Atlanta saw America more clearly than nearly any TV show of its era (preview)

This is 26 Episodes, a biweekly series tracing the history of television in the 21st century via episodes that made the medium great. The episodes are arranged chronologically, from 2000 to 2025, and they're chosen by me, Emily St. James. This is not a "best episodes of the century" list, but every episode I write about is one worth watching in my opinion.

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In March 2015, Flavorwire's Pilot Viruet considered what seemed at the time like a sea change in television. Viruet, who is a former A.V. Club colleague and a friend, was skeptical of how long that moment in TV history would last; I was less so. I, of course, was being hopelessly naive. I can only blame how white I am.

First, however, the shift that seemed like a new status quo. The 2014-15 TV season was marked by a slew of successful new shows led by non-white characters, including ABC's Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat, The CW's Jane the Virgin, and (most notably) Fox's Empire, which spent the first quarter of 2015 ruling the Nielsens. Those shows (and a few less successful others) made it to the air in part because ABC's Scandal had broken out so massively, leading to an all Shonda Rhimes, all the time Thursday night in fall 2014, with Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder cementing ABC's hold on young audiences on that night.

Surely, I remember thinking, this is how it will be now! The people who run TV networks chase money first and foremost, which makes wanting any given TV platform to stand as a bastion of progressivism a fool's errand. The entertainment industry might skew liberal, but its principles only stretch as far as its revenue. Still, this slate of diverse shows was making a lot of money. The conventional wisdom that shows with all-white casts were "mainstream" while shows led by non-white actors were niche had been disproven. Or so I thought.

In their 2015 piece, Viruet nodded to the boom in Black-led sitcoms in the 1990s, most of which aired on Fox, then The WB, then UPN. As these networks found success with white audiences, their Black-driven sitcoms swiftly got pushed off the air, even if those sitcoms were still drawing solid ratings. A similar thing had happened in the 1970s, and the huge success of The Cosby Show in the 1980s mostly led to networks chasing family sitcoms about white families.

Viruet quotes scholar Robin R. Means Coleman, author of the book African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy, who points to a boom-bust cycle for Black sitcoms that runs roughly 20 years. Networks in dire ratings straits greenlight Black-led sitcoms, they garner acclaim and viewership, and when the networks are once again soaring in the ratings, the Black-led sitcoms quietly get shunted off to the side. It happened in the 1970s, it happened in the 1990s, and Coleman and Viruet thought it might happen again in the 2010s.

Viruet writes:

“There’s interesting analogies in all sorts of labor structures in the history of America about how things are built on the backs of blacks,” Coleman tells me, “and the television industry isn’t very different.” Networks are always concerned with money above all and will use these minority narratives to get there. They aren’t actively concerned with gaining or maintaining any specific minority audience, as long as they’re able to draw a sizable audience of any variety. What will happen in, say, 2020, when networks have decided that they no longer need Black-ish or Empire? Will those shows even last that long?

Remember that list of new shows from the 2014-15 season up above? The only one of them that made it past 2020 was Black-ish. And would you say TV has gotten demonstrably better for diversity in that time? Or worse? I know what my answer would be. And it wasn't the one I would have given you back in 2016 when FX's Atlanta debuted.

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