Why Is Diversity Working on TV? 6 Stars Weigh In
Hollywood has a huge diversity problem. The uproar over this year's Oscar's near-complete lack of nominees of color has intensified every day since the nominations were announced and #OscarsSoWhite began trending on Twitter. On Friday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced sweeping changes to its voting process, including a pledge to double the number of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020. And while the implementation of these changes will hopefully create a more diverse nominee list in years to come, the bigger problem rests with a movie making industry that doesn't create enough opportunities for people who aren't white men. As Viola Davis pointed out at ELLE's 6th annual Women in TV Celebration last week, "The problem is with the Hollywood system itself...it's a symptom of a much greater disease."
"It's always hard to be vocal because you risk a backlash."
With more and more members of the Hollywood community lending their voices to #OscarsSoWhite, it's easy to forget how much courage it takes to speak out. "I think Asian Americans [and] Latino Americans should follow suit with how vocal African Americans are being about it," Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu told us. "But it's always hard to be vocal because you risk a backlash, and that takes a lot of courage to do. So I understand why it's difficult to speak out. But hopefully this will be a model for how to elicit change."
But while we've seen depressing trends when it comes to diversity on the big screen, on the small screen, an undeniable shift is taking place, and Viola Davis has a theory as to why. "It's sheer volume, and we have to fill up the volume with narratives," she offers. "How many channels do we have now? I mean, seriously, there are channels popping up that I've never heard of. Besides FX and AMC and Hulu and Amazon and HBO – we could go on and on and on," Davis says. "And you have to fill them up. You have to put material on each of those channels. That's the difference. And so therefore it's opened the door to so many journeyman actors who are out there, character actors who don't necessarily fit a mold. Actors who would have been the 15th or 16th lead in a movie…now can be the lead on a show. It's opened the door for them because they've got to fill up the volume."
Wu echoes Davis's reasoning: "This abundance of content forces television creators to be more innovative and to tell fresh stories with new faces and new ideas," she says.
"There's so much pressure on films to open well that it makes people more scared, less courageous, less innovative in their thinking." - Gillian Jacobs
And with American audiences increasingly choosing any of the myriad new TV offerings instead of a night out at the movies, studios seem to feel that movies have to be big spectacles to compete, both in the US and overseas. And they have to be familiar. (Case in point: Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, out in March.) "In film, you see them recycling old movies or recycling old concepts. That's like 50 percent of the big movies that come out and that's because they have those screens so they're only doing safe stuff," says Wu. "On TV, if you want to compete you have to have a fresh idea. A saturated marketplace is only going to foster healthy competition that will help creators grow and expand."
Gillian Jacobs, who will star on the upcoming Netflix comedy Love, agrees. "There's so much pressure on films to open well...that it makes people more scared, less courageous, less innovative in their thinking. And because there's so many networks now and there's so many more TV shows, people are willing to take chances on television. I think movies should look more like TV at this point."
Still, while more content equals more roles, more roles don't automatically go to a more diverse group of actors. It's up to executives to push for change – executives like Davis's boss on How to Get Away With Murder, Shonda Rhimes. "What it is with people who are in power, like Shonda, it's people who have the courage to explore their imaginations," Davis noted. "It's the people who are not so afraid that they just go along with what's been done before and they're afraid to step out and be progressive. [Hollywood] needs people who are courageous like that."
"The girl next door can be anyone from anywhere. That's what America is – everyone has come from somewhere else and made a country. We seem to have forgotten that." -Priyanka Chopra
Orange Is the New Black's Samira Wiley suggested that the overwhelmingly positive response to her show, which features a very diverse cast, has made television writers and producers more willing to follow suit. "We see on television sort of a prototype, and the idea is that because it's been made over and over and over again that that's what people want to see," Wiley says. "With Orange you have a show that has all different sizes, shapes, backgrounds and sexual orientations of all these women – that the public has eaten up. So now (it's clear) that 'No, they want to see that. They do want to see that.'"
After all, as Quantico star Priyanka Chopra points out, "The girl next door can be anyone from anywhere. That's what America is – everyone has come from somewhere else and made a country. We seem to have forgotten that." Galavant actress Karen David, who identifies as "a bit of Chinese, a bit of Indian, a bit of Jewish roots," credits her career to "people who have not been afraid to think outside of the box, who are not afraid of this mixed, tossed salad...I'm playing a medieval Spanish princess on Galavant, and that's because ABC and the team are not afraid to think outside the box. It's nice to see more people, especially women, who are cut from different cloths pop up on TV shows. And I hope we'll be seeing that in film as well."
