Last week, ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey hinted at a possible shift in programming that some interpreted as a concession to Trump’s America. “With our dramas, we have a lot of shows that feature very well-to-do, well-educated people, who are driving very nice cars and living in extremely nice places,” Dungey said at the Content London media summit on Nov. 30. “There is definitely still room for that, and we absolutely want to continue to tell those stories because wish-fulfillment is a critical part of what we do as entertainers. But in recent history we haven’t paid enough attention to some of the true realities of what life is like for everyday Americans in our dramas.”
What Dungey seemed to suggest is that ABC — a leader in airing successful shows with racially diverse casts — will consider setting more television shows in the middle of the country, away from the traditional media power centers in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.
When Vulture reported on Dungey’s comments, TV reporter Josef Adalian noted how ABC’s “hour-long series regularly feature significant numbers of non-white leading and supporting actors,” and wondered whether “Trump’s ascendancy threatens to shift the tone of the culture.” This either/or binary — multiculturalism vs. renewed focus on the middle of the country — has been struck repeatedly in post-election cultural conversations. But, in terms of television, I think it’s a false choice. “More multiculturalism” and “more flyover country shows” are not mutually exclusive ideals. In fact, they can and should be intertwined.
In the wake of last month’s election, media elites have spent a lot of time contemplating whether their blinkered perspectives have become unmoored from the realities of regular people. But Dungey’s comments were a rare public concession by a media power player that in spite of important gains in racial and cultural diversity, television remains woefully exclusive in at least one important area — geography.
The prestige shows that dominate the cultural conversation — everything from dramas like Scandal, Empire, and Mr. Robot to comedies like Transparent, Veep, and Master of None — are typically set in one of our three most prestigious American cities. The settings for these shows go hand in hand with the stories that TV writers and producers are most interested in telling, which tend to involve either young creatives trying to make it in the big city (like the New Yorkers portrayed in Girls, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Broad City, and HBO’s forthcoming Crashing, or the Angelenos of Love, You’re the Worst, and Bojack Horseman) or middle-aged power brokers who balance personal angst with government or corporate intrigue (Scandal, House of Cards, Empire, Billions, The Americans). Unsurprisingly, these stories are easily relatable for those working at the pinnacle of show business, and living in our country’s established show-biz strongholds, though perhaps not so much for the vast majority of viewers.
The most-watched shows are also dominated by America’s most prominent coastal hubs: Out of the top 25 highest rated shows from the 2015-16 season, only three scripted programs are set outside of the NYC/LA/DC axis: NCIS: New Orleans, Hawaii 5-0, and Grey’s Anatomy. Otherwise, so-called “average Americans” are being a served a steady diet of big-city cops (NCIS), lawyers (Blue Bloods), politicians (Madam Secretary), physicists (The Big Bang Theory), and whatever James Spader does on The Blacklist. When you factor in top-rated reality shows like The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol — all of which are set in L.A., with “creatives trying to make it” narratives — the percentage of flyover shows shrinks further.
If people are watching, however, doesn’t that mean middle Americans don’t notice or care about geographic homogeneity? Maybe. It’s hard to know for sure because viewers don’t have much of a choice.
This is not to say that aren’t any prominent flyover shows on television — Better Call Saul makes great use of the spare desert landscape around Albuquerque, and the appropriately titled sitcom The Middle is set in an unglamorous burg in Pennsylvania. But for the most part, in the television universe, NYC/LA/DC is the default setting and every other place is an exotic “other.” This explains why so many flyover shows are named after the cities in which they are set: NCIS: New Orleans, Hawaii 5-0, Nashville, Chicago Fire (and Chicago Med and Chicago P.D.), Fargo, Atlanta. (More about that last one in a moment.)
Can you imagine a drama simply titled Los Angeles or Washington D.C.? Of course not. Because it’s “normal” for shows to take place there.
Even TV shows that have been praised for increasing diversity are frustratingly limited when it comes to geography. As groundbreaking as Transparent has been for integrating transgender themes into mainstream television, its setting in the well-worn milieu of upper middle-class Los Angeles (with the entertainment business in close proximity) is so overly familiar that it practically seems de rigueur.
Why not set Transparent in the middle of Illinois? Why can’t Jeffrey Tambor’s character live in the same kind of modest home in which Roseanne Barr’s family resided in Roseanne — a blue-collar, middle-American, and artistically relevant show for which there seems to be no obvious contemporary analogue? Do the people who make and finance TV shows believe a middle-American trans story is less interesting than one set in L.A., or do they not know that story exists? If it’s the latter, I have a news flash: Trans people also live outside elite liberal coastal bubbles. If it’s the former, can I humbly suggest that you step outside that bubble for once?
Given the collateral damage created by our fractured media in 2016, pushing for more shows to be set in Wisconsin rather than Westeros is a relatively minor concern. But, as has been argued time and again, representation does matter when it comes to making marginalized audiences feel like they’re valued. An important part of this is recognizing that middle America isn’t just a cookie-cutter heartland populated by doughy white people.
The future of flyover shows isn’t more programs like Kevin Can Wait, it’s more shows like Atlanta, which takes place in one of America’s blackest cities in the middle of a perennial red state. Among the many things that made the first season of Atlanta so refreshing was its sense of place — I’ve been to Atlanta a handful of times, but the show evoked the spirit and feel of the city more vividly than any of my visits. The importance of the titular city to Atlanta can’t be overstated; the specificity of this world would’ve been rendered blandly generic had Atlanta been yet another show about young creatives living in New York or L.A.
Now more than ever, we need a media that doesn’t reduce whole regions of the country to regressive red or progressive blue. Rather, we could use a lot more nuance in how large swaths of America are portrayed. (Or more willingness to portray them at all.) For instance, I live in Minneapolis, the largest city in Minnesota. (We’re between Wisconsin and the Dakotas. I’ll give my friends on the coasts a moment to Google it.)
A lot of gay people live in my town — The Advocate once named Minneapolis the gayest city in America. There’s also a lot of Somali-Americans here, so many in fact that local voters just elected Ilhan Omar to the state House, making her the first Somali-American lawmaker in the United States. Minneapolis also has an active Black Lives Matter chapter, which has been galvanized by tragedies like the police shooting of Philando Castile back in July.
My intention isn’t to beg for a prestige drama to be set in Minneapolis. (Though that would be great!) It’s to illustrate how TV is lacking in imagination. This is a big country, filled with all kinds of people living in far-off, idiosyncratic places with their own takes on what it means to be an American in these uncertain times. It’s a far bigger country than pop culture often shows us. Why limit ourselves? Let’s explore it.
