Primetime Blues by Donald Bogle

Author:Donald Bogle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE NIGHTTIME SOAPS: A LITTLE COLOR DOESN’T HURT

Of course, placing African American characters in a white cultural context took on a whole other meaning in 1984 with the arrival of Diahann Carroll on Aaron Spelling’s top-rated Dynasty. Like such other popular nighttime soaps of the Reagan years as Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Flamingo Road, Dynasty explored a seductively melodramatic world of wealth, privilege, and power. Beautiful women. Dashing men. Luxurious clothes. Plush settings. And endless manipulations and betrayals. It was also just about exclusively a white world. Though some African Americans like Georg Stanford Brown, Bill Duke, Stan Lathan, and Roy Campanella Jr. directed episodes of the nighttime soaps, generally the series were so tightly controlled by their executive producers and production companies that there wasn’t much leeway for individual expression. For too long there were also no significant African American characters.

Diahann Carroll’s character, Dominique Deveraux, changed that. Having watched the soaps, Carroll aggressively had her manager suggest to various producers that they add her to their primetime dramas. The manager, Roy Gerber, recalled that “the first one we called, the producer told me: ‘We do not envision a Black person on our show.’ And they were not talking about just Diahann. They were talking about all Black people.” Dynasty’s co-creator, Esther Shapiro, however, had already considered the idea. “A lot of people suggested a Black maid—to do a sort of Upstairs, Downstairs kind of thing. I just hated that idea,” she said. “I was leaning more to a beautiful, glamorous, active Black woman who was smart and had an interesting life of her own.” Finally, Shapiro decided to create a role “where a Black could be on the same social and economic level as the other characters. The one thing we wouldn’t do is put on a Black woman as a victim.”

Carroll was signed to play Dominique Deveraux, an internationally famous singer and the half sister of series hero Blake Carrington (her mother and Blake’s father had been lovers). She returns to Denver to demand her place in the Carrington empire. Haughty, outspoken, glamorous as all get-out, the Black woman was now depicted as a formidable combatant in a tough, competitive, dog-eat-dog, mink-lined world. Her initial appearance was like something out of classic 1930s/1940s Hollywood. Dominique enters a posh hotel dressed to the nines, wearing a lynx coat and $350,000 worth of jewels with a matched set of Cartier luggage. When a clerk at the hotel tells her that he has a junior suite for her, she replies, “I don’t sleep in my clothes, and I don’t sleep with my clothes. I need a bedroom for me and a bedroom for my clothes.”

The press covered her appearance as a major television event with cover stories in TV Guide, Ebony, Jet, and Essence as well as features in other publications. People called her appearance “a blow against one of TV’s last WASP bastions: the primetime soap.” Ebony also reported that with Carroll’s initial appearance, “the show’s ratings zoomed in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other cities with large Black populations.

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