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....)

[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)

[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!

[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.

[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!)

[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...