Fresh On The Screen: How TV Is Redefining Who We Think Of As ‘American’
*TV is becoming more multi-cultural because the networks have begun to see how that translates to higher revenues. It’s been a long road from Desi on I Love Lucy to Jane the Virgin. Inside Hollywood, though, many will say that the doors to writers, directors and producers are still shut. I’m curious to see if new TV programming will have an effect of change on the rise of racist rhetoric in the U.S. Like it or not, TV is a leading factor in cultural trends. VL
By Jeff Yang, Code Switch
If, as historian James Truslow Adams defined it in his 1931 book The Epic of America, the American Dream is a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement,” then Hollywood is the glittering factory in which this dream is manufactured and distributed across a nation, and exported to the rest of the world.
[pullquote]These new shows arrive just as the political conversation around immigration seems angrier and more strident than we’ve seen in generations.[/pullquote]It might seem ironic, then, that those who founded Hollywood and built it to glory were almost all themselves newcomers — Jewish immigrants from middle and Eastern Europe, like Universal’s Carl Laemmle, Paramount’s Adolph Zukor and William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and the four siblings who founded Warner Brothers. Aware that the scent of foreignness might put off audiences hungry for their glamorous vision of America, they stayed behind the scenes and, as much as possible, hid their overseas origins; fear of xenophobic reaction is why we don’t have “20th Century Fuchs” and “Wonskolaser Brothers Pictures” today.
That fear of tainting the American Dream with a foreign scent carried over to the images on screen as well, especially with the advent of television, which brought the screen home and made it virtually ubiquitous. One might go out for an evening at the cinema to see exotic people doing incomprehensible things; inviting such people into one’s living room was another matter entirely. As a result, the medium of TV, from its very beginning, has been designed to comfort viewers through standardized formats, familiar tropes and friendly, sparkling-white faces speaking in clear, unaccented English (except for the occasional special guest from abroad or hilarious “ethnic” neighbor).
Click <a href=”http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/11/09/454890044/fresh-on-the-screen-how-tv-is-redefining-who-we-think-of-as-american” target=”_blank”>HERE</a> to read the full story.
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<em>Jeff Yang is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal Online and a regular contributor to CNN, NPR, Slate and Quartz, the business publication of </em>The Atlantic Monthly<em>. However, he may currently be best known as the father of Hudson Yang, star of ABC’s </em>Fresh Off The Boat<em>.</em>
[Photo courtesy of Code Switch/CW]