| The Way We See It - May 2006 | ||
| May 10, 2006 | *updated Monday-Friday (unless it's a slow day) | |
Shake Up Coming for UPN's Black TV Shows - 1:31 p.m.
Monday night I was getting ready to call this chick, reached for the phone, and thought again.. not a good idea, "Girlfriends" was on. That's like calling a guy during the NBA playoffs, you just can't do it and expect the person to pay attention (unless it's a blowout Detroit - Cleveland thing.. Lebron, the party's over.) That may not be a problem a few months from now when UPN, the home of black comedies, merges with the OC aka the WB to form a new network called The CW.
To this point the WB and UPN have failed to capture the kind of huge audiences that their stock holders love. The owners made the deal in hopes of forming a fifth network to compete with FOX, ABC, NBC, and CBS. The idea: we both have a few quality shows, let's put them on one network and have a whole lot of quality shows. Determining the definition of a quality show could mean trouble for the black shows that have found a home on the network. UPN has been the one place that black comedies could be found in clusters, like chocolate, chocolate chips. Hence the.. U People's Network. Off the top.. UPN's black comedies are:
Only Everybody Loves Chris and Top Model are sure to make it. All of Us is on the fence because of the Will Smith/Jada Pinkett connection (they may not want to upset Big Willie.) Surprisingly there are reports that Girlfriends isn't a lock, one of the better shows on the network, certainly better than All of Us and wayyyyy better than the show I forgot to list, House of Payne. It debuted last week and was horrible, from Allen Payne's jerri curl-like doo to the dialogue ripped from the pages of a bad play. I pray that Tyler Perry's success with Madea doesn't give it life support. On May 18th, CW will announce their schedule to advertisers and we'll find out the fate of UPN's black shows. Charles Dutton is quoted in Newsday saying that the cuts may be a chance for a fresh start with better black-themed shows... "Describing some of the UPN shows as "just bad," he said they are based on an "an old-fashioned sitcom style ... that served a certain market, in my opinion, in a very kind of lowbrow way." "Nonetheless, he said, "if you are going to clean house with these shows and wipe out all the on-screen time and job opportunities, then you find new, fresh, black writers and producers and urge them to come up with something that's exciting, different, bold, daring adventurous - even on the edge." That's wishful thinking. In my mind the opportunities for black writers and producers is going to move to cable, specifically TV One who is negotiating re-run rights for some of the cancelled shows and BET who under the guidance of Debra Lee is looking to expand beyond music videos. The absence of UPN could also pull the sheets off the other networks, bed sheets, not Klan :) .. who haven't had to return calls about black programming, because the door was always open down the hall. Outside of Bernie Mac's show is there a black show on any of the other networks? Rose Catherine Pinkney, executive vice president for programming at TV One, restates the point.. "As wonderful as it was to have a place where you could go and find a lot of African-American programming, UPN often took the other networks off the hook. When you looked at the numbers [on minority representation] from the Directors Guild or the Screen Actors Guild, they looked OK," she said." "But when you took UPN and its shows out of the numbers, they didn't look so good at all. And that's what we're starting to see." "Things are changing throughout the television industry, and, unfortunately, one of the big changes is the loss of a lot of African-American programs that a lot of people depended on. That's very sad." Hey.. there's always the internet. comments = 1){echo "(".$counter.")";} ?>------------------- |
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