First, as it did in the 1990s (and will likely do again in the 2030s), television has “discovered” that black people watch television and that white people will watch some television when there are black and brown bodies on the screen. Call it the Scandal/Empire effect. With the television industry scrambling to blacken/brown their landscapes for the 2015-2016 season, The Wiz largely follows this trend to help diversify NBC’s screen – a network that lags behind ABC and Fox with respect to the representation of black and brown actors in leading roles. This also marks a departure from NBC’s previous broadcasts The Sound of Music and Peter Pan, which featured largely white casts. Audra McDonald was the only major black/brown actor in The Sound of Music – and even she received criticism in some circles for being cast despite her credentials as a then-five-time Tony Award Winner. In this (re)turn to blackness, The Wiz at turns lets NBC have it both ways: it can broadcast a musical that will feature a predominantly black cast, thus jumping on the “diversity” bandwagon, while at the same time, The Wiz is one of the few Broadway texts (or at least soundtracks) that multicultural audiences embrace, without the lure of “stars” to make it attractive. The potential for a cross-section of multicultural viewers likely proved far too attractive for NBC to resist. Which brings me to my second point…

The Wiz, like NBC’s previous live musicals, is family-friendly fare. It continues to be a go-to musical for elementary and middle/junior high schools across the country (even ill-advised all-white schools have been known to tackle productions of The Wiz). I was in two productions while in junior high school (shout out to Mrs. Rowe and Mr. Nelson!). In this way, NBC is likely banking on a segment of the audience who can draw on the nostalgia of performing (or preparing to perform) The Wiz. In addition, unlike Empire, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, The Wiz does not delve into “adult content” that might make it touch and go for parents wanting to watch the broadcast with their children. Much like NBC’s The Voice, The Wiz presents the potential to be a cross-racial, cross-generational television-watching experience.

This version of The Wiz also has to serve two gods. First, it has to serve the ratings machine, as any television show does. But, second, and more importantly, it has to serve the more fickle Broadway god. In this way, in an attempt to make The Wiz relevant, the production team will attempt to use the success of the recent Broadway revival of Pippin as its template. Pippin, like The Wiz, is a period piece. Pippin got around that “problem” by turning the production into a Cirque de Soleil-style event. The score remains fundamentally 1970s, as does The Wiz‘s score, but this novelty worked for Pippin (it ran for almost two years, won four Tony Awards and recouped its $8.5 million investment in eight months). Presumably, the conflation of an industrial interest in black viewers/audiences and the circus theme is expected to deliver on both fronts for NBC and Broadway producers.

However, the reasons The Wiz looks good on paper also could present problems for NBC. Importantly, the Broadway and film adaptations of The Wiz are often conflated. Many/most of the stories I read on NBC’s version of The Wiz talked about the 1975 Broadway adaptation, but used imagery from the 1978 film version. While that may seem like a nit pick on its face, the two versions are different. The Broadway iteration maintains much of what we know from the 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland – Dorothy is still a little girl from Kansas – while it updates the language to hew closer to 1970s black cultural dialect. But most importantly in its Broadway iteration, The Wiz used a completely new score, which gave us the beloved “Ease on Down the Road.” The film adaptation “ages” Dorothy to a 24-year old kindergarten school teacher (likely because of casting Diana Ross as Dorothy) and moves her to Harlem in an attempt to make it something that “might pass for a ghetto fairy tale” as The New York Times’ Vincent Canby suggested. But the film version also plays with the score a bit, adding the Scarecrow song “You Can’t Win,” which replaces “I Was Born on the Day Before Yesterday.” In addition, because the DVD (and television syndication) functions as what Paul Grainge calls “markets of memory” (10-11), the preserved and re-circulated version of The Wiz will likely be vastly different than what NBC presents. Aside from the ways that the Broadway version (which NBC is presumably presenting) and film version are fundamentally different, this version of The Wiz will add “new material” provided by Harvey Weinstein. In this way, making this new version of The Wiz is akin to a person who has had one too many facelifts – there’s something familiar, but also fundamentally different.

Of course, the jury is still out with respect to how this new The Wiz will perform, but I predict that it will deliver the ratings NBC needs to continue its engagement with live, televised Broadway musicals (particularly because hate-watchers are gonna hate). But as the industrial infatuation with black viewers undoubtedly wanes, don’t hold your breath for NBC’s next musical to be Sophisticated Ladies, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Dreamgirls or any other black-cast musical. NBC selecting The Wiz as its next musical, I suggest, is not about its blackness per se, but about what televisual blackness means at this socio-historical moment.

By refusing to name Jackie Robinson, Cecil Gaines, or Solomon Northrop, these films do more to serve broader narratives about an alleged post-racial America. Rather, these stories, filled with suffering, noble Negroes, ultimately are less concerned with these black lives (after all, they are nameless as far as the titles are concerned). They fit a cinematic post-racial narrative that suggests that most of America’s racial problems are in the mythic past.

While these narratives follow Black characters, they are not primarily invested in telling the stories of Jackie Robinson, Eugene Allen/Cecil Gaines, or Solomon Northrop. Instead black men function as props in their own tales, which ultimately aim to “teach” liberal white viewers about the “horrors” of slavery and pre-1965 life in America from within the safe confines of their nearest Cineplex; the conclusion of each film provides a neat way to close the door on those histories. Jackie Robinson goes on to integrate baseball and in 1997, his jersey number, 42, was retired across Major League Baseball. Eugene Allen/Cecil Gaines finally gets the White House Head of Staff promotion he deserves and meets President Barack Obama to close the post-racial loop, demonstrating that if black people just “go slow” they will get the rights they want (and implicitly deserve). Lastly, as the film’s narrative ends, Solomon Northrop is reunited with his family, implicitly suggesting that his wrongful enslavement had been righted (although that was not a typical outcome for many free black men and women who were wrongfully re-enslaved). Ultimately, these films are more concerned with providing satisfying narrative closure than showing the things that were as narratively neat in these men’s lives – like Solomon Northrop’s inability to sue the men responsible for his re-enslavement.

Ultimately, 42, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler are biopics centered on black men’s lives. However, two other biopics released this year help to illuminate the point I am making, Captain Phillips and Philomena. Captain Phillips is centered on Richard Phillips triumph over Somali bodies (whose bodies stand in for blackness) and Philomena focuses on the titular character’s search for the child taken away from her. While there is some cultural understanding of Captain Richard Phillips, there is little cultural knowledge about Philomena Lee. Nevertheless, we understand that we are specifically seeing Captain Richard Phillips’ story. This is Philomena Lee’s story. We understand the centrality of these particular white people’s stories because of our cultural rootedness in the notion that whiteness is multiplicitous while blackness is monolithic.

By excluding the names of Robinson, Allen/Gaines, and Northrop in the film’s titles, these films remove the personal suffering of these men and instead focus on the lessons to be learned. These nameless black bodies then, stand in for a broader black experience that reifies the monolithic cultural understanding of cinematic blackness.

This failure to name these particular black men within the titles of these quality films with black casts (and this argument can be extended to The Help), suggests the utility of the representational labor black bodies are called on to cinematically perform. These films, with their inanimately named titular subjects also stand in for blackness on the world stage. Unlike most films with primarily black casts (and those not deemed “quality” because they are not centered on black suffering) like Baggage Claim or any of the films within the Tyler Perry oeuvre, they are largely segregated into US markets whereas more than a quarter of The Butler’s overall gross was derived from international markets. In this way, the namelessness of the black bodies travels its inanimate self to worldwide markets.

Ultimately then, 42, The Butler, and 12 Years A Slave concomitantly participate in and reify the notion of the nobly suffering negro while also suggesting the relative lack of importance in naming black bodies in film titles. While the titles certainly gesture toward the subject matter of the film, the legacies of the individual stories of Jackie Robinson, Eugene Allen/Cecil Gaines, and Solomon Northrop get lost in translation. Instead, viewers are invited to take the “lessons” of these suffering black bodies and find comfort in the ways black people in American “have overcome,” while allowing the myth of post-racial America to strengthen its roots.

The cancellation of Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 came as news to few people (although it had its fair share of fans who bemoaned its cancellation). On January 13, a paltry 1.76 million viewers tuned it see the show and by January 22, its network, ABC, announced that it was (mercifully) putting the show out to pasture. To my mind, little was remarkable about Don’t Trust the B except that it featured a gay black character – a rare species in network television fare. Luther, played by actor Ray Ford, was the series’ gay black character, who was the assistant to James Van Der Beek (playing a version of himself).

Don’t Trust the B received little attention. Clearly, not many viewers tuned in to watch the series (thus resulting in its cancellation). And few stories were written about the series after its initial televisual introduction with the majority of recent stories revolving around Luther’s promotion to series regular for the series’ second (and final) season. The series has been met with virtual silence from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the self-appointed organization that polices gay representation. The series failed to garner a nomination for the organization’s GLAAD Media Awards, whose aim is to celebrate “images that moved [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people] closer to equality.” So, what was wrong with Don’t Trust the B? Part of what was “wrong” with the show is that Luther was not a “respectable” homosexual subject. Sure, he was professional (he was Van Der Beek’s assistant), but not only was he single (which seems to increasingly be a no-no in gay televisual representation), but he also embodied far more hegemonically (and problematically) feminine traits. With series like Modern Family, The New Normal, and the now-cancelled Partners, the more “masculine” characters temper the more “feminine” characters. But Luther is the only gay in the village and as such, his feyness is untethered to “respectable” straight-acting homosexuality. He typically prances and preens his way through scenes and provides some of the series’ comic relief – a break from the ways gay characters have been imagined in recent years. In some ways, he also embodies the lecherous homosexual subject. He secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) lusts after Van Der Beek and in his “diary” on ABC.com, Luther celebrates the success of a billboard featuring Van Der Beek and suggests that now the world gets to “see what [he] see[s]… the tight package of a beautiful creature… James Van Der Beek.”

For his embodiment of so-called “negative” stereotypes, one would think that I would be suggesting that we keep Luther safely locked away in television’s closet, never to be seen or heard from again. Quite the opposite, I believe Luther is far more important representationally than he has been (and likely will be) given credit. Long after the cultural memory/DVD archive has forgotten that there was even a show on the air called Don’t Trust the B, we should remember Luther.

Luther is/was an important contribution to the network television canon of gay black characters for three reasons: first, he creates visibility for a population largely ignored on television (although, black gay men were likely not watching the show en masse). As a run through the canon of gay and lesbian characters on television demonstrates, very few of those characters are of color. The list of usual suspects include Jodie Dallas on Soap, Ellen Morgan on Ellen, Will Truman and Jack McFarland on Will & Grace and Cameron and Mitchell on Modern Family, thus reinforcing Richard Dyer’s assertion in his book White that “to be gay… is to be white.” Second, while I will not suggest that network television will ever educate viewers about gay culture, there was always something campy about Luther and his writer’s willingness to let him trend toward embodying more “feminine” characteristics and being proud of his feyness. Third, Luther was actually portrayed by an out black gay man, which alone is cause for celebration. Excepting the men of Noah’s Arc, those black actors who have portrayed gay characters on television have been heterosexual. I am not suggesting that these actors did a bad job at “playing” gay, rather I am suggesting that in Hollywood, with few exceptions, out gay actors are often understood as incapable of convincingly playing heterosexual characters, while concomitantly, because of their personal lives, are “too gay” to actually play gay characters, and thus unable to work in Hollywood.

So as we bid farewell to Don’t Trust the B, we also bid farewell to a part of gay black visibility on network television. Luther was a character written in a mold that has (problematically) been deemed passé and disrespectful to the middle class, married/coupled, suburban model of gay televisibility. And for that, we should be saddened.

Certainly, networks and netlets contribute to our collective memory through re-runs (which also speaks to particular ideals about taste cultures) and the selection of series available through those channels, but the DVD works as a tangible, on-demand archive that allows one to relive a series on demand. So, when we think about the black-cast series, what is available and what might that say about the archive? Why is the complete series of The Cosby Show available when only the first season of A Different World is available? Certainly, as Janet Staiger has argued, The Cosby Show was the last blockbuster television series, but A Different World provides a quite interesting case study.

The series ran from 1987 – 1993 on NBC and was created as a star vehicle for Lisa Bonet’s Denise Huxtable as she went off to the fictional Hillman College. In its first season, the show was an extension of The Cosby Show – a series that has often been criticized for the ways in which it failed to deal with racial issues, particularly in the 1980s, a time when the Reagan administration created policies that disproportionately had a negative impact on the black lower classes. The first season of A Different World is a vastly different series than the one it became in subsequent seasons, which is why it remains queer that the DVD archive only remembers the first season.

The second season of A Different World underwent a complete overhaul (although the show was No. 2 in the Nielsens overall and in black households), with Debbie Allen transforming the series “from a bland Cosby spinoff into a lively, socially responsible, ensemble situation comedy” according to the Hollywood Reporter. It is beginning in the second season, when the series breaks from its squeaky-clean Cosby roots that it really begins to resonate with black viewership, particularly black members of Generation X.

My best friend Ayanna looked to A Different World to provide instruction on identity development. While speaking in “proper” English was not the lesson Ayanna took from the show, she did gain a sense of the possibility of higher education for black students. Ayanna recalls, “It was probably the first time I had seen… a show that had what I would consider peers, or close to peers, who were predominantly African American, that were seeking education who I had similar things in common with.” Perhaps even more importantly, Ayanna draws a distinction between the import of a text like The Cosby Show and its depiction of an intact black family and the collegiate space carved out in A Different World. She remembers, “while The Cosby Show was cool, it was more about family, I just remember A Different World sticking out for me and it actually being a show that I could kinda grow up with as I was becoming a young person seeing how they evolved.”

Certainly, A Different World remained popular for black viewers throughout its run and can frequently be seen in reruns on WE, TVOne, and a host of other cable networks, but if we use the DVD as a kind of archive to have and to hold and to watch our favorite TV classics (however one defines that term) on demand, why does A Different World get erased from the collective memory that is the DVD archive? Or better yet, why does A Different World get remembered for a season of the show that is so unlike the rest of the series?

I could make the argument that black-cast sitcoms I loved from the 1980s are unavailable on DVD like He’s the Mayor (1986) or the woefully ahead-of-its-time Frank’s Place (1987), but these had a far lesser cultural impact in their cultural moments. But A Different World was a series that was only outside the Nielsen Top 5 for the last year of its run. Rather, there seems to be something else afoot with A Different World particularly given that other Carsey-Werner hits of the era, Roseanne and The Cosby Show, are widely available through this archive (as well as fixtures on the syndicated circuit of TVLand, WE, Oxygen, and other cable networks).

What I argue is afoot is that A Different World engages with a different kind of blackness than other black-cast shows of the era like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-1996), which also aired on NBC and whose complete series is available via the DVD archive in the United States. Rather, in its second season (and until the end of its run), A Different World becomes a show that engages with issues that affect and effect black communities of the late 1980s and early 1990s like HIV/AIDs, Reaganomics, intra-race racism, the ongoing legacies of racist stereotypes, like the “mammy” and black people owning slaves. These issues are a far cry from the issues Will and Carlton face on The Fresh Prince or from the general antics of J. J. Evans on Good Times or Fred and Lamont Sanford on Sanford and Son. I am attempting to refrain from making a value judgment about Good Times, Sanford and Son, or The Fresh Prince, because they all have their place within the black television canon. However, when those shows that regularly depict black people in purely comedic light become the only way in which the DVD archive remembers blackness, it becomes highly problematic.

Notes:

Beller, Miles. “A Different World.” The Hollywood Reporter (Los Angeles), 21 September 1989

In the remake (which should really be called a reboot, as much as I loathe the word) of the 1976 film Sparkle, notions of class mobility are important elements of the film. In fact, the sole reason for this remake seems to be outside of a cultural desire to remake this film. After all, the original film made few waves at the box office, although it has become a cult classic among a segment of the black populace (a segment to which I, along with my sister, belong). Rather, I argue the film is first and foremost concerned with rehabilitating the black mass’ mediated past. What I mean here is that the film works to reshape the ways in which mass mediated blackness is understood. The class status of the main characters is moved from three women and their single mother “living in a world of ghetto life” to being comfortably middle class and living in the relatively affluent Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit. This effectively inserts a black middle class into the hegemonic narrative of 1960s Black America.

The cast of the 1976 version perform "Giving Him Something He Can Feel"

By displacing the original narrative from 1950s Harlem to 1968 Detroit, the film participates in the reification of the idea that as black folks, by 1968, we “had overcome.” In 1968, the characters are four years past the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination in housing employment, schools and public spaces. Detroit was three years past the shock and awe of the death of Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit civil rights activist who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama for her role in the March on Washington. In short, 1968 is mythically a period in which the world was integrated and all of the strife associated with racial injustice had been settled. But what is left out of 1968 is the assassination of Martin Luther King in April. While the film is persistent about using King as a temporal authentication device, the civil rights leader’s death is never mentioned (unless we are to believe that the film’s action takes place within the span of a month or so).

The cast of the 2012 version perform "Giving Him Something He Can Feel"

But initially I felt the film was lacking something other than temporal specificity–it seemed so squeaky clean. What I initially understood as a lack of grit in this 2012 version was crystallized upon my second viewing of the film. In its original 1976 version, Sparkle was about the ways in which systemic racism often precluded black people from ascension into the middle class, particularly in cities outside the Rust Belt where jobs within the automotive industry were plentiful. As such, when Sister and Her Sisters sing that they are “living in a world of ghetto life [where] everyone seems so uptight,” they are in fact, living in a small tenement apartment where they need to perform themselves out of poverty. When the members of Sister and Her Sisters sing the same line in the 2012 version, it is generally met with a “Girl please, you live in a two-story house with a piano.”

The Williams' family stoop in the 1976 version

This remake of Sparkle is ultimately about being what Fredric Jameson calls a “nostalgia film.” He writes about American Graffiti that nostalgia films are concerned with “reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period… it seeks to reawaken a sense of the past associated with those objects” (p. 19). As applied to Sparkle as a nostalgia film, it is about getting the costumes and sets right. By re-excavating the 1960s and how we have culturally thought about race in that period, the producers and writers of the 2012 version of Sparkle can use mise-en-scène to depict the period while flipping what we think about the period on its head. Black people in this re-imagining are solidly middle class (and in Sparkle’s Anderson family, small business owners). They have overcome.

The home of the Anderson family in the 2012 version

I am not arguing that Sparkle’s placement within the middle class is inauthentic and that a ghettoized existence for cinematic black bodies is “more black.” We have had a slew of films that reflect a black middle class that can be understood within the multiple ways we understand blackness in the 21st century (many of them produced by T. D. Jakes, who is one of the producers of Sparkle). Rather, as a film designed to remake the original version, I felt hoodwinked. Sparkle was gutted of much of the narrative thrust from the original film and all that remained was some of the character’s first names (even the family’s last name was changed for the 2012 version). Gone are tales of poverty, pimps, and hustling, and in their place are respectable ideals like middle class values, church, and education. By inserting a middle class  family (albeit a matriarchy), past notions of the 1960s black subject can be rehabilitated from their connection to “ghetto life.” These renewed tropes of respectability are not “bad” on their face. But they are representative of a black cinematic shift away from depicting a black lower class. By returning to the 1960s and reshaping the mass mediation of blackness, the makers of the 2012 Sparkle can retrofit their “middle class values” cinematic project to a bygone era most notable for the proliferation of Blaxploitation film. But in the process of rehabilitation, ultimately the filmmakers rob Sparkle of its…well, sparkle and erase the struggle of black bodies throughout the Civil Rights era.

But as I have re-engaged with the story of Ocean’s alleged coming out, it occurs to me that he did not really come out as gay on his Tumblr page. Certainly, Ocean asserting that his first love was a man does not conform to hegemonic notions of masculinity, particularly black masculinity, but by his admission that he had once loved a man, he is thus culturally ascribed the moniker “gay,” even though he has not used that word (to my knowledge) to describe himself. Perhaps the prevailing logic here is, as Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr., asserts in his book Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics, “…Many hold the view that any homosexual act at any time in life means the person is homosexual, a status from which they could never fully recover” (136). In some sense, this is a sexualized turn on the one-drop rule.

Ocean’s failure to use the word “gay” can be understood within the notion that some black gay men embrace calling themselves “same gender loving” rather than gay to escape the racism they perceive within white gay communities. And it cannot go without saying that Ocean has not (to my knowledge) “defended” himself against the charge that he is gay. But, by not using the word “gay,” he could also be trying to have a nuanced conversation about sexuality as fluid, rather than fixed.

What becomes problematic is that hegemonic understandings of masculinity disallow men to select “both” when asked one’s sexuality particularly within mass mediated notions of black masculinity wherein the discourse of HIV/AIDS is inextricably linked to black men having sex with other men on the “down low.” In the popular imagination, the “down low” is socially constructed as black men sneaking around and having sex with men behind their girlfriend’s and wife’s backs. The “down low,” and bisexuality by extension, becomes the way in which we develop a cultural understanding of the seemingly rampant spread of HIV/AIDS among black women. Because our culture still understands HIV/AIDS as a “gay disease,” the “down low brother” becomes Enemy No. 1.

But despite cultural antagonism, Ocean attempts to be sexually both. On his CD Channel ORANGE, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard chart, selling 131,000 copies, he lyrically vacillates between imagined male and female lovers. I allow that this bisexuality could be rooted in the notion that men, particularly those within the masculinist musical forms of rock, hip hop, and rap, must assert aggressive heterosexuality. Thus, Ocean may have been working mostly within the hegemonic confines of these musical forms. On the other hand, we are culturally uncomfortable allowing Ocean to, as he does in his song “Monks,” speak about an:

African girl [who] speaks in English accent likes to fuck boys in bands
likes to watch westerns
& ride me without the hands

while one track later, the lyrics for “Bad Religion” find Ocean lamenting “I could never make him love me.”

Perhaps the connection between Ocean and gayness can be understood because his network television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon found the singer performing “Bad Religion,” an ode to homosexual unrequited love. It is my contention here that we are culturally uncomfortable with male bisexuality. Certainly, homosexuality is “bad” because it deviates from the culturally constructed sexual norm, but bisexuality is more problematic because of the sense that it remains unfixed.

But if his alleged coming out never mentions the word “gay” or “homosexual” and his music expresses desire for both same and opposite sex partners, how do we culturally make the leap there? We can make the leap because men, particularly black men in the popular culture imagination, are always already heterosexual. The only place for a man to go once deviating from heterosexuality is homosexuality. Unlike Katy Perry who can kiss a girl and like it (and tell her imagined opposite sex betrothed about it in order to titillate him), if Ocean kisses a boy (or desires to do so), he cannot fit within the hegemonic notions of heterosexuality–despite his attempts to lyrically straddle the sexuality fence.

The twist with the 2012 made-for-television version is that, as People magazine puts it, “This time, the women at the core of the Southern story, set in the fictional Louisiana town of Chinquapin, will be played by Africa Americans.” Aside from the racial politics involved in casting African Americans actors in roles that were originally occupied by white actors (which has recently become a trend on Broadway, particularly with Tennessee Williams’ work including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and most recently, A Streetcar Named Desire), this new Steel Magnolias seems to be getting beat by the gay blogosphere because it is not the 1989 theatrical version.

On its pedigree, no one can claim that this “blackening” of a beloved gay text is in any way “slumming it” in production values and talent. Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the team behind the Oscar-winning adaptation of the musical Chicago, are producing the telefilm with direction by Kenny Leon, the acclaimed director of the television adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. The film stars Queen Latifah, Phylicia Rashad, Alfre Woodard, and Jill Scott–together having won and/or been nominated for a slew of music, film and television acting awards. To borrow and paraphrase the New York Post‘s 1969 Stonewall Riot headline, why are the blogsphere’s queen bees stinging mad? What might lead OMG Blog to begin a piece on the debut of the telefilm’s trailer by incredulously asking, “Who told Lifetime it was okay to remake Steel Magnolias?!”

As a gay viewer myself, there is nothing inherently ghastly about this telefilm’s trailer. I argue that it is being trashed in the popular gay discourse because it is not the beloved 1989 “gay classic.” On the blog Joe.My.God, commenter “Elsewhere” concedes that he is unsure whether or not he will watch the telefilm because “the original film was imprinted on my (somewhat younger) gay brain with such ferocity that I love it more than my luggage” works to illuminate the ways in which the memory of Steel Magnolias and those that he presumably re-visits are too precious to disrupt by seeing other bodies in the roles. Another commenter “Jeremy” says, “I love me some Alfre Woodard and Mrs. Huxtable [Phylicia Rashad], but this just feels off. I don’t think you can remake a film that was originally done with three actresses that injected their HUGE personalities into their lines… To hear anyone else say the lines reminds you of the original and how much more superior it is.” The feeling of “offness” “Jeremy” feels seems to be rooted in its attempt to disrupt the way he remembers (and presumably re-lives, via DVD) Steel Magnolias. Additionally, I am not sure if this level of “offness” “Jeremy” feels can be traced to the notion that Steel Magnolias is being blackened. The telefilm is, after all, being billed not as simply a “remake of Steel Magnolias” but an “all-black remake of Steel Magnolias“, thus encoding its difference at the site of its industrial reception.

Furthering a discussion of the place incredulous nature of a remake of this text, Out Magazine staffer Max Berlinger is “not OK with [this remake] on so many levels… [because] Shirley MacLaine and Dolly Parton’s performances are so utterly perfect I’m flabbergasted that anyone would think this is a good idea. I mean, I’ll watch it, but I won’t be happy.” Berlinger in some ways crystallizes the tension some gay fans of Steel Magnolias feel. On one hand, they fully want to reject the text because it is not the theatrical (and most widely available) version of the text. On the other hand, because Steel Magnolias feels like it is a text “owned” by gay men, some are overcome by a desire to consume this (queered) text in any incarnation made available.

Certainly, there are voices who, like Joe.My.God commenter “Pepe” asserts that he will watch Steel Magnolias if only “for the opportunity to watch Ms. Rashad, Ms. Woodard, Ms. Queen and Ms. Scott all in the same room at the same time” or Advocate.com reader Scott Amundsen who concedes that the “trailer looks like it isn’t too bad.”

But the proof will be in the ratings pudding. While Lifetime has not yet announced an airdate for the telefilm, the success (or failure) of this remake will be determined by how many people actually tune in to watch. The fact is, there are some gay men who will tune in to watch and enjoy the telefilm on its own merits while others have already decided to hate this remake because its biggest crime is the failure to be the 1989 theatrical version.

After Amos ‘n Andy and Beulah, black bodies were invisible until television’s turn to relevance in the 1970s when shows like Julia, Good Times, That’s My Mama, and The Jeffersons featured black actors in starring roles and placed the experiences of black protagonists front and center (although Julia‘s claim to blackness is still contested). Then came Fox in 1986 to pose the first threat to the “big three” since the DuMont Network’s failed attempt in the 1950s. To get a toehold into the marketplace, Fox used a counterprogramming strategy that focused on creating programming targeted at “urban” (which is always code for black) viewers by featuring shows with black stars, almost all of them comedies including In Living Color, ROC and The Sinbad Show. Once they became a force to be reckoned with (and purchased the broadcast rights to NFL Sunday Night Football), black viewers, and hence “black shows” were no longer needed and were unceremoniously dumped form the network (Fox Formula 1.0). The WB and UPN (later merging to become the CW) employed a similar strategy in the early part of this century (Fox Formula 2.0).

This brings me back to TBS, whose first foray into original programming was 2007’s House of Payne, a Tyler Perry-produced show that can be termed a black sitcom. After the initial success of House of Payne, in 2009 TBS premiered another Tyler Perry sitcom, Meet the Browns, based on the play and film of the same name as well as Lopez Tonight, a late night talk show starring comic George Lopez. Two years later, Are We There Yet?, based on the film of the same name, premiered on the network (alongside the premier of Conan after Conan O’Brien’s very public fight with NBC over the fate of his late night talk show). Here is where I locate the first inking that TBS might employ Fox’s very successful formula. Less than a year after Conan premiered on the network, Lopez Tonight was cancelled. The network announced the show would be cancelled on August 10, 2011 and the final episode aired the following day. And Are We There Yet? is also apparently cancelled as it no longer appears on TBS’ list of shows on its website.

At the ATX TV Festival’s “TBS: Very Funny” panel, Cougar Town creator Bill Lawrence discussed how great it is that the show is being picked up by TBS. And it is great that the cul-de-sac crew is not permanently leaving the airwaves. It remains one of the few shows that make me laugh out loud. But with the acquisition of Cougar Town and the upcoming premier of the mainstream (read: white) Sullivan and Son, one wonders what is going to happen to the network’s “black shows”? Certainly, shows run out of stories to tell. And even more are cancelled because of low ratings (particularly if those ratings do not include enough “right/white” viewers). But when black shows help to put new networks on the map, it is troubling that they ditch them in favor of more “desirable” demographic groups.

As networks offering original programming continue to proliferate, the argument has been made that while the big five networks are overwhelmingly white, that cable still represents a place for minority bodies to be represented. However, there are several problems with this argument. First, arguing that cable offers a place for black bodies ignores that cable is not “free TV” and there is a socioeconomic privilege inherent in paying monthly for cable (assuming that these representations occur on basic cable, rather the more premium tiers). Second, and perhaps more importantly, if we allowed ABC, CBS, and NBC to push representation of minority bodies to Fox, and then allowed the big four to push it to UPN and the WB and now the responsibility rests with cable, where does the ghettoization of black televisual bodies end? Does it end when black bodies are again symbolically annihilated?