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Jones’ comments reflect a general consensus among TV critics and viewers that: 1) the black women who command the most attention on reality television tend to portray stereotypical, Sapphire-like characters; 2) as audiences consume such portrayals, there is a consistent line of argument from producers that insists “pitting [black women] against each other” is expected or “what the people want;” and 3) black female reality TV stars are willing to indulge the Sapphire fantasy if it means they will be able to further a personal and/or professional agenda. These are important themes to interrogate, especially given the history of mass mediated representations of black Americans, as well as the present-day “evolution” of black characters and other characters of color on unscripted and scripted American television. However, because attention is primarily focused on arguably “negative” portrayals, there has not been much critical analysis of “alternative” or more nuanced portrayals of black women in the televisual sphere. This chapter represents an attempt to fill in some of that blank space by focusing attention on an underexplored and relatively new consortium of reality television programming that features black women who are defined by their roles as mothers and entrepreneurs.

Although African-American women are still underrepresented in narrative television, reality television appears to be a site where one can find many portrayals of them. As other scholars have explained, the representations of African American women in reality television are usually negative, generally presenting them as loud, angry, and without “class.” However, there has been little research on the complicated relationships of black motherhood, black wifehood, and their portrayals on reality television. One black mother who illustrates this tense interaction is Tameka “Tiny” Harris, nee Cottle, formerly of the 1990s girl group Xscape, and star of two reality television programs— BET’s Tiny & Toya , and VH1’s T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle . Though both programs prominently feature Cottle, BET’s program constructs Tiny as an emotionally strong and pragmatically capable business woman who maintains the emotional health and financial stability of her family while her relational partner/husband, rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris, is serving time in prison. However, upon T.I.’s return home, The Family Hustle presents Tiny as having little business savvy and as overly permissive with their blended family. This is a dangerous portrayal, given that reality TV purports to disseminate some version of “reality” to its viewers.

The display of spirituality, faith and religion is not a new phenomenon among black women in the United States, nor is it new to the world of media. Africans came to the Americas with their own sense of spirituality and religion, and the awareness of a higher being became the mortar that bound the community together during the trials of enslavement and subsequent oppression. Not surprisingly, this legacy of worship continues to provide solace and strength, with black women at the helm.

The premise of the show revolves around six preachers in the Los Angeles area. They each pastor churches ranging from 3,500– 4,000 members; however, one pastor’s church has nearly 20,000 members (season 1: episode 1). A multitude of cameras follow the stories of each of the pastors’ lives, their relationships with each other, as well as their wives relationships with one another. The show has five black male preachers and one white male preacher. In season 1, all of the pastors— except for two— are married; one of the unmarried pastors is engaged to the mother of his child, and the other has a long-standing relationship with a female friend who frequently appears on the show. As viewers watch the show, they are given a glimpse into the world of evangelical preachers. Although at first glance the show seems to only focus on the men, the women provide an interesting glimpse at what it means to be a preacher’s wife, fiancée, or female companion. There were a total of eight episodes that aired over the course of two months. This chapter explores how black women and their friendships are portrayed on Preachers of L.A. — including the one white woman on the show. It also examines their discourse between one another— using critical race feminism to analyze the roles of these women as first ladies (a term used to describe the wives of pastors), their relationship with one other, and the conversations they have surrounding sex, marriage, relationships, and friendships. The chapter focuses on the first season of the show, which began in the fall of 2013. The show was later renewed for a second season, which began airing late summer 2014. This critique attempts to bring awareness to black women in the church and the discourse that perpetuates the stereotypes of black women on television. It also aims to initiate further conversations on various stereotypes— regardless of context— that have the potential to bear negatively on black women.

This chapter provides a description and critical analysis of Noah’s Arc , a Logo cable television series featuring a predominantly African American gay male cast. Queer theory and quare studies are used as theoretical tools to examine the conceptions of blackness in general, as well as representations of blackness in Noah’s Arc . Thereafter this chapter turns to an analysis of the representations in this series to illustrate how Noah’s Arc not only queers and quares notions of authentic blackness but also serves to expand various notions of blackness. Finally, this chapter provides a treatment of how whiteness and heteronormativity are implicated in this recent iteration of a racialized queer visibility in popular culture.

From Amos 'n' Andy to The Jeffersons to Family Matters to Chappelle's Show, this volume covers it all with entries on all different genres_animation, documentaries, sitcoms, sports, talk shows, and variety shows_and performers such as Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey. Additionally, information can be found on general issues, ranging from African American audiences and stereotypes through the related networks and organizations. This book has hundreds of cross-referenced entries, from A to Z, in the dictionary and a list of acronyms with their corresponding definitions. The extensive chronology shows who did what and when and the introduction traces the often difficult circumstances African American performers faced compared to the more satisfactory present situation. Finally, the bibliography is useful to those readers who want to know more about specific topics or persons.

By the end of the twentieth century, Mexican multimedia conglomerate Televisa stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Most scholars have concluded that the company’s success was owed in large part to its executives who walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled for seventy-one years. At the same time, government decisions regulating communications infrastructure aided the development of the television industry. In one of the first books to be published in English on Mexican television, Celeste González de Bustamante argues that despite the cozy relationship between media moguls and the PRI, these connections should not be viewed as static and without friction. Through an examination of early television news programs, this book reveals the tensions that existed between what the PRI and government officials wanted to be reported and what was actually reported and how. Further, despite the increasing influence of television on society, viewers did not always accept or agree with what they saw on the air. Television news programming played an integral role in creating a sense of lo mexicano (that which is Mexican) at a time of tremendous political, social, and cultural change. At its core the book grapples with questions about the limits of cultural hegemony at the height of the PRI and the cold war.

Aaron McGruder’s “The Return of the King” (2006) is one of many of the artist’s controversial episodes, yet it stands out because of the criticism it received among mainstream media outlets and civil rights leaders. It was the ninth episode to air from his series The Boondocks, which is an anime show that airs on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim cable channel. McGruder presents the following scenario in “The Return of the King”: What if Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) did not die after his April 4, 1968, shooting and instead awoke after being in a coma for thirty-two years?

At best, our knowledge about the lives and experiences of Black gay men is limited to a series of stereotypes, snap judgments, and ridicule. In terms of television media product, this aforementioned knowledge has been packaged mostly within the framework of comedy: a red-leather-clad Eddie Murphy talking about the most effective ways to shield his ass from the gay male gaze in the 1983 HBO stand-up performance Delirious ; Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier’s effeminate film critics Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather on the 1990s television variety show In Living Color ; fashionista panel members Miss J and Andre Leon Talley

Why is it important that a Black woman created, wrote for, and co-produced¹ two highly-regarded television situation comedies that engaged a variety of Black women’s health issues while at the same time these issues were being reduced, simplified, or altogether ignored in mainstream American hip hop? Mara Brock Akil tacitly responded to this question when asked why four episodes of the third season of Girlfriends (2000–2008), the situation comedy she created and co-produced for UPN, addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis among Black women in America. “I have things I want to say,” explained Brock Akil, “about bridging television’s gap between

On November 4, 2008, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show via satellite. One of the more memorable moments of the interview came when Cooper expressed shock that DeGeneres was unfamiliar with the hit Bravo television show The Real Housewives of Atlanta. “You mean you don’t know about NeNe?” he demanded incredulously, referring to cast member NeNe Leakes—the most outspoken and self-proclaimed “realest” of the Housewives. Cooper’s segment, along with his admission that Leakes was his favorite of the cast, brought even more attention to the already widely debated show, the first of Bravo’s Housewives series

Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Louisiana, life remained not normal still for many residents of the city. And while mainstream news organizations remembered the fifth anniversary of the hurricane with extensive coverage, it was the work of filmmaker Spike Lee and television program creators David Simon and Eric Overmyer that perhaps created the greatest buzz about the fifth anniversary of Katrina in 2010. Spike Lee’s first documentary, When the Levees Broke , was released in 2006. It documented what happened in New Orleans through the voices of local residents, politicians, and experts during and immediately after the storm.

Picture this: a comedy about an overweight Black woman who lives with and takes care of a white family. Joking all the way, she cooks, cleans, helps the father of the family, and comforts the children. Then at one point, we see the father holding his gun and pointing toward the door. The Black woman enters and jumps up and down, screaming, “Massa! Massa! Massa! Please don’t shoot!” It is easy to imagine these scenes in a 1930s film about the antebellum South. But they are actually from the first episode of a 1980s sitcom.

Although the cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (CBS, 1972–1984) averaged only nine new episodes a year during its twelve-year run (compared to a more standard production cycle of twenty-five to sixty new episodes a year for other cartoons), the show remained a highly popular option for young viewers on late Saturday mornings. By the time of the series’ network premiere in 1972, the cartoon’s animated African American stars—Weird Harold, Dumb Donald, Fat Albert, Rudy, Mushmouth, Bucky, Russell, and Bill—were familiar and recognizable to American audiences as originating from Bill Cosby’s boyhood community of North

In the first episode of Black Journal , before the opening credits, comedian Godfrey Cambridge appears dressed in overalls and a painter’s cap with a paint roller in hand and methodically paints the television frame. To the viewer, it appears that his or her television is being painted black from the inside—a potent visual symbol from the first national Black public affairs program. Initially, though, the symbol emphasizes a visual challenge to the absence of Black faces on television—a show that “looks” Black, because of the visibility of its Black hosts and reporters, but where whites still have significant

Television’s synergy with the Web initially seemed inconceivable to network executives. With the rise of Internet use, newspaper and magazine articles announced the impending death of television. While that was clearly hyperbole, network executives, though often anonymously, expressed their fears that Web content would siphon off viewership and thus advertising dollars generated by television programming. Fears may have been quelled with the evidence of the success of television shows first made available streaming on network websites and then for paid download through digital servers such as iTunes.

In a recent debate over the problematic characterization of Bonnie Bennett, the only Black female recurring character on the CW network series The Vampire Diaries (CW 2009), my challenger insisted that with all of the qualifiers I insisted she have, “maybe this is another hidden reason there are no minorities on television: everything becomes an issue and you just can’t win.” Indeed, the main qualifier I suggested that the series allow the character to possess—an innate sense of cultural difference—is difficult to grasp and maintain. However, I do not accept that just because race is difficult, it is

Although discourses regarding 1980s representations of Blackness on television heavily focus on The Cosby Show, its NBC spin-off series, A Different World, depicting student life at a historically Black college, was equally groundbreaking and deserving of critical attention. Looking to transfer the appeal and audience share of The Cosby Show to A Different World, the spin-off show’s first season centered on the life of The Cosby Show’s star Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) at Hillman College. A Different World’s story provides an illuminating case study of the role and power of television producers, highlighting their influence over a show’s narrative and

In January 1977, I, along with over ninety million other Americans, watched at least one episode of the television miniseries Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Over the eight days of the broadcast, the audience grew, and debates regarding its impact filled media outlets. In the weeks and months after the show aired, the impact was measurable as many families sought out genealogists to research family histories and college campuses saw increased interest in African American Studies. Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, commented, “ Roots was the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in

This project has been engaging my thoughts for nearly a decade. I was forced to actually address it while sitting in our temporary home in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, watching world satellite TV with virtually no Blacks on it. In Nigeria, I became acquainted with Paris-based Fashion TV, U.S.-based Style Network, and the Australian production McLeod’s Daughters. Outside of M-Net’s Africa Magic, a network dedicated to showing Nollywood productions primarily, television was anything but Black. This whitening of the televisual frame, even in Black Africa, made me begin to consider the dearth of knowledge circulating about Black television programming, even when abundance