This week in American Studies, we have been talking about racial tokenism, and specifically how it applied to major network dramas. Our teachers have even said that tokenism is only present in network dramas, because other types of shows (sitcoms, reality shows), follow different rules.
I began to think of what those different rules were. I mean, all types of shows are for the purpose of entertainment, not just network dramas, so shouldn't they all follow basically the same rules? Well, in the same way that we looked at cast pictures of network dramas, I looked at a cast picture of the ABC sitcom "Modern Family".
This clearly would never be the cast picture for a network drama. In the photo there is a gay couple, a family where the husband is twice the age of the wife (and the wife is hispanic), and what we would call a "traditional" family. However, when one watches the show, it really pokes fun at all of these topics. It pokes fun at the fact that the families are different or dysfunctional, and that one of the women is latino.
We also looked at the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, which does the exact same thing. They make fun of tokenism and all of the elements that you cannot just make a joke at in a network drama.
So is that the answer? The difference between the two and tokenism is that one can make fun of it and the other one can't? I am not sure but it is a very interesting subject.
Great post Jon! I was actually thinking about the same thing regarding Modern Family and other comedies and TV tokenism. I think it's easier for a comedy to poke fun at something like tokenism because a comedy is a lot more relaxed than a drama. While some dramas can have comical moments, typically they are much more serious and perhaps poking fun at something like tokenism in drama would not be received well. While you could get away with much more easily in comedy.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact is that comedies try to make fun of things. That's why they are funny, and it's difficult to make jokes about tokenism when you're trying to be serious. So I think the question is not why can comedies make fun of tokenism, it's more of the question, Why don't comedies have to follow the same rules?
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