Color Adjustment

From the 1950s TV incarnation of radio stereotypes Amos and Andy to "The Cosby Show" in the 1980's, Riggs (TONGUES UNTIED) sees a pattern of subverting racial identity and equality. Black characters were either harmlessly comical buffoons or sanitized into shallow, segregated reflections of their pallid white counterparts--happy, successful and, recently, yuppified. Even so-called breakthrough TV, like the Diahann Carroll sitcom "Julia" (1968-71) placed its idealized Black heroine into an impossibly color-blind society that interviewee Carroll admits was blandly one-dimensional. Riggs occasionally turns to an assortment of opinion-leaders, actors and TV producers for anecdotes and social commentary, all supporting the idea that prime-time Blacks are thoroughly whitewashed.

It's a sad but familiar refrain that a minority has been shortchanged in the media. Riggs does offer a few insights, like the admission from "Julia" producer Hal Kanter (with an Emmy Award looming over his shoulder) that his show was a form of penance for "Amos and Andy." A virtually forgotten, realistic drama of the early 60s, "East Side, West Side," (featuring young George C. Scott and James Earl Jones) looks stark and bracing even by modern standards. Couch potatoes may be shocked to realize that not until the 1970s sitcom "Good Times" was an intact Black family, with both mother and father, allowed to take center stage--and that was only because lead Esther Rolle demanded a husband (the role played by John Amos), instead of being the usual widowed "mammy" figure. And gentlemanly crooner Nat King Cole, host of an intermittant variety show in the 1950s, struck terror into the hearts of white station owners, much as angry "gangsta rappers" do today.

COLOR ADJUSTMENT is neither a comparative history lesson, nor really a critique of what constitutes entertainment. The filmmaker's concern is image, how the African-American is presented to countless viewers. "If TV alone can liberate us," intones narrator Ruby Dee, "it continues to mold how we are seen and defined." But there's something terribly facile about the thesis Riggs proposes. He contends that TV has always pandered to a sham vision of the American Dream: a superficial, consumer-crazed, affluent utopia with no relevance to the real world. Riggs makes his point by intercutting news footage of late-60s race riots and anti-war violence with clips of what was on the tube at the time--"Gilligan's Island," "Bewitched" and "Julia"--and he quotes producer Aaron Spelling: "Television is cotton candy for the eyes." So when Blacks reach ascendancy on the air via "The Cosby Show" (and to a lesser extent "The Jeffersons"), Riggs and his panel of smug academics claim that no worthwile goal has been achieved, and nothing has changed. The Huxtables are merely Ozzie and Harriet with dark skin, and the query "Is this positive?" is superimposed over the smiling visage of Bill Cosby.

In other words, COLOR ADJUSTMENT is, well, rigged. It presents a no-win situation, a set-up in which any Black who succeeds on the tube is demonized for selling out. As an alternative to Cosby, Riggs and his assembled scholars hail "Frank's Place," a short-lived 1988 comedy-drama that got the leper treatment from CBS, shuffled around to so many time slots that leading lady Daphne Maxwell Reid's own mother couldn't find it. One wonders, if the tables were turned and "Frank's Place" had been a smash while "The Cosby Show" languished, whether COLOR ADJUSTMENT would have adjusted its own opinion of the two programs.

Riggs informed a newspaper reporter that he pursued Bill Cosby for nine months for an onscreen interview to defend himself, but to no avail. When COLOR ADJUSTMENT premiered, with its sour take on the Huxtables, an upset Cosby phoned Riggs and explained his refusal. Riggs: "Essentially he said he did not want to engage in a public debate about dissension within the Black community. He felt it would harm our overall unity as a people. I find that very old-fashioned and quite regressive."

The point is well taken, but Riggs has his own blinders. By spotlighting prime time exclusively COLOR BLINDNESS skips the late-night stardom of Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, daytime's Oprah Winfrey and Bryant Gumbel, and Bill Cosby's Saturday-morning kids' show "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," whose urban setting was far removed from the Huxtable's comfortable lifestyle. (Dare anyone mention "Soul Train?") The politically correct commentators slam the mini-series "Roots" for obliquely suggesting that the struggle of American Blacks ended with Reconstruction; nobody refers to its followup "Roots: The Next Generation." Riggs omits shows with integrated casts like "The Mod Squad," "Mission Impossible," "Laugh-In" and "Star Trek." Variety shows hosted by Sammy Davis Jr., Flip Wilson and Leslie Uggams are ignored. Finally COLOR ADJUSTMENT is hobbled by being current only to 1988, which excludes the taboo-nudging satire of Fox TV's "In Living Color," the video incarnation of "In the Heat of the Night," the widely acclaimed "I'll Fly Away" and others.

In the fall 1992 TV season alone there were six new shows starring Black performers or set within the Black community. Marlon Riggs is quite correct in questioning what such roles--typically on sitcoms rather than the more prestigious dramatic format--represent, and what relevance they contain for America still stricken by entrenched prejudice and inequities. Unfortunately, COLOR ADJUSTMENT, with its easy cynicism and built-in failure mode, makes little progress toward answers. leave a comment