AYSW? | Where Are All the Black Sitcoms?

I've watched Girlfriends an embarrassing number of times.

I know Joan will inevitably sabotage whichever relationship of hers I'm rooting for. I know Toni will say something so unbelievably out of pocket that it teeters between diva and disrespectful. I know William is about five minutes away from saying some conservative bull that would get him excommunicated from Black Twitter in seconds. I know every twist, turn and plotline, but I always find myself rewatching. 

I do the same with Living Single, The Parkers, Moesha, Everybody Hates Chris and The Game. My entire Netflix recommendations section is just Black TV shows from the ’90s. 

However, after finishing my 8th annual rewatch of Girlfriends and surfing through Netflix's catalog for something new to watch, I realized something.

Where are all the Black people? 

I can only think of a handful of TV shows from the past 10 years that had more than two Black lead characters. And once you remove shows created specifically by Black writers or showrunners, I find it even more difficult to think of a single TV show in the past 10 years that had at least one prominent monoracial Black woman in its cast. 

Here are a few things I've been watching lately that have made this shift in Black representation particularly hard to ignore.

Girlfriends (2000)

Following four Black women navigating careers, dating and friendship in Los Angeles, Girlfriends is basically everything I want from a sitcom. Joan Clayton, Antoinette “Toni” Marie Childs-Garrett, Maya Denise Wilkes and Lynn Ann Searcy are all deeply flawed in completely different ways, and they don’t read as Black stereotypes but as archetypes of the type of young adults you would expect to meet in a major city. 

There was a period in American television when predominantly Black sitcoms were practically their own ecosystem. In 1996 alone, around 15 sitcoms starring predominantly Black casts were airing on television: most notably, shows like Martin, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Jamie Foxx Show and Living Single — the show Friends took inspiration from. There were as many Black sitcoms being released in the ’90s and 2000s as there are Power Rangers TV shows today — there were a lot of them.

Compare that to now. There’s Abbott Elementary, which I’m absolutely obsessed with, and we had The Upshaws and Black-ish a couple of years ago. While they were successful, many newer Black sitcoms have struggled to last more than a few seasons. 

This is why Girlfriends feels so refreshing. Joan is neurotic. Toni is vain. Maya is judgmental and ambitious. Lynn has 600 college degrees and somehow remains unemployed. None of them have to represent Black womanhood correctly because none of them are the only Black woman in the room.

That abundance gives them permission to be flawed without those flaws becoming an oversimplification of Black people as a whole.

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Don’t Worry Darling has KiKi Layne as Margaret, the only Black woman in the movie and the primary companion to Florence Pugh’s character, Alice Chambers. Margaret is the first to realize that something is wrong with their quaint little town, and, obviously, no one listens to her until Alice starts having the same suspicions. Margaret’s purpose is basically to warn Alice, suffer the consequences and ultimately push Alice’s story forward. 

Obviously, Black people haven’t completely disappeared from the big screen. If anything, Black actors have more freedom in what kinds of stories they can appear in. We have Black characters in fantasy, horror, science fiction, period dramas and prestige television. We no longer live in a world where a Black actors’ options are basically a sitcom, a cop show or being the first death in a horror movie.

This is good progress, but the same patterns of typecasting are being replicated, just subtly enough to call it diversity. 

Black women often exist only in someone else's story: the best friend, coworker or hyper-competent confidante who supplies our white protagonist with witty comments or poignant advice. Margaret's role in Don't Worry Darling fits neatly into that dynamic. Black men seem to get slightly more room, but even that tends to fall into familiar archetypes: the athlete, the criminal or antihero, the intimidating guy with a heart of gold like Bullet Train’s Lemon, or the wise mentor, otherwise known as roughly half of Morgan Freeman’s discography. 

And when a Black character is allowed to be the messy, romantic, deeply interior center of a narrative, Hollywood almost always gravitates toward lighter-skinned, biracial or racially ambiguous actors. It is impossible to ignore that Hollywood feels more comfortable giving them access to vulnerability and versatility due to their closer proximity to whiteness. 

Abbott Elementary (2021)

Set in an underfunded Philadelphia public school, Abbott Elementary follows a group of teachers trying to do their jobs while navigating money troubles, questionable leadership and tumultuous personal lives. 

Despite the show being a comedy, the characters aren’t parodies of what white people think Black people are like. They get to move the plot forward instead of existing to help someone else do it. 

And Abbott isn’t alone. Shows like Atlanta and Insecure similarly give Black characters room to be complicated and integral to the worlds around them. 

But there’s an obvious pattern: All of these shows were created by Black people.

According to University of California, Los Angeles, Black creators made up just 3.3% of the creators and co-creators behind the most-watched scripted streaming shows in 2024, compared with the 91.7% who were white. And research from University of Southern California Annenberg found that when Black writers, directors and creators were involved in Netflix productions, those projects had more Black leads and main cast members than projects led by non-Black creatives. 

This means that Black representation hinges on Black creatives being able to write and produce Black stories, and with the barrier to entry in Hollywood being so high, more effort should be put into making sure these creatives have the platform and support they need to be successful. 

Representation isn’t just adding one biracial woman to a mostly white cast; it’s allowing Black people to create and star in the stories that are meaningful to them.

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