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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1992-09-22
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REVIEWS, Page 70TELEVISIONMany Shades Of Black
By RICHARD ZOGLIN
SHOW: Color Adjustment
TIME: June 15, 10 P.M., PBS
THE BOTTOM LINE: A provocative look at how TV has
portrayed blacks, from Amos 'n' Andy through Roots to Cosby.
Marlon Riggs may be the most notorious unknown filmmaker
in America. A lecturer at the University of California's
Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley, he was the producer
of Tongues Untied, a film about black homosexuals that aired on
pbs last summer and became a cause celebre after being attacked
by conservatives for its "offensive" material. The film -- an
offbeat, heartfelt mix of documentary, poetry and performance
art -- did not deserve the abuse. But the brouhaha may have the
unintended benefit of alerting more viewers to Riggs' impressive
new offering: Color Adjustment, a provocative look at how TV has
portrayed blacks over the years. The film, which leads off this
summer's P.O.V. series of independently produced documentaries,
contains nothing that is likely to inflame the guardians of
media morality. But that doesn't mean it won't leave viewers
discomfited.
With a well-chosen mix of film clips and interviews, the
program takes us back to the ancient 1950s, when virtually the
only blacks on TV were comic stereotypes: Amos 'n' Andy, Beulah
and the occasional bumbling menial. "There's no room for
prejudice in our profession," Milton Berle tells Danny Thomas
in a snippet from Berle's old Texaco Star Theater. But of the
black stars of the '50s who had their own variety shows, only
Nat King Cole lasted a full season, and he was canceled
thereafter when he could not find sponsors.
Riggs ticks off the breakthroughs for blacks in the '60s
and '70s, then puts each under a critical magnifying glass.
Julia, in which Diahann Carroll played TV's first black sitcom
mother, was intended as "some sort of an apology for a lot of
the things we had done on Amos 'n' Andy," says creator Hal
Kanter. Yet the show's sunny treatment of race relations was as
far from reality as anything on the tube. (An encounter between
Julia's little boy and a white playmate: "Your mother's
colored!" "Of course. I'm colored too." "You are?" Squeal of
laughter.)
Shows like Julia and I Spy (which teamed Bill Cosby with
Robert Culp) succeeded by spotlighting black people who were
fully assimilable -- the sort of blacks who, as one critic
notes, "could move into your neighborhood and not disturb you
at all." Ghetto comedies of the '70s like Good Times did a
better job of reflecting black life, but they were betrayed by
buffoonery (Jimmie Walker's strutting J.J.). Roots, of course,
brought the black experience to a wider audience than any other
show before or since, but its popularity, the documentary
notes, came only by making slavery acceptable for prime time --
"transforming a national disgrace into an epic triumph of the
family and the American Dream."