Creative Film

108 views 9:13 am 0 Comments April 14, 2023

Over the last 10 – 20 years, television representations of race have evolved a lot and it’s shown through many different tv shows and reports that have been released over the years. There’s been a good rise in ethnic directors, writers, actors, and producers such as Shonda Rhimes who has produced shows like How to Get Away with Murder, Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, Inventing Anna and Kenya Barris who was the writer and producer of Black-ish and Grown-ish and the films Girls Trip and You People. They have been two of the many directors/writers/producers that have shown an evolution in the representation of race through the last 10-20 years.

‘By addressing the persistent racial inequities, the industry could reap an additional $10 billion in annual revenues’ (McKinsey & Co, 2021). While finding research on ways that race has evolved over the years, there were many articles and interviews about the evolution of television for different races. In general, trying to build a sustained career in television is hard as the industry has been a very unwelcoming workplace.

This part of the article just shows that if the industry was open to allowing different races in the industry, the opportunity to be in television the annual revenue would increase by at least 7% (McKinsey & Co, 2021), and even though that doesn’t seem like it’s much, it is and it would make a big difference in the industry if they were more inclusive with other races. In research, it is shown that in the UK in 2019, employees from minority ethnic backgrounds in broadcast channels like BBC, Channel 4, Sky, and ITV were made from 13% across the UK TV industry but from White ethnic groups it was 70% (Ofcom, 2019).