It's not SyFy -- It's the system.

[taste_is_sweet]

A few minutes ago, my darling husband started talking to me from where he was reading Entertainment Weekly in the bedroom. He wanted to let me know about a new show on SyFy about The X-Men super-powered crime fighters called Alphas, because apparently Callum Keith Rennie is going to be in it (it looks like he'll be a reoccurring character, which most likely means he'll be a villain, because that's how SyFy rolls).

I asked Dom how many characters were in it and he said five. Then I said that without reading the article I could tell him how the team would look:

The leader would be a white male
There would be two other white guys on the team
There would be one black guy
There would be one woman, possibly of Asian descent

Turns out I was wrong--the female team member was played by a an American of Middle Eastern descent. The magazine had also made a mistake in that the cast has six members, not five, which naturally means there can be another female. She's white, of course.

I was surprised, though, to see that the Professor X analog of the team is a Dr. Rosen, because as far as I know that's a Jewish name and I'd been thinking that the Dr. Zimmerman of Sanctuary was just a fluke. Then again they're both doctors, right? You wouldn't want, say, the Bad-Ass sniper dude to be Jewish. Because then you'd have to set the show in Israel.

Much as I honestly applaud SyFy for being brave enough to have a character who, based on her last name, could possibly be Muslim (not to mention how nice it is to see Jewish surnames), I still think there's a big damn problem when I can guess the ethnic and gender makeup of the cast almost exactly based exclusively on knowing that it's an action show and the number of team members.

And while the last nails in the coffin of my love for SyFy were brutally hammered when they chose to cancel SGA for the horrendously racist and misogynistic casting and character choices of Stargate: Universe, I will say that I know they're not the only network that constantly uses these kind of ratios for their action teams. I don't want to keep picking on SyFy, but Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate: SG-1 were perfect examples of this. So is Hawai'i 5-0. There's always a bit of leeway as to the background of the female character if you already have a male PoC on the team, and if you have a team of three than the woman will most likely be the PoC as well. SyFy (sorry, SyFy! But seriously, you keep asking for it) did this with Being Human; I'm afraid I don't know about the cast from the original UK production.

Actually, I do want to pick on SyFy. After reading the cast descriptions for Alphas, it turns out that (of course!) the Really Strong Guy is black, the Sniper Dude (God forbid he not be a dude!) is named Cameron Hicks--seriously, does SyFy ration names or something? Or is the constant repetition some kind of in-joke?--the female character I mentioned earlier is described as 'a pretty girl in her twenties' (emphasis mine). The other woman is--OMG I SO CALLED IT!--basically a super-sexy, manipulative bitch (springwoof: she's a charmer, but ours is cooler). The youngest guy on the team is not quite the technopath I thought he'd be, but he still does shit with radio, television and cell-phone frequencies. He also seems to have an Autism Spectrum Disorder by the way he's described, but I'll bet the producers didn't want to out-and-out say so in order to not have to deal with anything approaching a real Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Way to go with the originality, SyFy! You keep pushing those boundaries, you edgy, outside-the-box, imagining greater network, you! ::golf clap::

I know I'm not the only one on LJ who's gotten more than a little bored and sick of this. It's not just the predictability, it's the fact that it's all so damn predictable. Why can't a team of five have four women and one man, with a female leader? Why do most of the characters in pretty much any show ever on a major network have to be white? It's tiring and it's sad and it's gotten to the point where looking at the new shows advertised on TV or in my husband's Entertainment Weekly is just discouraging.

I'm sure that at least some of the new network shows promised this fall will be as fantastic as the glossy photo ads and the previews claim, but I'm voting with my eyes and I'm not going to watch any of them. The stories may be different, but the faces are way too much the same.

Comments

[amalthia]

My husband finally had to ask how I knew which characters where going to die first or die at all in movies and TV and when I pointed out it was always the POC or woman who died first he was quite shocked...But knowing that they always kill the women and poc first kind of takes away the suspense when it comes to horror movies or scary sci-fi type movies.

I think the reason I loved the Fast Five so much is that I felt like I was watching a movie about people that looked more like me. (though obviously I rarely see people that buff or hot....)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean--my husband was surprised that I could peg the cast of this brand-new show so closely as well. It's not like we have to be psychic when it's so standard, eh?

I've watched two of the Fast and the Furious movies (I think), but I do remember how much I enjoyed Vin Diesel in them. Thanks for the rec. :)

[amalthia]

Not going to lie Fast Five isn't going to win an Academy Award but I thought it was highly entertaining and I liked the diverse cast of characters.

[mific.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you know that if they DID make a show with several women taking the lead, it'd be like these latest Kate Beaton cartoons!

strong female characters (http://beatonna.livejournal.com/148564.html)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Oh God. At least that seems far more comic-book than TV media, though that's not saying much. ::sighs::

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Why are Jews always doctors? I can trace my Jewish lineage back seven generations and I'm quite sure I'm defective because I have no aptitude for science, faint at the sight of blood and I'm not full of wisdom. In fact, some have said I'm full of it and definitely not meant wisdom.

While I have seen more Jewish characters, (Eyal in Covert Affairs, Josh in Being Human), it would be cool to have an Israeli sniper, or a Sephardic Jewish fashion designer, or I don't know, a beautiful author? They exist!

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they do! As long as they're not on television! :)

Hell, why not an American sniper who's also Jewish? It's not like every single white person on television needs to have a last name like Sheppard, McGarrett, Castle, Beckett, Weir, Bell, Jackson, Mitchell or Hicks...

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Or even names like Beaumarchais, Radziwell, or Azóla, French, Lithuanian and Portuguese.

I admit, in one of my projects, I do have a Jewish doctor, but I did do some work to make him a bit more unique.

1. He's Sephardic. Yemenite, to be exact.

2. He was interested in science but is a trained sniper as well.

3. He's gay and married to a wonderful fellow soldier.

4. Although actively Conservative Jewish, he's also obsessed with sports and the New York Yankees.

5. He went into medicine out of sincere conviction to help immigrant refugees like his parents.

So I feel slightly better about promoting stereotypes.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

WORD. :) Though to be fair the second of the two women in that SyFy Alpha series has a French last name, and they seem to be remarkably good about adding Jewish characters too (though did you notice that Josh wanted to be a doctor before becoming a werewolf? There must be some in-joke thing going on, seriously).

Your character sounds pretty cool to me! And it sounds like it might be set in Israel, in which case it'd be much stranger for him not to be a Jewish doctor, eh? ::g:: But even if he's American I really don't think you have anything to worry about. My complaint was more that SyFy seems only capable of making their doctor characters Jewish, as opposed to giving them more diverse professions.

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

YES. The only thing I hate more than seeing the cast lineup of two white male leads + token POC/female sidekicks is seeing a cast lineup that's just flat-out all white male. ARGH.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen a cast that's all white males in awhile, at least, but it might just be that we're not watching the same shows...

ETA: But I hear you. Boy, do I hear you. It makes me wish I had any power in the TV industry at all.

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

I watched the premiere of Trust Me, because I was happy to see Will McCormack back on TV, but I hated it. In a Chicago advertising agency, the plot was all white guys in power (and not even Italian or Polish--in Chicago, mind you--straight WASP), one strident woman trying to break into their club (read: shrewish for "humor"), and all the extras were white. (Well, there was one black guy in the very first scene, but when I went to IMDB afterwards to find out who that unicorn was, he didn't even rate a credit.)

Shortly after that, the ads for White Collar started springing up, with ... two white guys, and I just couldn't go there. I know it's popular on my flist, and I've heard there is one character's wife and one black guy, but the promotions never showed them.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, White Collar! I'm sorry--I didn't know about Trust Me and I've never actually seen White Collar, and Elizabeth (the white wife of one of the white guys) is in so much fic I was certain she had to be a major character in the show. Hopefully.

There definitely does seem to be at least one CoC, but like you I don't know how often he or she or they might appear.

Unfortunately, I'm so much more interested in the 'team' shows like I wrote about that I don't even know how many or few other shows have Characters of Color in them. Of course, if the shows I do know about are any indication, than I'd say not many. :(

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

The only show I can think of off the top of my head that does casting well is Gray's Anatomy. Races, genders, ages, sexual identities—you name it, it's all mixed in at all levels from surgeon on down. And it's an ensemble "soap opera," so it's not just one or two faces up front plus the sidekicks. Hospital soap opera isn't really my kind of show, so I haven't watched a lot of it, but I wish everyone was casting this way. Other than a slightly higher proportion of "Hollywood beautiful" faces, it looks like walking into the hospital down the street from me.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

That would be cool. But yeah--I don't like soap operas, either. Why can't I get a cool adventure-type show where the characters look like the people I see in the local Supermarket?

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

The Brits are often better, at both the race thing and the "regular looking people" thing. Idris Elba is heading a police drama (very intense, very good) called Luther. First season was six episodes. Second season has just started, but I'm going to wait until it finishes before watching, or the suspense will kill me. :D

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

::golf claps with you::

SyFy lost my affection, frankly, when they started to feature professional wrestling, and other shows not even vaguely related to SF or fantasy.

The kind of thing you're talking about is really just rife throughout the whole entertainment industry. However, as audiences, we're just starting to wake up and notice and voice our dissatisfaction. For a long time, television trained its audiences to be passive consumers of content: "watch the Box with the pretty pictures. The Box is Good." Nowadays, the internet is training people that they can interact with their content, vote on it, comment on it, and (fans are on the cutting edge, of course) remix it and reshape it. I predict this new power will eventually change the content itself (see American Idol, where people vote on the outcome of the contests--shades of the Roman Coliseum).

Also, it takes awhile, but entertainment content mores eventually catch up with the prevailing mores of society. Just watch a show from the 60s--Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, for example--and see all the drinking and smoking and blatant objectifying of women going on. See the complete *lack* of POC. Today, we have very little onscreen drinking or smoking--smoking generally denotes a villain, or at least someone raunchy; drinking generally denotes characters letting their hair down, being debauched, or having a "problem"--it's no longer everyday and casual. Today we have POC onscreen (if not usually in the lead roles), and *women* in leading roles (even in action series! Yay, Buffy!), and *gasp* even gay characters (even though often just comic relief). Just wait, eventually media will catch up with today's societal mores...however, by then it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow society will have moved on too, and will still be complaining about how backwardly media is portraying people.

(and, yes, darlin'. Our Charmer was *lots* cooler!)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Our charmer rocked. We did that well. :D

I agree with you on all your points and I appreciate your optimism. I just wish these changes would get here faster.

It's true that the internet has been reshaping the consumption of media for years now, but even so it hasn't seemed to change the kind of media that's being consumed. We might be writing fanfic and commenting on the actors' Facebook accounts and tweeting the directors about our favourite shows, but it's still the same white guys we're doing the writing and the commenting and the tweeting about, eh? At least at the moment. I hope that will change.

[natsuko1978.livejournal.com]

SyFy (sorry, SyFy! But seriously, you keep asking for it) did this with Being Human; I'm afraid I don't know about the cast from the original UK production

UK Being Human features an Englishman (George, the werewolf) an Irishman (Mitchell, the vampire) and a mixed-race woman (Annie, the ghost). Which sounds like the beginning of a bad joke...

On the other hand, I can't help thinking that race in the UK is a *slightly* different issue to in the US. White European is "native" and there are tensions between Celtic Britain and Anglo-Saxon Britain (cf Northern Ireland and movements for Scottish and Welsh independence etc), not to mention between Eastern/Western and Northern/Southern European (in Italy, for example, Northern Italians manage to be "racist" about people from the South/Sardinia/Sicily etc(who tend to be somewhat darker complexioned), and many people in the UK are very prejudiced about "bloody Poles and Estonians coming over 'ere and taking all our jobs") as well between White and other races... To be *really* representative you'd need a rather large cast.

That said, given that half my class at school were either Jewish or Asian (my part of London didn't have many Black African or Black Carribean residents; in other parts of London White European is the minority) I don't see nearly enough Jewish or Asian characters in British tv.

This is quite depressing...

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Hello!

It's interesting that the characters got different names in the US version of Being Human. Maybe they sounded too UK or something? Weird.

Your comment illustrates the sad truth that even if everyone on the planet were the exact same colour, we'd find reasons to hate each others' guts anyway. That is definitely depressing.

It's strange how (with the Hawaii 5-0 reboot being at least one notable exception) TV has almost never really shown characters with Asian backgrounds. This is something I really don't understand, considering there are definitely actors able to fill the roles out there. I don't get it.