Protests by NAACP, La Raza and other activists in 1999 highlighted the absence of minority characters on new network shows, leading NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS to scramble to retrofit, offering and forcing them into negotiations about ethnicity and casting as well as longer-term commitments to employment behind the camera. At the same time, other networks like UPN were accused of pandering to young African American demographics with irresponsible teen shows. The dearth of Asian Americans on any network beyond roles as newscasters or passing characters was hardly discussed.

Meanwhile, cable opportunities like BET and the growth and changes of Spanishlanguage stations like Telemundo and Univision complicate any simple conclusions about race and television even before one considers the limited minority presence in the upper echelons of the broadcast industries as producers, directors and writers. If television both reflects and shapes America, it is important to understand how it has dealt with—and continues to deal with—critical divides like race and ethnicity.

In the golden age of television and its aftermath, “whiteness” functioned as a norm against which some black racial stereotypes emerged in crossover shows from radio like the popular albeit racist Amos’n Andy or the roles given black women as maternal servants in shows like Beulah. The Nat Kïng Cole Show (1957) was the first African American show on prime-time network TV, but disappeared after one season. Asians took on such safe domestic roles in generations of cooks on Bonanza, Bachelor Father and Dynasty, while Hispanics added local color to westerns. There was hardly any presence of Native Americans outside westerns, or people of Arab and South Asian origin.

Julia (1968–71), which cast Diahann Caroll as an attractive, educated black professional single mother, seemed to be a breakthrough in fighting stereotypes, although some critics argued that the character and plots were so anodyne as to make race irrelevant. The lack of black men was also problematic, although the spy series I Spy (NBC, 1965–8) had brought Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott onto screen as a Rhode’s scholar and arch commentator on companion Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp).

In fact, the presence of African American stars seemed to grow thereafter. The Jeffersons (1975–85), whose upwardly mobile title characters spun off from Norman Lear’s All in the Family, provided comic yet edgy commentary on problems like intermarriage, class and exclusion in American society played out by African American characters with evident flaws. Good Times, a spin-off of another Lear series, played out even grittier issues in a working-class family in public housing. Capping off this golden age of minority television, in a sense, were such miniseries as Roots (1977, 1979). In 1982 Cosby began his decades of involvement with the Cosby Show and other productions, while Miami Vice (1984–9) confused categories of ethnicity and virtue.

At the same time, African Americans and others began to be integrated into the faces of television, including news, sports coverage and ensemble television—long-running hospital, crime and scifi dramas (Star Trek and its heirs) invariably had at least one African American star amid other minor minority characters. Critics have argued that the additions of minority characters only serve as tokens of diversity although at times of national convulsion like the Los Angeles riots, these became pivotal perspective characters.

Yet, if urban television implied local color, it was also clear that other shows had lengthy careers in segregated worlds—whether the sometimes leftist humor of Murphy Brown or the sophisticated urbanity of Frazier, where the whole cast is white. These were balanced by (almost) all-black shows that soon found a special home on UPN. The division, however, was one of audience as well as plot, as black and white viewers consistently chose different shows as their favorites—Seinfeld, for example, did not appeal to black audiences. When City of Angels brought the predominantly black innercity medical drama to prime-time network in 2000 it thus challenged not only network history, but consumption of media within a segregated society. Moreover, it asked whether the integrated model of dramas and soaps or the separate but equal presentations of UPN and the networks more accurately reflected the state and desires of race and ethnic relations in America at the end of the century.