discursive framework
that is drawn from both the past and the present. The colloquial use of “side chick,” for instance,
though having origins in contemporary rap music, can be understood as a twenty-first century
derivative of the Jezebel archetype, a figure whose association with Black women dates back to
slavery. The image of the Jezebel—historically represented as a mixed-race woman with

28
The term “side chick” is just one of the characterizations used to refer to Olivia Pope. Others
include “side piece,” “jump off,” “THOT (That Hoe Over There),” “whore,” and “hoe.” It is
worth noting, however, that anti-fans are not only in using these terms.
29
Robin M. Boylorn, “On the Glorification of the Side Chick,” Gawker, October 4, 2014,
http://gawker.com/on-the-glorification-of-the-side-chick-1642317478.

161
prominent European features—was used as a racialized and gendered symbol of Black women’s
deviant sexuality.
30
Used to pathologize and thus stigmatize Black women as promiscuous, the
image of the Jezebel has evolved into other tropes, including the “hoochie” and the “gold
digger.”
31
These aforementioned tropes are built upon perceptions of Black women as sexually
aggressive, immoral, and materialistic; beyond satisfying a presumed insatiable appetite for sex,
their illicit behavior is also driven by economic gain as they are believe to primarily pursue
relationships that are financially advantageous.
The “side chick” both deviates from and shares some characteristics with the “hoochie”
and the “gold digger.” Like these other tropes, the side chick is represented as a seductress who,
without shame, “steals” men from other women. However, while economic gain may be one
reason why the side chick pursues a relationship with a married man, this is not always the only
motivation. Each of these off-shoots of the Jezebel archetype is classed; they have been
predominately used to characterize Black working-class women’s sexual behavior. However, the
rise of Black middle-class women’s visibility in reality television has brought about a shift where
were they too are subject to the categorization of “gold digger” and “side chick.” In their
referencing of other shows in relation to Scandal, for instance, a frequent refrain from anti-fans
is that it like Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta and Basketball Wives—both reality programs on Vh1—
glorifies the image of the side chick. In these cases class status does not offer “transcendence” to
the rather race-neutral (read: white) category of “mistress”; as Black women they these reality
personalities, and Olivia Pope as a character are typecast within the racially coded term “side
chick.”

30
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment.
31
West, “Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel: Historical Images of Black Women and Their
Implications for Psychotheraphy”; Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment.

162
Related to the commentary about Olivia as a side chick, discourses of race, gender, and
sexuality also appear in anti-fan talk about the interracial nature of the pairing of Olivia and Fitz.
For example, anti-fans tweeted:
#Scandal is just a Black woman being a white man’s whore. We got to do better

I have a problem with a powerful Black women [sic] being a more powerful white
man’s side-piece #Scandal #inners

I dont [sic] know Shonda Rimes like that, but you'd think she'd know better than to
cast a blk [sic] woman as a side chick to a white man

@ScandalABC [@mention] Why are Black women and Black men fascinated about
a show that portrays a Black women [sic] as a white mans [sic] WHORE?

These comments referencing the racial difference of the two actors playing the roles of Olivia
and Fitz represent recognition of the historical relations between Black women and white men in
which Black women’s bodies were exploited for the pleasure of white men. Although these anti-
fans do not use the term “Jezebel,” the image and its place in America’s institution of slavery is
evoked by the use of “side chick,” “side piece” and “whore.” The third tweet (indirectly)
criticizes Rhimes, for she, as a Black woman, in the eyes of the anti-fan should be cognizant of
this history, yet she chose to position a Black female character is such a relationship. The fourth
tweet serves as a critique directed at Black viewers. The underlying assertion there is the same as
the first example—shouldn’t they know, or can’t they see that the same dynamics are being
represented? If so, then why do they continue to watch?
Black anti-fans’ discourses of race, gender, and sexuality, and discussion of their
investment in the representation of Black womanhood presented in Scandal manifests in some of
their comments about why they choose not to watch the program. In some instances, anti-fans
criticize the fact that Washington was given a character like Olivia to portray. They assert that

163
Washington “deserves better” and question why her mainstream visibility as an actress
32
had to
come at the expense of playing “the other woman”:
Halle Berry had to sex Billy Bob Thornton to win an Academy award and Kerry
Washington has to be a White man’s sidechick [sic]

My Blackness will not allow me to watch Scandal. It’s crazy that in order for a Black
actress to blow up she has to play a side chick

Kerry Washington deserves better than being the most famous side-piece on TV
#Scandal.

Kerry Washington would be far more interesting to me on TV if she were the
president’s wife and not his side piece. I just can’t watch

In the first example Washington’s role is referenced intertextuality; it is compared to that of
actress Halle Berry who, after working in the film industry for decades play a diversity of roles,
received her first Best Actress Academy Award in 2001 for playing a Southern, poor single
mother in the film Monster’s Ball. Berry’s win—which at the time was the first for a Black
woman—was critiqued because it came from a role in which she was graphically displayed on
screen having sex with the character played by Billy Bob Thornton. The second tweet example in
many ways mirrors the first as it can be interpreted as an indictment on the types of roles Black
women gain mainstream visibility and acclaim for. In the subsequent tweets, anti-fans appear to
stress that the role of Olivia Pope is a disservice to Washington and a missed opportunity to go
beyond an overused stereotype.
It is worth noting that besides a few instances, anti-fans did not direct their opinions
about the show to Washington, Rhimes, nor to ABC. Based on some of the statements made by

32
Kerry Washington has been active in the film and television industries as an actress since
1994, but she has often played only supporting roles. Prior to 2012, when she did have a
significant role she primarily appeared in films that featured primarily Black casts (e.g. Miracle
at St. Anna, For Colored Girls, I Think I Love My Wife). While Washington acted in a number of
films that garnered popular and critical attention (e.g. Ray, Mr. & Mrs. Smith), it was not until
after her role in Scandal that she became a household name as an actress.

164
anti-fans, however, these parties—particularly Rhimes— are implicated in their criticism of
Scandal. At the time of Scandal’s season three return it remained the only commercial network
drama to feature a Black woman in a lead role. Given the absence of Black women in lead, co-
lead, or recurring roles in network dramas, and the fact that Scandal is written and produced by a
Black woman, it would not be a stretch to speculate that some Black Americans may have held
expectations that the program would provide a portrayal of a Black female character that differed
significantly from that found in other genres, particularly reality television.
33
Rhimes, as a Black
woman working in the television industry as a creative voice shaping television content, is
inevitably subject to the burden of representation. By virtue of being a Black voice in the
otherwise closed off space of television production, Rhimes’ and her work are called upon to
speak for and thus represent “the many voices and viewpoints of the entire community that is
marginalized from the means of representation in society.”
34
The burden of representation places
an obligation on Black creative professionals to construct narratives that “authentically”
represent the Black experience and that work to dismantle hegemonic discourses about
Blackness located in media generated by non-Blacks. Rhimes’ choice to have Washington
portray a character like Olivia Pope then, is seen by anti-fans as antithetical to the goals of
shifting public perceptions of the Black community and intervening in an industry that has long
been in the business of proliferating images that can be used to sustain racist and sexist
perceptions of Black women.

33
Throughout the season anti-fans often made comments that lumped Scandal in with other
shows that depict Black women as mistresses or “side chicks.” Such shows included Vh1’s
reality television series Love and Hip Hop: Atlanta and BET’s scripted drama Being Mary Jane,
which premiered midway through Scandal’s season three.
34
Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, 91.

165
Connected to the interpretation of Olivia’s character as representative of the side chick
archetype and thus a “bad” or “negative” image of Black womanhood, Black anti-fans object to
Scandal on moral grounds, asserting that the program glorifies cheating. Anti-fans tweeted
comments like the following:
@kerrywashington She is showcasing to young Black women that being a married
man's sidechick is ok. And who is/fastest AIDS segment?

I think #Scandal is a show that advocates being a bustdown [sic], sidechick etc. And
does it under the guise of a powerful Black woman

I don't even watch #Scandal and I hate it. Not only is it brainwashing and
propoganda, [sic] but it's telling Sista's it's ok to be a sidechick. Sad

As illustrated by the sample tweets above, anti-fans view Scandal not simply a “bad text” by
virtue of its depiction of Washington’s character as a mistress, but also a text that is morally bad
for Black women. Anti-fans voice or perform concern that women who watch the show will see
Olivia as a role model and engage in similar behavior. Thus, anti-fans caution Black women fans
of the show to “don’t ever become the side chick.”
Anti-Fan Memes and Jokes Directed at Fans
Morality concerns are one facet of anti-fans’ criticism of programs they dislike, so is the
belief that individuals who take pleasure in consuming at particular text—deemed immoral by
anti-fans—will be susceptible to its harmful influence. Black anti-fans’ displeasure with Scandal
stems from a concern for third-person effects.
35
These anti-fans worried or at least performed
concern, for the potential impact the show could have on Black women viewers. Undergirding
Scandal anti-fans’ concern is the presumption that Black women are easily influenced by the
representations of Black female characters on television. Such a perception—particularly as this

35
Richard M. Perloff, “The Third Person Effect: A Critical Review and Synthesis,” Media
Psychology 1, no. 4 (1999): 353–378.

166
concern seems to be frequently voiced by Black male anti-fans—is gendered; it speaks to the
belief that Black women, as women are emotionally vulnerable, mentally impressionable, or are
unable to differentiate immoral behavior depicted on television from behavior they should
employ in the real world.
Some anti-fans view Black women as hypocrites for taking pleasure in the romance
depicted in Scandal. A number of image memes generated by anti-fans articulate this point. In
Figure 8, an anti-fan produced a meme that depicts a couple angrily shouting at each other.
Below the image of that couple is an image of Olivia and Fitz in the Oval Office sharing and
intimate embrace. The accompanying text reads “Females be like ‘I hate infidelity’…until
Thursday.” The implication is that in the context of every-day real-world relationships women
would confront someone who cheats on them, but when it comes to watching Scandal they
suspend their hate of infidelity on Thursdays—the night show airs—in order to take pleasure in
the Olitz plot-line. This point is extended into Figure 9, which features yet another image of
Olivia and Fitz in an embrace. This time the text reads “Girls be like I can’t stand cheaters but on
Thursday nights be like awwwww.” This image meme expresses the same view as the first
example: Black women have a different affective response to infidelity depending on whether
the infidelity occurs in the real world or the fictional world of the show.

167
Figure 13 Infidelity Meme #1

Figure 14 Infidelity Meme #2

What is particular striking about the case of Black anti-fandom around Scandal is that it,
in some ways, mirrors discourse from Black male critics of popular works by Black women
creative professionals. In describing the context of Black women’s readings of the film The
Color Purple—based on the novel of the same name written by Alice Walker—Jacqueline Bobo
notes that Black male critics took the film to task for perpetuating a racist and harmful image of
Black men and the Black family.
36
Cognizant of the ideological force and potential effects of the
images of Black males circulated through these texts, Black men derided the film, viewed it as
“counter to the best interests of Black people,” and saw Black women as culpable in the

36
Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers, 3.

168
perpetuation of racism by virtue of their positive reactions to the film. Similarly, Scandal anti-
fans engage in form of policing in which a predetermined interpretation of the text is provided in
order to limit the frames through which viewers of the program can make sense of it. For anti-
fans, Scandal does not promote a “positive” representation of Black womanhood, and therefore
does not fit within the framework of Black respectability politics. Respectability politics
emerged in the early twentieth century in Black Baptist churches across the United States and
asserted that it was the responsibility of every individual in the Black community to self-regulate
and self-improve their behavior “along moral, educational, and economic lines.”
37
The aim of
such politics both then and now has been to distance Blacks from the images perpetuated by
racist stereotypes. Politics of respectability call on Black people to monitor their public behavior
because it is viewed as having “the power to either refute or confirm stereotypical
representations.”
38
Historically, discourses of respectability have tended to hold Black women
accountable for the rise and fall of the entire race, since they were viewed as primarily
responsible for raising families. Therefore, Black women had the responsibility to model moral
behavior in public and private in order to insure that the next generation of Black children grew
up as respectable citizens.
If we consider anti-fans’ criticism of Black women watching the Scandal in relation to
politics of respectability, the process of viewing the show is equated with actively “condoning”
cheating and consequently undermining efforts to dismantle stereotypes about Black women, and
by extension, the entire Black community. Such criticisms are born from an awareness of the
panoptic gaze of others and how that gaze informs others’ attitudes about back Americans. Anti-

37
Evelyn Brooks Higginbottom, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black
Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 196.
38
Ibid.

169
fans, through their commentary, attempt to police Black women’s consumption of the text in an
effort to control public perception of the Black community. However, Black female fans of the
series actively take aim at anti-fans’ presumptions that because they watch Scandal they are
doing potential harm to themselves or others in their community. The following tweets are from
Black female fans who voiced frustration an anti-fan commentary about Scandal and their
consumption of the show and are illustrative of the ways in which some fans navigated through
criticism of their viewing of the series:
I wish people would stop saying #Scandal is about a Black women being a side chick
to a white man. It's so much more than that.

I wish people weren't so worried about Kerry Washington being a side chick in
Scandal and more how good of an actress she is

Olivia Pope is so much more than a side piece, at this point that part of the story is
small compared to the rest of her life. #Scandal

These Black women fans employ an oppositional gaze that is in response to anti-fan’s attempts
to police their agency in looking at Scandal as a text. I borrow this concept, “oppositional gaze”
from bell hooks who used it to describe a resistance strategy employed by Black women as a
way to navigate their film viewing experiences. hooks argues that Black women have had to
develop an oppositional gaze in order to avoid getting hurt by a lack of Black female presence on
screen. The oppositional gaze represents way of looking past race and gender for “aspects of
content, form, and language.”
39
Instead of turning away like anti-fans suggest they should, they
look, and in doing so they choose to interpret the show and Olivia’s character in their own way.
Their assertions that Pope is “so much more” or elsewhere that there are “layers” to her
character, speak to their negotiated reading of the text and their desire to extract pleasure from
viewing it despite criticism from non-viewers. In short, these Black women viewers employ a

39
hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 122.

170
strategy of looking and reading where they see Blackness as spectrum and refuse the primacy of
respectability.
40

Remarks on Anti-fan Critiques of Scandal

Intersecting discourses of race, gender, and sexuality permeate Black anti-fans’
commentary about Scandal. These anti-fans interpret the character of Olivia Pope through the
lens of a specific racialized and gendered stereotype, that of the “side chick.” They situate this
stereotype as negative and consequently deem the images represented in Scandal as “bad.” In
many ways such a stance can be viewed as uncritical. bell hooks explains that representations are
frequently discussed among Black Americans and such conversations focus on whether images
are considered “good” or “bad.”
41
What constitutes a “good” image is informed by whether it
differs from racist stereotypes. In hooks’ view this classification of images as either “good” are
“bad” is uncritical since it submerges “issues of context, form, audience, [and] experience (all of
which inform the construction of images).”
42

In voicing their dislike, contempt, and outrage at Scandal, Black anti-fans fail to consider
the program within the specific context of the genre (melodrama), and they make several
assumptions about what the viewing audience takes away from the text. Anti-fans assert that the
text, in its entirety, is “negative” by virtue of the plot line between Olivia and Fitz. Thus, it might
be easily concluded that anti-fans make an uncritical judgment. I however, wouldn’t make such a
definitive assertion, as I see some instances where there is a critical unpacking at play. This
unpacking involves an awareness of both the past and the contemporary landscape of Black

40
Nina Cartier, “Black Women On-Screen as Future Texts: A New Look at Black Pop Culture
Representations,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 150–157, doi:10.1353/cj.2014.0050.
41
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990),
72.
42
Ibid.

171
cultural experiences and Black representation. This awareness is then vocalized both implicitly
and explicitly in anti-fans’ reasoning for their dislike of Scandal. They situate their critiques
within the framework of Black women’s marginalization, on-screen and off-screen. Therefore, in
these instances of critical evaluation of Scandal I see anti-fans’ commentary as productive, and
instrumental in teasing out, making, and re-making Black political thought in reference to
contemporary representations of Black womanhood in television.
There are other aspects of anti-fan discourse about race, gender, and sexuality in reference
to Scandal that inhibit the re-making of Black political thought as inclusive of Black women’s
thoughts, pleasures, and experiences. Some anti-fans’ views of the medias influences on Black
women comes across as dismissive of Black women’s agency and relegates them to the position
of innocent, impressionable children. Such a stance is highly problematic and does more to
distance alliances between Black women and Black men when it comes to engaging in the
necessary conversations that can generate change not only in the realm of representation, but also
within the space of Black people’s everyday, lived experience in the Unites States.
I want to make one final, related, point about what I see as the inherent sexism in some of
the commentary tweeted predominately by Black male anti-fans. Though the nature of their talk
about Scandal can be viewed as sarcastic criticism or “snark,” on occasion, such talk is distinctly
misogynistic in tone. This usually happens when anti-fans direct their insults not at Scandal but
at the Black female viewers. For instance, some anti-fans repeatedly refer to Black women who
view the show as “hoes” and “side chicks.” And while I did not find instances where such
comments were directed specifically at individual fans, it is nonetheless disconcerting. It would
be simple to dismiss tweets that refer to Black women in these derogatory terms as instances of
“flaming” or “trolling”—hostile or aggressive communication behavior meant to insult, ridicule

172
or provocative an individual or an imagined audience or group.
43
However, it would be negligent
to characterize such acts in this manner.
These tweets represent the “darker dimensions” of anti-fandom
44
as textual hatred is
directed outside of the text towards the human audience members viewing Scandal. While Gray
touches on the side of anti-fandom that engages in derogatory discourse in the form of racist and
sexist comments,
45
he does not evaluate or discuss the broader ramifications of such discourse.
Australian scholar Emma Jane critiques Gray’s sidelining of anti-fan vitriol that otherwise would
be deemed acts of speech that are sexist, misogynist, or racist. Jane asserts that researchers
cannot refrain from assessing the ethical dimensions of anti-fan activity since such activity “is
not an ethically neutral space in which the primary texts involved are those which provoke anti-
fan audience activity, and the only humans involved are anti-fan audience members. Instead,
anti-fans are also powerful media producers, and their targets can include human subjects who
may suffer real-life pain and suffering.”
46
By merely labeling certain discourses as an example of
“anti-fandom” or trolling there is a risk of “downplaying its force, potential ramifications, and
ethical questionability.”
47
In agreement with Jane, I see the critical distance maintained within
anti-fandom studies with respect to pejorative comments directed at fans of a text as problematic.
The commentary directed at Black female fans, by Black male anti-fans, is evidence of a much
larger issue: Black male misogyny targeted at Black women. By simply ignoring it as “trolling,”

43
Patrick B. O’Sullivan and Andrew J. Flanagin, “Reconceptualizing ‘Flaming’ and Other
Problematic Messages,” New Media & Society 5, no. 1 (2003): 69–94,
doi:10.1177/1461444803005001908.
44
Gray, “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television Without Pity and Textual Dislike,” 852.
45
Gray points to an example where some anti-fans posted racist and sexist comments about
Omarosa Stalworth, a reality television personality who participated on the NBC series The
Apprentice. Stalworth, a Black woman, was often vilified the show as manipulative and angry.
46
Emma A Jane, “Beyond Antifandom: Cheerleading, Textual Hate and New Media Ethics,”
International Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 186, doi:10.1177/1367877913514330.
47
Ibid.

173
a cry for attention or purely anti-fan “talk” that is then viewed exclusively through an audience
reception lens, such anti-fan activity is treated as harmless when it is in fact not without its
consequences.
Conclusion

The Season 3 premiere of Scandal, and several episodes that broadcast thereafter,
generated important conversation among viewers and non-viewers of the program. Anti-fans
voiced a politics of viewing that articulated disappointment in decisions made to portray Kerry
Washington’s character in a stereotyped way, and concern over the potential influence of
Scandal’s representation of Black womanhood. Ultimately, however, rather than explicitly
directing their criticisms to those involved in the production of the show, anti-fans place the
burden of responsibility on Scandal’s female fans, asserting that by virtue of continuing to watch
the program they are complicit in glorifying the image of Black women as “side chicks.” In so
doing, anti-fans view Black female fans as thwarting efforts to dismantle public perception of
Black women as immoral.
For their part, some fans’ politics of viewing Scandal were rooted in the pleasure in the
act of watching, reacting to, and discussing the show with other fans, and not about assessing or
criticizing the programs’ depiction of Black womanhood. Instead, Scandal surfaced as a text in
which they could escape and immerse themselves in the fast-paced plotlines and tawdry romance
between Olivia and Fitz. For other fans, their pleasure in viewing was temporarily suspended
during scenes in which Olivia was called a “whore.” These fans’ politics of viewing demonstrate
the negotiation between pleasure and representational politics as they actively interrogate
Olivia’s characterization on the show, and direct their criticisms to Rhimes’ and others
associated with crafting the program.

174
The findings that are presented here are in no way representative of the entirety of the
viewing audience for Scandal in general, or Black American viewers and fans specifically.
Instead, it represents a snapshot of a particular segment of viewers and non-viewers who actively
engage with the show by discussing and reacting to it online. My conceptualization of the
politics of viewing—a discursive struggle over representations that takes place within
counterpublic spaces that manifests online—is still in its early stages of development. However,
a primary point I want to make is about the utility of the online space in which such politics are
fought over. While some have argued that politics that manifest online are not politics, but
instead exists passively as the mere circulation of content, opinions, and information.
48
I view
online spaces as important to the dissemination of Black Americans’ “every day talk,” which can
facilitate the building of collective politics that, ideally, can lead to activism.

48
Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural
Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 51–74.

175
Conclusion

Throughout this dissertation I sought to better understand this moment within the
contemporary television landscape in which Black women have come to occupy roles outside of
reality television and comedic sitcoms. I wanted to know why this was happening, how it has
come to be, and how has this visibility perceived amongst Black viewers. In addressing the first
two questions about why Black women have been provided with these opportunities in television
and how these opportunities have come to be, I took an approach that I believed would be most
beneficial—considering the business logic employed within the television industry, technological
changes and advances, the saturation of televisual content, and how cultural discourses of race
and gender are utilized to inform what content gets made and how, where it is distributed, and
for what audiences. I discovered that it would be unwise to be too optimistic about the current
trend in Black women’s visibility on television in leading roles, particularly within dramas.
At the beginning of Chapter 1, I discussed how surprising it was to see several shows
with Black women in leading or co-leading roles be featured in the line-up for the 2014-2015
television season. Out of the four mentioned—NBC’s State of Affairs, Fox’s Red Band Society
and Empire, and ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder (?)—only two have lasted a season or
more. CBS’s Extant, which starred Halle Berry also aired for two seasons, and in April 2016,
Nicole Beharie, who was the co-lead on the Fox series Sleepy Hollow for four seasons, had her
character Lieutenant Abigail Mills killed off. Her ouster from the show led to assertions that
Black women are expendable within the television industry.
Upon hearing about Beharie’s departure from Sleepy Hollow I immediately returned to
Akil and Rhimes’ comments at the opening of this dissertation. The two women voiced optimism
that what is happing in contemporary television not being a trend. In considering the history of

176
programming practices within the industry and the ways in which representations of Black
people on television are only valued to the degree that they can draw in white viewers, I think the
trend will last for as long as those viewers remain interested. Time will tell if, in the long term,
such programming will represent the norm or if it reflects a momentary phase similar to the era
Black programming that lasted from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. This is a critical point;
television shows that feature Black women in lead roles will be measured or contrasted against
the success of other shows that feature Black women. The continued failure of many of these
shows will possibly be used as evidence that “it's just not what the audience wants.”
It is difficult to pinpoint why some programs with Black female protagonists are
successful and others are not. I cannot make a blanket statement like “Oh, it’s because this show
lacks cultural specificity in its representation of racially or ethnically diverse characters.” None
of the cancelled shows had characters whose racial or ethnic identities became important focal
points to the narratives. And then there is Empire, a show that was immediately popular and
makes no attempt as being colorblind in its narrative. I have arrived at the conclusion then that in
order to understand why some Black women-led programs fail, and fail miserably, and others
succeed, another study is required to consider those elements that viewers are looking for in
these types of programs.
What I learned from my work in Chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation is that it is
necessary to understand the conditions under which specific representations of Black
womanhood are or are not imaginable as viable “products” for consumption by mainstream
television audiences. Looking at network strategies, institutional practices, and public statements
articulated about successful programs that are led by Black women facilitate understanding those
conditions. In many ways the television industry produces the reality of what audiences will or

177
will not watch. That is to say, by continuing to churn out images of a specific type, those
working to make television are able to create a product that consumers are familiar with. They
can then say “Look, this is what viewers like; it's what they want more of.” In short, industry
insiders work to fulfill their own prophecy and then use the success of what becomes popular as
evidential proof that they were right all along.
Through a case study of the online promotion of Scandal and Black fans’ engagement
around the program, I touched on the ways in which their labor is visible, but made invisible in
order to create distance from being classified as a “Black show.” In the course of exploration of
tweets from season 3, I was struck by how visible Black fans were by way of their postings of
pictures, memes, and conversations. It became clear to me, however, that the ways in which
Black fans’ engaged around Scandal and the participatory culture they produced, had no value
beyond its ability to quantify them as the “television audience” for the program and to provide
various stakeholders, including ABC, with valuable data about consumer taste that could then be
worked into a new revenue stream. I should not be shocked of course; television is a business,
and in this competitive market that is post-network television, alternative funding sources are
likely desirable.
The last chapter on Black fans’ discourses of race in relation to Scandal is particularly
special to me. I decided upon this dissertation project because of the lack of research on Black
women in, and on television, and the dearth of scholarship on Black audiences and fans. In
Chapter 4, I posited a theory of the politics of viewing that takes place within the Black
counterpublic of Black Twitter. There are a number of reasons why this chapter resonates with
me, but chief among them is what I see as the intervention it makes. Part of my frustration with
Black feminist media studies and the analysis of media texts is that there is a tendency toward

178
using stereotypes or archetypes as the priori lens through which to interpret images of Black
female subjectivity. This ultimately results in the Black feminist critic finding exactly what it is
they were looking for in the first place. By moving away from this type of analysis, and
interrogating the various ways in which Black consumers of a certain media text grappled with
their own identities and collective experiences in relation to that text, and considering how they
interpreted, talked about, and derived meaning from it, I was able to see what it looks like to take
a position that suspends the frameworks that have come to dominate Black feminist media
analysis. This allowed me to gather Black fans’—and anti-fans’—perspectives and interpret
them holistically, that is, in relation to both the history of Black marginalization, objectification,
and subjugation within visual imagery, and in consideration of the specificity of the
contemporary moment in the progression of Black representation within the U.S. context.

179
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Asset Metadata

Creator Chatman, Dayna Earlene (author)

Core Title Black women on the small screen: the cultural politics of producing, promoting, and viewing Black women-led series in the post-network era

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/22/2018

Defense Date 06/06/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Black audiences,black women,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-network era,race,representation,television production

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee chair), Bar, François (committee member), Smith, Stacy (committee member)

Creator Email dayna.e.chatman@alumni.usc.edu,dchatman@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-275091

Unique identifier UC11281241

Identifier etd-ChatmanDay-4602.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-275091 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ChatmanDay-4602.pdf

Dmrecord 275091

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Chatman, Dayna Earlene

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA