Diahnn Carroll as Julia
Friends, can it really be true that we’ve had no tv series with a single African-American female lead since 1974??? The article below mentions Teresa Graves’s as an undercover detective in the 1974 made-for-TV flick Get Christie Love!, which I do not remember, but I DO remember watching the beautiful Diahnn Carroll as Julia when I was a kid back in the late ’60s.
So, um, let’s see. Diahnn Carroll broke that glass ceiling, Teresa Graves followed her, and um, we’ve had a mere 40 year absence of series led by a single black woman??
Where have I been that I didn’t notice this disparity? Me, the lifelong feminist writer and (I hope) someone who lives without racial prejudice of any kind. Well, I guess I’ve been living where I’ve always lived, on PLANET WHITE! Apparently, everyone who runs network tv also resides there.
Thanks to the wonderful Shonda Rhimes, who created both Gray’s Anatomy and The Practice, we will once again have a network series fashioned around an independent, intelligent, interesting woman of color.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/04/how-scandal-on-abc-got-off-the-ground.html
Check out the article and look for SCANDAL,an upcoming and LONG OVERDUE series inspired by the life of Judy Smith, a real-life political clean-up woman.
When Get Christie Love and Julia came out, I was old enough to remember them, but to young to understand these shows were groundbreaking. I assumed people of all colors were on TV. It was not until the 1980s that I notice everyone on TV were white. It bothered me for long time. Thankfully times are changing, I am sitting here watching a news program that has a black female host and two black female journalists. Times are changing, but we still have a long way to go.
Not that there aren’t problems with the show, but Olivia Pope’s a woman powerful enough to walk into the White House whenever she wishes and yank the president’s…um, chain. I hadn’t realized the character was based on a real person.