While TV audiences are flocking to shows with diverse casts, UCLA’s study of the 2021-2022 TV season warns of a “contracting and potentially homogenizing TV landscape” that may signal the scaling back of diversity efforts, particularly when it comes to “big budget shows and who gets to write for TV.”
Despite growing audiences for shows featuring diverse casts including CBS’ “FBI,” TNT’s “Snowpiercer” and Netflix’ “Bridgerton,” the report, released on Thursday, found a pattern indicating that shows created by people of color were showing an uptick in getting greenlit but “tended to receive smaller budget than those created by white men, particularly in the digital arena,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, inaugural director of the Entertainment Media Research Initiative, which is housed in UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Continued Ramón in her statement, “The next few years may be a true test of whether Hollywood is truly committed to the changes they promised during the nation’s reckoning on race following the murder of George Floyd.”
Simply put, in a season landscape dominated by big-budget series like “Lord of the Rings” and “House of the Dragon,” women and people of color “just aren’t getting the same budgets as white men,” the report concluded.
And that’s especially ominous in the face of a recession and a general shrinking of the production budget pie, said Darnell Hunt, UCLA executive vice chancellor and provost and co-founder of the Hollywood Diversity Report, in the statement. “Diversity initiatives traditionally are the first to be cut or sacrificed when there are economic downturns. We’re already seeing it start with Warner Bros. and HBO cutbacks.”
Added Hunt, “But rolling back efforts before equity has been truly achieved for women and people of color would be a major miscalculation. Any cost-savings studios realize now will come at the expense of alienating increasingly diverse viewers who expect increased representation in their tv shows, and do not make good business sense in the long term.”
Michael Tran, a study co-author and UCLA grad student, said in the statement, “The racial and gender dynamics in a collaborative writers’ room have an enormous impact on the types of stories told.”
Meanwhile, gains are taking place on screen, though more quickly in digital than network shows. According to other statistics from the report as provided by UCLA:
- Cast diversity has increased: Overall cast diversity for broadcast scripted shows has steadily increased over the course of this report series. In the 2020-21 season, 34.9% of broadcast, 35.8% of cable and 30.7% of digital featured majority-minority casts.
- Female leads well represented: Women were well represented as cable scripted leads and digital leads and slightly underrepresented in the broadcast arena.
- Broadcast lags in featuring people of color as leads: Overall minorities were nearly proportionally represented as cable and digital leads, at 39.6% and 37.6% respectively, but underrepresented at just 27.4% of broadcast leads.
- Women of color made gains as broadcast writers up from 13.6% in 2019-20 to 17.8% in 2020-21.
- Women of color increased their shares of episodes directed across all three platform types from the previous season.
- Social media engagement was highest for digital shows that had diverse casts, such as Netflix’s “The Chair,” Disney+’s “Loki” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and HBO Max’s “Hacks.”
Read the full report here.
