Core Post #3

The most enduring problematic throughout our class thus far has been that of the uneasy relationship between critiques of the widespread, industrial encoding of meaning—what we’ve referred to as the ‘hypodermic’ model of cultural analysis—and a more optimistic indexing of consumer/fan response and remix. Instead of continuing to mediate between these schools, this week’s group of readings backshifts to the first model in order to gauge how the industry thinks about race and ethnicity. This is not, necessarily, meant to question how producers imbue texts with racialized meaning, but instead, to acknowledge how shifting positions of racial politics in broader cultural formations feed into transitional marketing and textual strategies.

            Gray’s essay captures a cross section of the positionality of blackness during the network-to-cable transition. Black subjects onscreen become figureheads for general Reagan-era, upper-middle class whiteness. This shift in content represents a subterranean tension between the desire to capitalize on an untapped market share and the necessity of toeing the line of least-offensive programming. A textual history of sitcoms, since the 1980s, led by people of color, can largely be written according to this precarious balancing act played out by networks trying to contend with a fourth interloper and a surfeit of cable and home-video options. One narratological shorthand we might use to pin down particular series at a place on this spectrum is the place of catharsis in regard to explicitly racial plotlines. To put it simply: an episode of The Cosby Show seems far more likely to end its ‘very special episodes’ with a positive outcome than an analogous episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which sometimes leaned heavily into the seeming irreparability of race relations in the United States.

            Drawing this distinction allows me to provide a precedent for my distaste for the episodes of Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat we screened last week. Despite their (especially the former’s) attempts to feel current, they feel like products of an alternate universe in which sitcoms never got any better than Family Matters at staring racial problematics in the face—never overcame the need to synthesize liberal bourgeois ideals and racial struggle.

The opposite side of the coin – the final scene of Fresh Prince on racial profiling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no3c6xaJ43k