![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And even though that show, too, would come under fire for its racial and ethnic stereotyping, more often than not it was the main characters and their staggering lack of awareness that were the butt of the joke. Seinfeld didn’t just come from a Jewish perspective it leaned into New York’s diversity – from the iron-fisted Armenian running the trendy neighborhood soup spot to the Johnnie Cochran-like lawyer Jackie Chiles. But he is also routinely checked by his office manager, his best friend, an old high school pal – and none of these people are white. CBS’s Becker cast Ted Danson as a cranky Bronx doctor who is constantly annoyed with everything – not least a heterogeneous array of walk-in patients. Only a handful of network sitcoms resisted the trend of presenting New York as monocultural. That New York, run first by Michael J Fox, then Charlie Sheen, was a fantasy, too. In ABC’s Spin City, a sitcom about the workings of the city government, the mayor’s office had only three non-white employees. But Cosby eventually yielded its place on CBS’s primetime schedule to the starkly white family sitcom worlds of Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens. By and large, the sitcoms of the day reflected this siloed worldview at home and in the workplace.Ĭosby’s vision of two romantics striving to savor the autumn of their lives was the exceptional New York sitcom about Black people that found a home with white audiences (Cosby’s then pristine reputation and the show being based on the BBC’s One Foot in the Grave helped). “Not in a mean way – it’s just people acknowledging it was long overdue.Television in the late 90s assumed its audience was either Black or white. “I’ve gotten a lot of, ‘It’s about time,’” she told the Times. Kauffman said she had received supportive messages after announcing her gift. The professorship Kauffman plans to establish within Brandeis’ African and African American studies department aims to support scholarship on the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. “I really felt like Ross should date other people, women of all races,” Schwimmer said. Schwimmer said in a 2020 interview that the lack of broader cultural representation was “wrong” and he described advocating for his character Ross to date diverse women. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.”Ĭharacters of color on Friends were largely fleeting. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. “Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. “I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years,” she said to the Times. Kauffman said Friends’ lack of diversity illustrated how she had internalized that systemic racism. ![]() “That was really the moment that I began to examine the ways I had participated. “It was after what happened to George Floyd that I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of,” Kauffman said. Kauffman said that she had initially felt Friends was unjustly singled out for its racial and ethnic homogeneity, saying, “It was difficult and frustrating.” But she said now she feels that criticism was fair. “At a time when the television landscape is becoming increasingly diverse and inclusive, it’s uncomfortable – if not outright inappropriate – to raise a glass to a sitcom that was so blind to the multiculturalism of the world where it took place,” Greg Braxton noted. When HBO last year streamed Friends: The Reunion, an LA Times diversity writer said it wasn’t “a moment of celebration for everyone” and that it might have been subtitled “The One Where They Ignored Diversity – Again”. Many wondered how, on Manhattan’s racially diverse Upper West Side, the characters seemed to exist without interacting with any residents or visitors of color. “So you can watch it in order, or you can watch your favorite episodes.”īut after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020, triggering racial justice protests across the country, Friends became a target of criticism. “Yes, it’s a sitcom, but it’s also a soap opera,” Austerlitz told the Times. The show earned tens of millions of dollars in syndication and streaming for its creators and cast, including Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer.Īfter Netflix announced it would drop the sitcom in 2019, Saul Austerlitz, who wrote Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era, said Friends occupied a central place in American pop culture. Kauffman said it was initially “difficult and frustrating” to see Friends criticized for its lack of diverse characters in a show that ran for 10 seasons after it premiered in 1994, according to the Times. ![]()
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