lathleenwrites:

Black Sitcoms Will Never Be the Same. I ran through Jet Magazine’s Archives and saw that almost every other issue in the 90’s had a black sitcom family on the cover. If only we could get shows like these back. Here were my favorites growing up..

The only one of these I saw was “A Different World”… and only a few episodes of that.  Guess I was busy during the 80s… and white.  But I do wonder how much difference the race of viewer makes… “The Cosby Show” and “The Bernie Mac Show” were popular with whites and blacks but I suspect “Moesha” wasn’t a big draw for white viewers.  Makes me wonder whether “The Cosby Show” was the main breaker of the racial divide for 80s TV and why the color barrier didn’t stay broken (the only other “black show” of that period  I can think of that seemed to draw a significant mixed-race audience is “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”).  I could be totally wrong about this but it occurs to me that the 70s was actually much more successful at drawing mixed race audiences to shows like “Good Times”, “The Jeffersons”, “Sanford and Son”, “Diff’rent Strokes, and “What’s Happening”… perhaps because as a society we were actively engaged in discussions about race and integration… or perhaps it was because the characters on those shows conformed to racial stereotypes.  In any case, it does seem odd that there are fewer black shows now than there were in the 70s and 80s.  Here’s a feature from The Today Show that explores the issue: Where are the black TV shows?