Minor Post #1 by Lewis Brown

Each of the three readings, to varying degrees, circles around the fraught nature of television's economic arrangement when it comes to discourses of "authenticity" and racial representation. I tend to read this relationship quite cynically—a feeling gratified to some degree by Herman Grey's article—though of course I'm wary of my own positionality in staking any bold claims. With that caveat up front, the Grey article cannot but call to mind the discourses of faux progressiveness championed by corporate America—especially in media industries—in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Tellingly, what we might call the  (remarkably short-lived) "we promise to do better" era of the American media landscape's public facade coincides with the ascendancy of the streamers and the so-called "streaming wars," wherein Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the usual suspects fought for the financial longevity that would accompany acclaim. Though the co-optation of this hollow rhetoric of racial justice was hardly limited to, say, Hulu's Twitter account, I think there's a sort of symbiosis here akin to how Herman Grey describes that between the institutional/economic context of late 80's TV and the proliferation of Black television: representations of authenticity became, in no small part, the terrain on which the streaming wars were fought. (Parenthetically, I TA'd the Television Symposium course, where TV creators come to campus to discuss an episode or two of a currently-airing series, for two semesters last year, where I saw this dynamic rehashed time and again: X showrunner wants to make something culturally "authentic," often with a genuine investment in seeing a culture of their own achieve meaningful televisual representation, but not infrequently with a more oblique relationship to the culture depicted that invites a level of cynicism towards how they're deploying that discourse. The two ideas that came up without fail in every class, usually discursively paired, were "authenticity" and streaming.) I was happy to stumble across another article of Kristen Warner's for the LARB that happens to pick up this exact topic: Warner validates this cynicism in her article "Blue Skies Again: Streamers and the Impossible Promise of Diversity," which situates this discourse as one that crops up repeatedly accompanying large changes in the TV industry, suggesting they'll inevitably beget progressive changes in TV content (whatever that might mean). Writing about the "blue skies" attitude toward this myth at the time of mass cable adoption, Warner argues, "the blue skies rhetoric about the possibilities of democratization and freedom that would bring about forward societal progress is the same discourse that surrounded the future of the internet and is the same discourse that swarms around the possibilities of streaming television." Discussing the turn away from narrowcasting that Fox, WB, and the CW all took upon achieving cultural and economic legitimacy, returning to the tried and true televisual logic of "least offensive programming," Warner writes,"'Diversity' is like the starter house that you sell when the market heats up and enables you to buy what you really wanted after all." The article as a whole is worth a read as she unpacks this relationship in far greater detail: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/blue-skies-again-streamers-and-the-impossible-promise-of-diversity/

I'll add as a PS that I've always found it astounding how, of all institutions, Amazon's canny harnessing of "authenticity" managed to incur such public goodwill when it makes so abundantly clear the commodification at play. We could all be several times more skeptical of claims to progressiveness from TV industry folk who are content to take a paycheck from and generate revenue for Amazon (though nor should we elide the fundamentally similar nature of the other streamers, vessels of data extraction that they are.)