Back in 2014, we were introduced to the Johnsons, an upper-middle class black family — Rainbow, an anesthesiologist; Dre, an advertising executive; their four kids; and Dre’s parents — when black-ish premiered on ABC. The show’s premise was immediately provocative: In the first episode, Andre has an existential crisis after worrying that his kids, who are growing up in a wealthy, mostly white suburb of Los Angeles, are not “black” enough. With its title and premise, the show made it a mission statement to interrogate what it means to be black through its multi-generational cast. It was a tall order for a network sitcom, which had never addressed this specific modern dynamic.
The most successful television families put down roots in their viewers’ hearts. Shows like Full House, The Brady Bunch, or All in the Family, which each spent years on the air, made viewers laugh, but also made them feel like they were a part of their families. Shows centered on black families have always set out to do the same, but have been forced to deal with extra baggage that shows featuring white families don’t — namely, anticipating the conclusions largely white audiences will draw about them. They must choose between introducing white viewers to friendly, agreeable black faces with relatable storylines or take a risk by focusing on more complex plots and issues that are more specific to blackness.
In the history of television, most shows have taken the more conservative approach. “Black-cast television, in its early years in particular, really became invested in trying to project a particular kind of image,” said Alfred Martin, professor of Communication at University of Colorado Denver. “So people would perhaps see black folks on television who were well-mannered and well-dressed.”
Martin says this was motivated by Amos n’ Andy, one of TV’s first shows that featured an all-black cast. Amos ‘n’ Andy, which premiered in 1951, was based on a successful, long-running nationally broadcast radio show by the same name following its cast of characters in the black community of Harlem. While it provided an opportunity for black actors that hadn’t existed before, it was criticized by its origins in minstrelsy because the actors that played the main characters in the wildly popular radio show were both white, and the black actors were directed to imitate their voices and characterizations. Even though the TV show enjoyed some popularity on the air, it never reached the level of the radio program, and it could not shake criticism that its depiction of black people was harmful. After a campaign headed by the NAACP, the show was taken off the air and syndication in 1966.
In 1965, sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a report positing that poverty in the black community was not just a symptom of economic factors, but rather a “ghetto culture” that encouraged single motherhood and absent fathers. The position was not widely accepted, but it did speak to an anxiety that some black people at the time felt — a concern that some black actors didn’t want to confirm in their work. With this newfound prominence, the pressure to not confirm stereotypes about black people grew. As television became a more popular medium in the 1970s, more diverse shows like What’s Happening!! and Good Times hit the air, and attempted to resolve these anxieties. (Esther Rolle, who portrayed matriarch Florida Evans on Good Times, insisted on not being a single mother on the show.)
“It’s taking us to a place that I’m not sure we’ve seen black families go on television.”
A new standard was set in 1984, when The Cosby Show ushered in a golden era for black families on television. Claire and Cliff Huxtable and their five kids became the quintessential American family, who just happened to be black. The show imitated popular television shows that centered white families, and honed the sitcom form with good acting, writing and direction. It became the No. 1 rated show on television for five consecutive seasons. While this seemed like a step in the right direction, it created a mold for what black families had to look like on network television: nuclear, wealthy, or at least not poor, and completely stable, with no signs of turmoil outside of a one or two episode arc. “So many black-cast shows throughout the ‘80s and the ‘90s are really trying to attempt to catch that Cosby lightning in a bottle again, trying to replicate the perfect home,” Alfred Martin said. Shows like Moesha and Family Matters followed the formula and were able to reach higher and higher levels of success.
Since then, very few network television have shows been able to consistently buck this narrative and still maintain a level of success — until black-ish, which has enjoyed impressive ratings since it started airing. From its debut in 2014 to its most recent season, black-ish has aimed to regularly break down controversies and allow them to play out among the Johnson family. Issues like the Ferguson protests, postpartum depression and the prison industrial complex have been handled with a steady hand on the show balancing brevity and laughs withs the severity of the issues at hand. The writers and actors are free to pull from existing headlines and imagine how the Johnsons would process them, though appearing on a network does offer some limitations. (Recently, an episode addressing NFL players kneeling during the national anthem was pulled over “creative differences.”)
But it was this past season’s arc, which concluded earlier this month, that really took the form of the show and flipped it on its head. After the birth of their fifth child, Bow and Dre experienced a rift in their marriage. This wasn’t necessarily unexplored territory for this kind of show, but the tone of Black-ish — which normally leans into the jokes more than the serious stuff — changed completely. Take an episode like “Blue Valentime,” which opened cheerfully as the couple got the kids ready to visit their grandmother. But as soon as the kids left and the door closed, and Bow and Dre were left alone, the colors turned greyer and the conversation drier, signaling the growing distance between them.
The latter half of the season followed them as they tried to work through their problems, mostly unsuccessfully, before eventually deciding that it was better for them to separate. Andre moved out, and they began to work out how they would co-parent their kids in two separate households. The show didn’t abandon comedy: There were lighter moments, like when Dre finally was able cook a dinner that the kids liked, or when Bow addressed a sound she heard in the middle of the night without getting scared. Rather than wallowing in the difficulty of their situation, the show illustrated how the configuration of a family could still work after changing drastically.
The show’s writers, who normally try to balance out serious moments with a few laughs, forced the audience to sit in the discomfort. “The thing that I get so often with network comedies, and I think some of the most brilliant people in the world do them, but it’s easy to hide behind a joke,” Kenya Barris, the show’s creator, told Entertainment Weekly. “I kind of feel like when you have to face things and you don’t have humor, it becomes very vulnerable; it exposes your deepest and darkest fears, in some aspects.”
“What makes black-ish really interesting is this idea that we are actually seeing the cracks in the foundation of a black family,” Alfred Martin says. “It’s taking us to a place that I’m not sure we’ve seen black families go on television.” According to a 2017 Nielsen study, more than 79 percent of the show’s viewers are non-black, which means they’re watching a story they’ve probably never play out in real life. And what else could be the point of fiction, if not to show us the inner lives of other people?
By the season finale, it actually felt like the show work with its main characters remaining apart. Instead, they’re pulled back together by a family emergency, as Bow’s father passes away. When he finds out, Dre rushes back to their house and finds his wife hunched over, sitting on the stairs. They embrace, finding a new emotional depth for the show. “Sometimes, the bad times tell us more about who we are and who we want to be with,” Dre narrates, as the episode eventually ends with the couple making amends and getting back together. Over 4.9 million people tuned in for the finale, and last week it was announced that the show would be returning for a fifth season, allowing the Johnsons to explore even more unmined territory.
