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>> 119 5 The Worldwide Circulation of Contemporary African American Television Since the mid-1990s, television channels, audience configurations, and program offerings have continued to fragment both at home and abroad. The economics of this splintering landscape have proved challenging for program producers and networks nearly everywhere, and a growing number of them have turned to international markets in order to defray costs and externalize risk. The impact of these developments on television portrayals of all kinds has been a matter of much debate among media scholars. For some, these changes have introduced a degree of diversity heretofore unknown in television around the world (Curtin, 1996, 1999). Others see this diversity as superficial, and worry about the homogenization, on a worldwide scale, of viewpoints and cultural experiences due to the dominance of transnational conglomerates that place the ownership of media outlets in a small number of hands (Bagdikian, 2000; Herman and McChesney, 1997). Still others, who believe that media offerings have become more diverse, point to the growing isolation and purification of audience segments and the demise of shared values (Turow, 1997, 2005). Finally, some have argued that these developments have rendered obsolete many of the conventional ways we analyze and think about diversity in television programming (Lotz, 2006). The evidence of increased African American television trade today is undeniable. A greater variety of genres, featuring a greater diversity of African American characters and ideological content, now travel to a wider global audience than at any time in television’s history. This is not to say, however, that commercial television trade is marked by diverse, complex, high-quality stories of African American life. Quite the contrary. In fact, portrayals of African Americans continue to be enabled by specific economic considerations, business practices, organizational forms, institutional labors, and industry lore that render certain kinds of portrayals common and others unlikely. What is more, some of today’s more diverse portrayals may, for some, be reactionary rather than progressive. In addition, some of the more interesting and unique portrayals are also the most vulnerable. All of the television shows that travel successfully in today’s television 120 > 121 One of the framing storylines involves Grey’s relationship with Derek Shepherd , with whom she had a one-night stand before starting her internship, and who turns out to be a surgeon at the hospital. This storyline continues to animate many subsequent episodes, as do relationships among interns and “attendings,” as well as interns and interns, and interns and patients. Generically, then, Grey’s Anatomy is a medical melodrama, with stories about patients and disease that generally conclude in a single episode, along with ongoing storylines about personal relationships that continue from episode to episode and season to season. In addition, each episode is structured around a recurring leitmotif that Grey addresses in voice-over at the beginning and end of each episode, as well as throughout the episode as a transition between scenes. Grey’s Anatomy is one of a slew of current network television series that feature conspicuously integrated workplace settings, typically in a dramatic genre. Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki (2000) in their study of prime-time network television programs found that the majority of African Americans in such programs inhabited either integrated workplaces or segregated households. More recently, Herman Gray (2005) has noted the same tendency. The trend toward portraying African Americans in workplace series that hew closely to what Gray (1995) calls “assimilationist” discourses of race is, in my opinion, a response to complaints from activist groups in the wake of the 1999 network television season. In the fall of 1999 a number of political groups, including the NAACP and La Raza, threatened to boycott network advertisers because no new series featured a nonwhite character in a lead role. Subsequently the drama series Now and Again (1999–2000) elevated the role of the African American actor Dennis Haysbert (Dr. Theodore Morris ) and The West Wing (1999–2006) added an important recurring character , Charlie Young, played by the African American actor Dulé Hill. All of these characters are reminiscent of the “super-Negroes” that populated television series in the late 1960s: they are all highly competent, brilliant even, and are exceptionally well-dressed and well-spoken individuals. Beyond window dressing, the only significant difference they bring to the series is rooted in personal and communicative stylistic differences from white characters . Otherwise the medical profession, the federal government, and the ranks of law enforcement are portrayed as racially neutral work spaces that...

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