Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television »

Kristal Brent Zook , Ph.D., has written about culture, race, feminism, and politics for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, The L.A. Weekly, Vibe, Emerge, and The Source.

Following the overwhelming success of "The Cosby Show" in the 1980s, an unprecedented shift took place in television history: white executives turned to black dollars as a way of salvaging network profits lost in the war against video cassettes and cable T.V. Not only were African-American viewers watching disproportionately more network television than the general population but, as Nielsen finally realized, they preferred black shows. As a result, African-American producers, writers, directors, and stars were given an unusual degree of creative control over shows such as "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air," "Roc," "Living Single," and "New York Undercover". What emerged were radical representations of African-American memory and experience.

Offering a fascinating examination of the explosion of black television programming in the 1980s and 1990s, this book provides, for the first time ever, an interpretation of black TV based in both journalism and critical theory. Locating a persistent black nationalist desire—a yearning for home and community—in the shows produced by and for African-Americans in this period, Kristal Brent Zook shows how the Fox hip-hop sitcom both reinforced and rebelled against earlier black sitcoms from the sixties and seventies. Incorporating interviews with such prominent executives, producers, and stars as Keenen Ivory Wayans, Sinbad, Quincy Jones, Robert Townsend, Charles Dutton, Yvette Lee Bowser, and Ralph Farquhar, this study looks at both production and reception among African-American viewers, providing nuanced readings of the shows themselves as well as the sociopolitical contexts in which they emerged.

While black TV during this period may seem trivial or buffoonish to some, Color by Fox reveals its deep-rooted ties to African-American protest literature and autobiography, and a desire for social transformation.

Publishers Weekly

In the early 1990s--before Party of Five and Ally McBeal--Fox Television carved out its niche by producing and airing black TV shows, beginning with Keenan Ivory Wayans's In Living Color. Network executives had realized that African-American viewers were a huge segment of the total TV audience and jumped to position themselves as "urban" and to establish Fox's reputation as a network that was hip and different. Yet, as Zook demonstrates in this engaging but somewhat slight account, which began as a doctoral dissertation, black writers' and producers' efforts to confront race-relevant issues were often stymied by executives who tended to prefer straightforward sitcoms that appealed to both whites and blacks. The result was that even the shows trying the hardest to deal with thorny racial themes on screen--such as Roc, South Central and New York Undercover--were, sooner or later, forced by the network to avoid controversial or unconventional material. Often the shows were canceled outright, or control was given to white producers. Zook also looks beyond Fox to NBC's The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, Living Single and The Sinbad Show, and breaks down the various ways--positive and negative, simplistic and complex--in which race is represented by network TV, revealing how a producer's identity often shapes programming decisions. Zook raises significant issues and writes in an accessible style, but her conclusion, that in the highly corporate business of network TV, "the possibilities for black authorship are tentative at best," is hardly revelatory. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)