by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched an episode of the PBS Pioneers of
Television series called “Breaking
Barriers,” which basically talked about the people of color who cracked through
the all-white TV mainstream in the 1950’s and 1960’s — starting with Desi
Arnaz, who not only played Lucille Ball’s husband in I Love Lucy as the authentic Cuban-American he was but also
produced the show, pioneered the three-camera technique for shooting on film in
front of a live audience (even though Arnaz was only the first person to do
this in a scripted show; Ralph Edwards had shot the quiz show Truth
or Consequences live with three cameras as
early as 1950, a year before I Love Lucy began) and built Desilu Studios into a major production company
responsible for such TV hits as The Untouchables, Mannix and Star Trek (the latter two of which were also important steps up for people of
color on television). A number of the pioneers were interviewed — Bill Cosby,
Leslie Uggams, Diahann Carroll (who recalled that when she first showed up to
work on Julia she could not be
made up because the studio makeup department literally did not stock cosmetics suitable for Black women!),
George Takei (who told the story of how as a child he had been removed, with
his parents and siblings, from the two-story home they had bought with the
earnings from their business and taken to a converted stable where they were
interned during World War II — he said that the official term for the internees
was “resident non-aliens,” stripping from them the constitutionally guaranteed
designation of all U.S.-born people as U.S. citizens), Jimmie Walker, Margaret
Cho (who when I did a brief phone interview with her for Zenger’s had a lot of nasty things to say about her sitcom, All-American
Girl, and on this show recalled that the
crash diet ABC insisted she go on before the show started shooting caused her
kidney problems) — and Walker and some of the others noted that after the brief
flowering in the late 1960’s and 1970’s there are now fewer people of color on TV than there were then, and
virtually no shows built around non-white leads.
