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CBS has long been ground zero in the struggle to get networks to understand the diversity concerns of activists, journalists, and critics. The network — which actually had a record of being one of TV’s most diverse in the 1970s, when it supported much of the work of Norman Lear — has spent nearly two decades ruling the TV roost, mostly with crime shows starring white men in their lead roles.
And that strategy has proved lucrative. CBS has been the No. 1 or No. 2 network in total viewership in every year that starts with the digits 20. (I have to qualify only because it slipped behind Fox ever so slightly in some of the years of American Idol’s height.) This means that as every other major network on TV has hit rock bottom and reexamined its commitment to diverse casting alongside myriad other concerns, CBS has largely kept doing things the CBS way, and profiting.
But 2017 is different.
CBS isn’t having a great year so far, and that plays into more aggressive questioning of its diversity
As the network’s new president of entertainment, Kelly Kahl, and senior executive vice president of programming, Thom Sherman, took the stage for their very first executive session at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, they were surrounded by a swirl of terrible news.
First was that they were there at all — former president Glenn Geller, who spent barely a year in the job, left it for a medical leave that eventually became a permanent step away from the job. Second was that CBS actually slipped to third for the first time in years among the demographic advertisers care about, 18- to 49-year-old viewers. (It still placed first in total viewership, but advertisers care less about those over 49 than those under it, which means CBS can charge less of a premium on ads.) Third was that CBS’s fall slate is pretty terrible. (And, yes, this is all subjective, but the best I can say about a couple of its pilots is that I can see where they might — might — get better someday.)
But overhanging everything was CBS’s continued inability to put shows with diverse casts on the air. And even if Kahl and Sherman were talking about a fall slate they’d inherited from Geller, they were still talking about the second consecutive fall season where CBS had no new shows with women in lead roles, and a fall where only one of its new shows didn’t have a white guy lead (the new cop show S.W.A.T. features Criminal Minds star Shemar Moore in the main role).
And on top of that, the network had just refused to give Hawaii Five-0 stars Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park — that show’s only two main actors of Asian descent — the pay raise they asked for in contract renegotiations. Kim and Park left the show. (Kahl would only say the network made “a very lucrative offer” to the actors, but they turned it down.)
In the past, CBS might have rebuffed these questions with, “We make shows people want to see. We’re going to keep trying to get more diverse, but our lineup only allows so much room for new programming.” To Sherman and Kahl’s credit, they didn’t take that tack (that much) — but their actual answers also revealed just why the entertainment industry struggles with diversity concerns in the first place.
An interlude about the CBS Kevin James sitcom Kevin Can Wait that doesn’t fit anywhere else but is too weird not to share
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The other big announcement Sherman and Kahl made, one that caused audible gasps in the room for how ghoulish it sounded, involves the recasting of the wife role on Kevin Can Wait, the network’s bland but solidly rated Kevin James comedy.
Initially, reports said that Leah Remini (James’s wife on his old sitcom The King of Queens) would be taking the place of Erinn Hayes (his TV wife in season one of Kevin Can Wait). But Sherman and Kahl revealed that the role wasn’t being recast, per se — it was being completely reconceived, and Hayes’s character would be killed off offscreen between seasons. After a time jump, James and Remini’s characters would be together.
Oof.
So many problems with Hollywood’s systems seem surface-level but run very, very deep
When asked by Variety’s Maureen Ryan if CBS’s entirely white casting department (on both coasts!) contributes to how few diverse actors the network casts, Kahl said he didn’t think that was part of the problem, while Sherman added, “They’ve been together for a long time. That’s just the way it’s been.” (He promised a few sentences later to expand the casting department to include a higher level of diversity — but it was clear neither expected this question to come up.)
Similarly, when pressed on the point of diversity again, Kahl said, “Every single drama on our air has at least one diverse character,” which feels like the answer of the West Wing producers scrambling to add Dulé Hill to their show’s cast after that series’ pilot all the way back in 1999.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, network TV isn’t as homogenous as it is simply because older, whiter TV executives aren’t aware of the problem. They’re at least aware enough of it to pay lip service to solving it. TV is homogenous because the systems put in place to produce, cast, and develop its shows are so heavily skewed toward white voices (and often white male voices) that ideas from other quarters can often be too easily brushed aside. (And that’s to say nothing of the agencies that bring talent to those networks, which have similar problems.)
Fixing that problem requires actively working to change not just surface-level appearances of diversity but also underlying systems — as FX has done with its initiatives to hire more diverse directors on its shows, which have radically changed its behind-the-scenes diversity. But fixing that is much, much harder, and if a network has had consistent success doing things the way they’ve always been done, creating incentives to fix broken systems becomes even more difficult.
Take, for instance, Kahl’s answer to a question that had nothing to do with diversity — does the network rely too heavily on cop shows? “Look at the top 10, top 20 list. There are tons of procedurals. These are among America’s favorite shows.” Or look at Sherman’s answer to a question about whether CBS would like to be more successful at the Emmys than it is: “We’d love to be nominated and have Emmys, but if push came to shove, we’d take ad revenue and ratings over Emmys any day.”
CBS has become one of TV’s most successful networks by doing things a certain way. It might know it needs to change, on some level, but until something truly cataclysmic happens, it’s not hard to assume business will continue as usual.
The irony here is that Sherman, especially, can’t really be blamed for the network’s current diversity woes, as he joined only recently from corporate sibling The CW (which has much, much more diverse casting on average) and had previously been at ABC during the casting of Lost and Grey’s Anatomy, both breakthroughs in terms of the idea that having a diverse cast could be a boon to a show’s ratings. He tried to lean on this track record a bit in suggesting he’s aware of CBS’s problems and will work to rectify them. But until those underlying systems are fixed, he might be tilting at windmills.
