Showing posts with label African-American. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African-American. Show all posts

Friday, October 9, 2015

Perspectives on American TV, 2015: A public shout-out for some nicely-observed insight from Stacia L. Brown @washingtonpost - How @RosewoodFOX is expanding representations of black men in network TV. She correctly notes how the new Fox-TV show starring @Morris_Chestnut has already shown "how rare it is to see two black men onscreen discussing something other than violence, racism, or their own mortality." Amen.

Perspectives on American TV, 2015: A public shout-out for some nicely-observed insight from Stacia L. Brown @washingtonpost - How @RosewoodFOX is expanding representations of black men in network TV. She correctly notes how the new Fox-TV show starring @Morris_Chestnut has already shown "how rare it is to see two black men onscreen discussing something other than violence, racism, or their own mortality." Amen.

I've written the following post in reverse-chron order, with oldest on top, in an attempt to be more logical than usual.
















For me, the highlight from Brown's column was this line: 
"The subtlest moments — like Rosie, Dante, and those flowers — punctuate how rare it is to see two black men onscreen discussing something other than violence, racism, or their own mortality."

Exactly!

I've watched all three Rosewood episodes so far, and partly because it's set here in South Florida -#SoFLand partly because I also think it has a good premise for a series and a nice core of actors around star Morris Chestnutit's definitely starting to grow on me.
Especially as it finally stops trying to explain who every character is and can actually breathe a little and let the plots develop however they will.

Not that it's ever going to be M.A.S.H., of course, or even aspires to be, but most people now forget how really crummy some of their early M.A.S.H. episodes were when the writers and editors kept hammering home who the various characters were long past the point where we got it, esp. Klinger
Radar and Frank Burns.

In retrospect, some of those early M.A.S.H. episodes often seem like the show's writers were intentionally bullying Larry Linville's Burns character just to see what sort of reaction it might provoke in either him or the show's audience. 
People loved seeing pranks performed on poor Frank Burns, but serial cruelty is another thing altogether. 

It's always especially noticeable in those episodes composed largely of clips.
You almost wonder what the writers were thinking.

Most TV viewers nowadays forget that, for a while at least, like the Mary Tyler Moore Show,
M.A.S.H. was forced by CBS network execs to use a laugh track, which was cringe-worthy, even though it was performed without a studio audience.
As we know, as the two shows' dramatic success grew expondentially on Saturday nights, that foolish crutch was eventually dispensed with, even if it remained on so many other middling network TV shows well into the 1980's.

The really odd thing is that I was thinking the same exact things last night watching the newest episode of Rosewood as what Washington Post reporter Stacia L. Brown writes about. 
Weird. :-)

Like Brown,  I also hope that they give the show a chance to properly develop and find its way.
It's always a good thing to have fully-realized characters on network TV, especially if they can be set against an area of the country that is -quite correctly I'm sorry to say- often regarded as the height of superficiality, where physical looks always-but-always trumps brain power every time.
(As I know so well from growing-up in sunny sand, surf and bikini-clad South Florida!)
How ironic would that be?

And if it can be a character that looks, acts and thinks like series star Morris Chestnut's,  one that's doesn't adhere to most Hollywood's showrunners' pre-conceived paint-by-numbers notions of what the show has to do, as opposed to what it can do, so much the better for everyone concerned, not least, the poor TV audience who desperately prefers to see more accurate depictions of complex people's lives on the tube. And lives different from their own, with their own separate struggles.


But then a sophisticated TV audience that wants more also has to let the networks know they want that, not more of the same old thing, or variations on a TV theme from 25 years before.
And so it is here with Fox-TV.
People have to use their voices.
So far, so good!















Since I sent out an email with much of the above Thursday afternoon to my corps of well-informed friends and Followers(!)  across the country, have been greatly heartened by the number who say that they not only like and watch the show, but also agree with points that Stacia L. Brown and I raise.
:-)

Dave

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Important questions are NOT being asked in South Florida: With President Obama coming to South Florida today re his immigration/amnesty plan, when was last time you heard an honest public discussion in South Florida about African-American unemployment rates in Miami? I think Obama's amnesty plan makes that worse. Much worse!

Important questions are NOT being asked in South Florida: With President Obama coming to South Florida today re his immigration/amnesty plan, when was last time you heard an honest public discussion in South Florida about African-American unemployment rates in Miami? I think Obama's amnesty plan makes that long-term problem worse. Much worse!






















The news that President Obama was coming into South Florida today got me to wondering and musing over the weekend, and not surprisngly, some of this sentiment clearly echoes things I've asked and answered in this very space many times over the past 8 years.

Simply put, have any of you attended a public meeting anywhere in South Florida in the last two years where, either together or individually, Representatives Lois Frankel, Debbie Wasserman 
Schultz or Frederica Wilson have spoken about immigration issues and attempted to make the case that President Obama's immigration plan for amnesty for up to 5 Million people would NOT 
negatively hurt long-term unemployed workers in South Florida, esp. African-Americans?
Or seen a similar public discussion in your area? 
Why do you suppose that is?
And why fdo you suppose that the local news media ignores that obvious question, just as supposed South Florida-based public policy groups do as well?

When I was a kid growing-up as a news and politics junkie in 1970's South Florida, on the day that unemployment 
rates came out of the Dept. of Labor Statistics in Washington -i.e. the BLS- I seem to recall that it was usually the case that then-WTVJ anchor Ralph Renick -when he was the dominant media voice in all of South Florida- would make a point of mentioning not only the national and state numbers, but the ones for Dade and Broward, too, along with the local unemployment rate for Blacks.
And those numbers would usually appear on screen, along with a very simple graph that would be embarrassing to put up these days.

The idea being that accuracy mattered, of course, but also that it's important to have 
useful context and nuance to draw upon before making any reasonable conclusions about what was happening with unemployment and the economy.

That seems like such a simple thing, but before I left the area last June for an extended 
period of time, I can't think of the last time I actually heard the long-term unemployment levels for African-Americans in Miami getting either mentioned in print or on TV or brought into the larger discussion about their relative economic standing only getting worse if that action took place.

Especially since I think it's fair to say that based on my living in South Florida again for 
the past 11 years, there are many less Black adults or children in South Florida who can speak even passable Spanish, compared to when I was a kid growing-up taking Spanish for 6 years and French for 4.

Those Latin American entrepreneurs coming to Miami that seemingly everyone in South Florida's incurious media horde likes to make a fuss over in often over-the-top sycophancy, with some TV stations being especially egregious about making no pretense of being anything but Chamber of Commece cheerleaders, are NOT going to be hiring people who are NOT bilingual, except for low wage jobs.

So what group is that going to be in Miami-Dade County?
Precisely, but instead, everyone just pretends they don't know what the logical result of this will be.
#Despair

I guess we'll all have to just wait until after the next riot and have yet more foreign and out-of-state reporters fly into the area to comment again on the self-evident short-term attention span of reporters that is actually much worse than South Florida residents as a whole.
Which is why those out-of-towners will again be speaking about South Florida reporters continuing to ignore the legitimate concerns of Black Miami, preferring to do ponintless stories about breast surgery, food fads and fashion and crime lowlights among visiting celebs and rappers on South Beach.

But then isn't that lack of energy and foresight the same reason why local news media don't exert any energy at all in pressing local South Florida Congressional representatives on policies that are harmful to such a large share of the populace?
Their own constituents!

Recently, Rasmussen Reports released a national poll on the Obama Amnesty plan.
Guess what it said

Voters Weigh Costs of Obama's Amnesty Plan
Voters still view President Obama's order exempting up to five million illegal immigrants from deportation as illegal and tend to think Congress should try to stop it. But they're evenly divided over whether a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security is the way to do it.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2015/voters_weigh_costs_of_obama_s_amnesty_plan