Black History Month Program: Meet Bethonie Butler, Author of Black TV
Veteran TV reporter and author Bethonie Butler will discuss her book Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond.
Over the past decade, television has seen an explosion of acclaimed and influential debut storytellers including Issa Rae (Insecure), Donald Glover (Atlanta) and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You). This golden age of Black television would not be possible without the actors, showrunners and writers that worked for decades to give voice to the Black experience in America.
Written by veteran TV reporter Bethonie Butler, Black TV tells the stories behind the pioneering series that led to this moment, celebrating the laughs, the drama and the performances we’ve loved over the last 50 years. Beginning with Julia, the groundbreaking sitcom that made Diahann Carroll the first Black woman to lead a prime-time network series as something other than a servant, she explores the 1960s and 1970s as an era of unprecedented representation, with shows like Soul Train, Roots and The Jeffersons. She unpacks the increasingly nuanced comedies of the 1980s from 227 to A Different World, and how they paved the way for the ’90s Black-sitcom boom that gave us The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Living Single. Butler also looks at the visionary comedians—from Flip Wilson to the Wayans siblings to Dave Chappelle—and connects all these achievements to the latest breakthroughs in television with showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay and Quinta Brunson leading the charge.