Written by Max Thornton.
Thursday night is the best TV night for comedy fans. Even now that 30 Rock has departed this mortal coil (goodnight, sweet show; may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest), there is still a lot to enjoy about Thursday nights. For me, it’s the trifecta of Community, Parks and Recreation, and Archer.
(Remember 2009, the year all three of those shows debuted? Ugh, what happened to you, TV – you used to be awesome.)
I love Community, Parks and Recreation, and Archer. They are my three favorite shows on the air at the moment. Coincidentally, each of them has an African-American woman among the main ensemble, and it makes for an illuminating comparison to look at the respective treatment of Shirley Bennett, Donna Meagle, and Lana Kane.
Community: Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown)
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| Not gonna lie, I adore that pun. |
The central conceit of Community is that seven unlikely friends are drawn together as a study group at a community college. The intent to explore diversity is built into the concept. Unfortunately, the actualization is not always as laudable as the ambition.
Shirley has tended to get short shrift in terms of character development. A lot of the time it kind of feels as though the writers don’t quite know what to do with her. It’s not necessarily because she’s one of the older characters – they never seem to run out of things for Chevy Chase to do as crusty old white dude Pierce. It’s not necessarily because she’s a woman of color – Troy and Abed are the show’s most beloved characters, and neither of them is white. I think it’s an intersectional thing. Shirley is an African-American woman, a committed Christian, and a middle-aged mom, and possibly none of these are things a writers’ room for a hip young pop-culture-savvy show is entirely comfortable with.
There has been some recognition on the show’s part that Shirley was a little underdeveloped in the early episodes, and seasons two and three made a conscious effort to give her more depth. We learned that she has a history of alcoholism, that she kicks ass at foosball, that her Miss Piggy voice is actually her bedroom voice. She had a very ill-advised hookup and a paternity scare while getting back together with ex-husband Malcolm-Jamal Warner. She has toned down the evangelical fervor of her faith to accommodate the diverse religious traditions (or lack thereof) among her friends.
Shirley is still often the show’s most problematic character and the one that is left most adrift in its various plots. At this stage, though, she is well-rounded enough that she actually feels like a real character. It just took a little longer than it did for everyone else on the show.
Parks and Recreation: Donna Meagle (Retta)
My main complaint about Donna is that she is too often in the background. She was technically only a recurring character in the first two seasons of Parks and Rec, only getting promoted to a regular in the third season.
Donna rarely if ever has storylines focused on her, which is a shame because she’s kind of awesome. She’s one of Pawnee’s most competent employees, tending to just get things done when the rest of the Parks Department is goofing around, but she also has a healthy sex life (both partnered and solo: in one episode she was shown casually reading Fifty Shades of Grey at work), a friendship with Aziz Ansari’s character Tom, and a brilliant made-up holiday called Treat Yo Self.
Although Donna is more of a background player than Shirley, she feels fully developed on much less screentime. It certainly helps that Retta is not the only woman of color in the Parks and Rec cast: Rashida Jones and Aubrey Plaza are both perfecton the show, and if any character is a little undercooked it’s Jones’s Ann Perkins (and her ennui is finally being addressed in-text).
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| Ann and April: NOT friends. |
One question I do have for the Parks and Rec writers, though: With such a fantastic, positive, nuanced portrayal of a larger woman on your show, why do you keep making so many fat jokes about the citizens of Pawnee?
Archer: Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler)
Archer is a show of an entirely different tenor than the NBC sitcoms. An animated dark comedy on FX, it’s considerably less popular and considerably edgier than either Community or Parks. As always, edginess in comedy is a double-edged sword. When it works, it’s absolutely brilliant (and perfectly attuned to my personal sense of humor); when it doesn’t, it’s just painful.
For the most part, Archer walks the line very well. If you’re unfamiliar with the conceit, creator Adam Reed’s description “James Bond meets Arrested Development” is not a bad one. Lana Kane is one of the top spies at ISIS, an espionage agency centered on the dysfunctional relationship between suave, self-centered, reckless Sterling Archer and his mother Malory, the agency’s head. At its best, the show functions largely as a workplace comedy with cool gadgets and some magnificently weird characters.
Lana is indisputably the most sane person at ISIS, in a Dave-Nelson-in-NewsRadio kind of way, and she also has to cope with being a woman of color in a pretty unforgiving milieu. Archer does a pretty good job of portraying other characters’ prejudice against her in a way that skewers the discriminators, not the discriminatee. Just look at the most recent episode, when Lana challenges Malory for refusing to send her on a mission to Turkmenistan.
Lana: “Because I’m black, or because I’m a woman?”
Malory: “Pick one! I mean, look, I don’t want to sound racist, but–”
Lana: “But you’re gonna power through it.”
Malory proceeds to explain how sexist and xenophobic Turkmenistan is, and how she just had to send only white men – who are meanwhile cocking up the mission with considerable panache. It’s a nifty but non-preachy way to demonstrate the myopia of racist thinking.
I love my Thursday night shows, and I’m glad they include rich roles for women of color. None of them is perfect, though, and it’s a sad truth that they are all created and helmed by white men. Putting women of color in your shows is great, but as long as the creators, showrunners, and executives are overwhelmingly white men, there is still a helluva lot of progress yet to be made.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.
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