Kung Fu Monkey: Writing: Characters and Race

Kung Fu Monkey: Writing: Characters and Race:

"Let's face it -- if television showed real life, then 25% of Christian characters would be what we typically class as evangelicals, 15% would be atheists, one out of ten characters would be black, one out of ten would be Hispanic, and the same number would be completely foreign born. Only one out of four would have graduated from college with a bachelor's degree. Or to make a point which I hope won't piss off too many of my screenwriting/executive friends, if television even vaguely resembled reality there would be ten times as many visible minority characters as there are Jewish characters on television.

Yeah, tell that to every NBC Thursday night comedy lineup for the last ten years.

And what does TV give us instead? Smart white folk in cities, or redneck white folk in the country. Or, occasionally, twee smart white folk in rural settings. (This may be one of the reasons I like My Name is Earl so much -- the make-up of that town is the closest I've seen to what, from my travels as a stand-up showed me, would be the actual make-up if that town.) I'm not carrying a banner for color-blind casting or writing for politic's sake; I'd like to see more of it because what we have now is just shitty writing."