Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Sanjena Sathian about her writing process.

Watching The Bachelor was supposed to make life easier. I started getting into it a year or so after I began working at my brother’s salon. I had a regular stable of clients, but none was particularly in love with me. The problem was not my skill—I am talented at hair removal and competent at mani-pedis. The problem was our Yelp reviews, which said things like “Good eyebrow threading but that one girl makes you keep your eyes open for a whole minute before she starts and the way she stares makes you think she’s trying to suck your soul out.” Which I thought was dramatic.

When he saw that particular review, my brother came into the back storeroom where I was taking my break and waved his phone around like a distress signal to get my attention. I was reading a blog about people who believe they’re already dead, and how psychologists find it very difficult to treat those settling into the placid state of afterlife. They are basically unconcerned with going to work, and surprised you can see them at all.

“Earth to Avanti!” My brother read the review aloud. “Can’t you just learn to make small talk like a normal person?”

I was willing to learn.

He conferred with his girlfriend, who suggested I watch The Bachelor. She said it was like the NFL for women. Like if the whole world shared the same high-school friends to gossip about. She said there were blogs and podcasts and tabloids and Instagram feeds and brackets and betting pools. She said that everyone watched it, that even some men indulged, discreetly and lovingly. It would let me into the world, this show.

This happened in the spring. Outside, the Bradford pear was stinking up the parking lot and dropping petals that looked like used Kleenex. As summer set in, I binged, taking careful notes inside my studio apartment, with its thin walls and rattling window AC unit, while the humid days thickened outside.

By late June, my eyes were starting to hurt and my hand was starting to cramp and my social-media feeds were crowded with images of all that normalcy, and yet I still was not much better loved by clients. Until Camrynn Hare—an old high-school classmate—walked in. Some years ago, a white girl would not have come to our salon, but eyebrow threading was now mainstream.

When she leaned back, I began staring into her cement-colored eyes but stopped myself. I asked if she watched the show and she made an intense mmhmm noise. I remembered how she’d passed around a tube of snake-venom-infused lip gloss by the lockers, her whole clique pursing their slick, plump mouths.

“What do you think of that Earl guy?” I asked. Earl was the villainous country singer with the snake tattoo coiling up his right arm.

“Oh my God,” she said. “He was in SAE at SMU with my maid of honor’s fiancé, and—” and then we started to talk. I lost track of my limbs as we discussed Earl’s true motivations, his upcoming gigs in Nashville, and whether or not he’d secretly had a girlfriend the whole time.

As she opened her eyes to blink at her newly pruned brows in the mirror, she cocked her head. The hair that had once been bleach blond was now chestnut brown and rose in a country-club pouf above her head.

“I know you from somewhere,” she said.

I agreed that she might. However, neither of us could place me. I booked her for another appointment four weeks out and mentioned that we were on Yelp.

But the point is what happened on The Bachelor during Season 12. This was the year that David P. Li’s huge Asian blockbuster movie came out, and everyone was psyched about representation, which was another way of saying that people who previously felt invisible now felt like the world was made of infinity mirrors and they could see themselves multiplied and omnipresent, like a clone army. So when everyone found out that superstar David P. Li was super-single, ABC was like, Let’s cast him, and it did.

Harry Chettiar came into the salon just before the premiere, in early fall. His parents are from Singapore, like David’s; his mother is Chinese and his father is Tamilian and his real name was Hari, but he’d changed the spelling. He enjoyed having his eyebrows plucked. Not threaded. Something about the many tiny pings of pain (pleasing) instead of the single dull stretch (numbing).

“What’s new in the world, Avanti?” he asked when he checked in at the cash register. I looked past him, through the salon windows, at my trifling world: the rest of the strip mall and the Ethiopian restaurant and the Target and the gas station my uncle owned. The sky was the color of overwashed denim.

“Not much,” I said. “Are you ready for the Bachelor premiere?”

He admitted he wasn’t. I led him to the back room, where I tend to take male clients, who find the front of the salon too exposed. I explained about David.

Harry hadn’t seen the blockbuster. “Was he in those vampire rom-coms?”

“Yes,” I said. “He was the vampire boyfriend’s best friend.” In those movies, David P. Li worked out next to the main vampire, and over moonlit sessions at the gym they discussed the vampire boyfriend’s love for his human personal-trainer client.

Harry lay down on the waxing bed.

“I got the scoop on all the contestants,” I said. “Want to hear?”

I engaged with all Bachelor Nation media. One of the brainier blogger/podcasters, who likes to remind people that she attended Williams College, invited me onto her show once, as the superfan guest. I did not click with my fellow panelist, Dr. Donna Linklater, a professor of cultural studies and the author of When Reality Isn’t Enough: Nonscripted Television and the Rise of the Modern “Romance” Lexicon. When I asked her if she believed in love, true love, she invited me to sit in on her freshman seminar to have my mind blown with critical theory, but I had to work, and anyway, I didn’t think that the way she talked, full of isms and citations, would help with small talk.

“Tell me,” Harry said. He liked to have me talk while I plucked.

I pulled from the middle of his face first. When his brow furrowed, I pressed my thumb to it and reminded him to relax.

“There are 30 women,” I said. “They’ll all show up the first night in limos, right. And they’ll strut out and say, Hi David, it’s so wonderful to meet you, you’re even hotter in person, I learned this word of Mandarin for you, etc.!” I moved to his right brow.

Harry exhaled. I felt the ring of his breath on my chin, just the size of an engagement ring.

“Thirty women.” He gritted his teeth. “I can’t even wrangle one.”

“They’re going to make the first limo all Asian women,” I went on. “I submitted an audition tape, see, and if they’d picked me, I would’ve been in that bunch.”

“I’m glad you didn’t get picked,” he said.

“That’s not nice.” I paused, tweezers in the air. There were mirrors all around us. I shook my head and gave myself the spins from the many incarnations I saw of me.

Harry opened his eyes as I finished the right brow and leaned toward the left. I looked away because I didn’t want to be accused of soul sucking. I used to think the moment before a beauty treatment required intimacy. I’d gaze at the whites roped with red, the ringed retinas, the black-hole pupils. I thought that if I stared hard enough I would fall into the right pair of pupils. I would tumble through the black hole and disappear and no one in this earthly reality would ever ask me to remove another hair again.

My brother knocked on the door. “Avanti, your next customer is here.”

Small talk, not big talk, he kept advising.

“Would you like to watch the show with me sometime?” Harry asked.

And then I did look into his eyes. They were light brown. It would be like muddying around in a tiny wading pool if I fell in there. I would not get lost; I would still be stuck on Earth.

Season 12, teasers.

David gazes out at a sapphire-blue ocean.

David grabs the face of a faceless girl and brings it to his. Both their faces disappear as the camera zooms out. They are in a hot-air balloon the same color as the hot sunset.

David’s voice is saying, “It’s so pretty here.” Girls’ voices are saying, “So pretty,” “So gorgeous.” Above them hangs a cratered afternoon moon.

A brunette says, “He’s from, like, Planet Sexy!”

Girls cry. David cries.

A blond girl says, “When I’m with David, the world just falls away.”

A girl whose face is obscured growls. She says, “I want to make all of them disappear.”

Before she told me I was anti-feminist, Dr. Linklater had a lot to say about how the couples—Ben and Becca O., Robert and Aimee P., Peter and Bekah L.—never last, and how it’s because they’re forced to speak in these preordained platitudes that, by virtue of cultural dribble-down, imperil the rest of us too. I told her we shouldn’t blame them, because you know those moments when they’re staring out at the sky above the ocean and saying things like so pretty, amazing, I’m ready, this journey, find love, late fiancé, single mom, last relationship, etc.? You know those moments you called “Orwellian-level deadness”? Those moments are when they’re seeing something so magical that they lose all the words they once knew. That thing is floating in the sky above the Java Sea. Like a UFO, maybe, or a distant galactic rock where the mysteries of truest love dwell.

At least they saw it, I told her. Have you ever? Seen it? Have you ever looked out at the great space above a sea, or above a mountain, or above the teeth of a city skyline, or even above the asphalt in the parking lot of the salon where you work, and have you ever thought you saw something, something alien you could never put words to if you tried? And have you ever thought, I want to rocket there as fast as I can? If you saw even a flash of that galactic love meteor, what could you say? What would be good enough?

Spoiler: When David’s limos rolled up on the first night, there were only 25 women. Not one was Asian.

I went to Harry’s house for the premiere. He lived in a midtown loft overlooking the park, with exposed-brick walls and a blackboard by the kitchen where he wrote his grocery list in green chalk. He ate a lot of green things. Kale. Celery. Spring onions. Spirulina. Chard.

Harry’s house was full of pictures of his dead mother, who was petite with disproportionately big breasts. I should say that I am petite with disproportionately big breasts. I have some northeast Indian in me, which means sometimes I am taken for Chinese or Thai. I will just say it. There is no way around it. I look a lot like Harry’s mother.

I approached one of the images of her, mounted above the television, which turned out to be an oil painting. Her eyes were totally black. The painter had neglected to give them variation in color and light, so they looked like two buttons on an otherwise human face.

Harry served gimlets and popped organic popcorn. He said he’d already had a few drinks before I arrived, he’d gotten nervous, he’d been wanting to ask me out for forever. He started talking and talking. It was endless, how much he had to say, as if the entire time he’d been asking me to talk while I plucked his eyebrows, he was biting his lip not from the pain of the plucking but from the pain of not speaking all these secrets. He pointed at the painting and told me that when his mother died, he had been at summer camp, lost in the woods during a game of something called Predator Versus Prey. He was the Prey. Right around the moment she died, he was being caught by the Predator, a huge white boy named Jimbo.

He asked me about my parents, and I told him how my dad had left when I was a teenager and how my mom had gone back to India as soon as I moved out of the house, and she died there. I didn’t tell him about my mom joining the creepy ashram where she had to wear white all the time, or how when I talked to her on FaceTime, I could see her slowly departing, replaced by this intensely faithful devotee to something invisible. I prayed very hard to the gods she believed in when she decided to starve herself to death for fear of accruing new, bad karma. You go your whole life in America not knowing that starving to death is a thing people do, and then someone you love does it, and you become aware that a million imperceptible forces exist in the universe that compel people to do this. In my audition tape for The Bachelor, I had obviously not shared this information; I just said I’d lost my parents, because you have to let other people fill in the rest, so they see you as normal, lovable, fixable.

“I’m so sorry about that,” he said. “You seem strong. Maybe because of it.”

I nodded. Then I kissed him on his elbow when he lifted it to take a sip of his gimlet. I had one hand in the popcorn bowl and I squeezed it so that I touched all the popcorn, even the dead kernels at the bottom.

“Why did you do that, on my elbow?” he lowered his drink. He didn’t seem mad. “You’re shy, aren’t you?”

I am not shy. I am easily mistaken for shy. I nodded.

He did the rest of the work. I felt vaporous, or like I didn’t exist.

“Is it okay?” he asked, in the middle.

Mostly.

Then I looked at the clock. My head was dangling backwards over the arm of his sofa and I saw the red numbers on his microwave, upside down. “It’s going to start soon,” I whispered.

“What?” He grunted. A bead of his sweat dripped onto my chin.

“The show.” I snapped my head back up. He put his hand behind my neck, to cushion it.

“Oh. You really want to watch the show?”

His breath came very fast.

I blinked very fast.

“Don’t cry,” he said. He had one hand on my right breast. He moved the other one from my neck to my left breast and squeezed both. My head dropped upside down again. Watching Harry’s inverted kitchen was like floating the wrong way in antigravity. I felt nauseous. He seemed to be going faster, though I couldn’t feel very much.

“I’m not crying,” I said as the blood rushed to my head. “But I want to watch the show.”

“Fuck,” he said. “I lost it, anyway.”

How many things could a person lose in a moment? This was one of the best messages of The Bachelor: In every moment lurks the possibility of great love but also great loss. If everyone saw this, everyone would live differently. They would take great risks for love, like going on television. They would demand more. A man I slept with for a while told me if I wasn’t careful, the world would never be enough for me. I said he was the one who should be careful.

Harry went to the bathroom. While he was gone, I reached for the remote control and started the show. That was when I found out about the missing limousine.

First night. Los Angeles, Bachelor mansion. Champagne sprinkles the air. The tongues. Everything seems to be giggling. The women, the house, the Southern California night.

Contestants: Twenty-one white, three Black, one Cuban woman. Fifteen blondes. Five brunettes. One redhead, dressed as a vampire in tribute to David’s first movies.

Kelsey, 24, wedding-dress designer from Bend, Oregon, steals him first. They sit outside, tucked under a bright-green shag blanket. Other women are visible through the doorway, no longer giggling. The vampire chews her lip with the fake teeth. Someone points and shrieks. Fake blood drips down her chin.

Kelsey, wearing a top hat, pulls a multicolored handkerchief from David’s ear.

David: Wow, that was like real magic!

Kelsey (leaning forward): Well, now you know that I believe in magic. Do you?

The near-kiss is interrupted by the vampire. She has taken off all her clothes except her black cape and is creeping up behind David. There are little blurred blobs in place of her undoubtedly perky boobs. She pops up when Kelsey is close enough to breathe on David’s nose. The vampire teeth connect with David’s neck. The vampire pulls back. The teeth do not come with her. They stick to David’s skin, they are so slick with fake blood. Kelsey screams. The women scream. David cracks up. The vampire gets the final rose that night.

In the morning I called the brainy blogger/podcaster and asked if she was surprised that the all-Asian limo never showed.

“What?” she said.

“You sent me the footage,” I said. “Of the first limousine. When it was five Asians, and the host came out and shook David’s hand and was like, ‘We’re so excited to shine a spotlight on representation this season,’ remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. Hm. They probably just filmed it as a teaser and found it didn’t test well or something. They cut people all the time, babe.” She panted. I could hear the roll and hum of exercise machines around her. I was locked in the supply closet at the salon between the huge tower of waxing strips and the courtesy tampons that we kept in the bathrooms. Outside, my brother was asking the other stylists where I was.

I thought I remembered some of the missing women’s names. I recited them back to her.

“I dunno, babe,” she said. Her breath slowed as she began walking on the treadmill. She glugged water.

“Don’t you think you should do a post or an episode about it?”

She sighed. “Look,” she said. “I went to Williams College. I like a sharp analysis of pop culture as much as the next person. But I’m not gonna do a whole episode on this. Dr. Linklater fucked up my downloads for a month. Maybe you should pitch a think piece or something.”

My whole body felt dense, like concrete, like I was one of the walls of the storeroom.

I hung up and searched my email for the footage I swore she’d sent me. I found nothing. Maybe she’d Snapchatted it? Or maybe I’d cleared my iPhoto? I couldn’t find social-media handles associated with any of the women I was sure were in the first limo. Perhaps I was wrong about their names.

I clicked and clicked and clicked until my thumb cramped.

A few people had written snarky posts about how The Bachelor shouldn’t be celebrated for casting an Asian man as the lead, how the airwaves could handle only one minority at a time: Did anyone else notice that the few nonwhite competitors got zero camera time? One writer said she’d heard reports that Asian women had signed up for the show but that ABC had canceled several contracts using the network’s new background-check system, so perhaps all those women had turned out to have DUIs or STIs.

I found just one post on a blog I’d never heard of that seemed to recognize my reality. It was by a woman named Mrinalini Rangapadmanabhan. I did not envy her that name. She said she knew—for a fact—that five women of various Asian descents had signed on for David’s season. She said they had disappeared off the face of the planet. Fact-check her, she dared you: There were no missing-persons reports, no social-media evidence; no one had noticed these women being subsumed by the void, by aliens, by covert ops, by another dimension, by something wicked. She ended the post with: “CAN ANYONE FUCKING HEAR ME OUT THERE.” I clicked on the neon-green Contact me link, but then my brother pushed the door open so suddenly that a wall of super-absorbent tampons fell on me.

“Avanti,” he said, waving the storeroom key. “What the fuck.”

That day, I did a mani-pedi, several Brazilian waxes, a bunch of eyebrows, and Camrynn Hare’s entire face-threading. It turned out that all those years in high school, Camrynn had been waxing most parts of her body.

As I spread witch hazel on her skin after, she said, “Aviva, I think you might need to let this one go.”

“Let it go?”

I had been talking to everyone, all day, about the missing limousine. These were clients with whom I always discussed The Bachelor. Most watched; those who didn’t enjoyed my recaps.

“You’re starting to sound a little crazy,” she said. I wanted to hold up the hand mirror to her face and go, You look crazy, like a stripped peach pit. But that would have resulted in a damning Yelp review.

“You always like The Bachelor,” I said in an even tone.

“I like to gossip,” she said. “But I’m not interested in discussing existential things when I’m getting my face done.”

“Existential?”

She sighed and went to pay. She tipped me 12 percent and neglected to book her next appointment.

That night I wrote to Mrinalini Rangapadmanabhan and told her I believed her. The Asian women had been ripped from the Earth. Aliens made sense to me.

The next Monday, I drove to Harry’s house. He seemed surprised to find me at his door.

“I only meant watch it that one time,” he said, but he let me in. I’d arrived 30 minutes early. As soon as he shut the door, I dropped to my knees and gave him a blow job. When he was done, I went to turn on his television with time to spare. I left him with his corduroy pants around his ankles in the front hallway.

“You’re kind of insane, aren’t you?” he said, sitting next to me. Above the television was that portrait of his mother, still dead, still resembling me. I did not offer my opinion about his sanity. Instead I told him what I’d been saying to Camrynn Hare regarding the missing limousine, and I complained that she said I’d been talking too existentially. I had not heard back from Mrinalini Rangapadmanabhan.

“I guess alien-abduction theories might strike some people as existential,” he chuckled. He poured two glasses of wine and placed the bottle on his dark wood coffee table. “My sister watches this with a bunch of girls,” he said. “Why don’t you do that?”

“Like a ‘girls night.’” I used air quotes.

“Yeah.” He grinned. “You have wine lips.” He licked his thumb and pressed it on my lips. It was a bothersome, effeminate, maternal gesture.

I had briefly attended a watch group for one of the summer spin-offs at my brother’s girlfriend’s house. There was a lot of rosé and vegan baked goods that no one touched. I sat between a tall blond woman named Holly Greer and another tall blond woman named Molly Peele, and I mixed them up. People were cold to me after that. Also, I found it difficult to simultaneously track everything being said on the screen and in real life. These women jabbered over the events of the show; I don’t know how anyone would have been prepared for small talk during the following week.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said, edging away. “I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with women afterward, see.”

“How come you feel like you’ve got nothing to say?” He reached for a stray lock of my hair and tugged on it hard. I wondered if he was going to ask me to choke him. I have had sex most ways. Here is my opinion about sex. Sex is a bunch of grunts and flails you make with your body and voice. It can be nice. But in my opinion it has little to do with the things you say when you look into the sky and all the good words are lost.

The show was starting. I asked him to please be quiet.

I began to sleep over at Harry’s on Monday nights after the show.

“Do you ever feel like something has just swooped down to Earth and stolen your words?” I said, during week seven, after sex.

“Like your aliens?” He smirked. “I guess. Sometimes. But if aliens came here and the best they could do was steal my lines, I’d think that was a waste of a trip.”

“That’s what I feel like,” I said. “You asked me why I don’t have enough to say.”

“Hm,” he said. “Well. What’s one thing you always want to say but can’t?”

This was why I did not date much. I hated the risky, slow striptease, revealing everything about yourself, only to wind up exposed and cold in an icy wood, so to speak, when the other person decided they’d seen enough. Out there, alone, freezing, naked, you looked around and wondered if anyone had been watching the whole time. It seemed better to love in neat phrases or in silence, gazing out at a sapphire sea, with a camera as witness. That way, even if your lover didn’t properly comprehend you, 8 million to 12 million viewers might.

I put my ear to Harry’s shirtless chest and looked out his bedroom window at the night. You can’t see stars from homes like Harry’s, because of the city lights.

“Hey. I can’t tell if you’re asleep.” He shook me and my bare breasts flopped. “Earth to Avanti?”

“I’m not asleep,” I said. “And I’m not shy.”

“That’s what you always want to say?”

“What?”

“That you’re not shy?”

I lay back down on his chest.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you like my view?” he whispered.

He started to massage my head. At first his nails felt like bird’s feet scrabbling along my scalp, but then it felt nice, and I felt bad, because he had been so clear about the shape of all his loss and I was letting him slot me in even though I knew I couldn’t fit. Obligingly, I considered his view. I saw only skyscrapers. The one that looks like a perfectly sharpened pencil. The one that looks like the head of a parasaurolophus dinosaur.

I nodded sure, he had a cool view. My head knocked against his chin. I did not say it was pretty or amazing. I couldn’t give him that.

Fantasy suites. Thailand. David and the vampire redhead, now known as Melissa, 27, small-business owner, Salem, Massachusetts, are in a hot tub. One-on-one, Melissa is gentler. Good at letting David in on her vulnerability: Every man she has ever been with has cheated on her. This information has made her a fan favorite.

Melissa: I was made to feel like I wasn’t enough for them. That’s why I became such a big personality.

David: That whole journey, it brought you here.

David lifts her out of the hot tub, carries her toward the fantasy suite. There is a risk. That she is not enough for David, either. But she takes the risk. Because the invisible, loving, omnipresent gaze of Bachelor Nation is saying, “You are more than enough. For us.”

In the morning, David leans on his forearms on the bamboo balcony while someone totes in Danish leaking blood-colored jelly. Melissa curls up in a ball in bed behind him, wearing glasses and a pajama tank top, braless. The camera doesn’t linger on David’s face, which viewers have memed on social media by covering it with a question-mark emoji to indicate enigma. Instead the camera brushes over his abs and lands on Melissa, her hot-red hair flaring over her shoulders, her eyes pooling.

The night of the finale, I went over to Harry’s as usual. I no longer spoke with clients about The Bachelor. Harry was my final companion in franchise consumption.

He told me he had joined an office betting pool.

“It’s me and a bunch of women,” he laughed, handing me a bottle of white wine from the fridge. The condensation chilled my hands. I drank straight from it. No popcorn, not since the first night. “Don’t be jealous, though,” he added, bringing his warm breath to my cheek. “They’re all moms and stuff.”

I sat on the floor in front of him as the episode began. He was doing that hair-scratching thing as I leaned against his bony knees. Kelsey was crying and Melissa was crying. I was getting drunk and Harry’s hands were moving down my neck and drumming on my collarbone.

“Wait,” I said, when one of his hands moved toward my breast.

“Sorry,” he said. “I know you don’t like to be distracted, during.”

“No, just wait,” I said.

Melissa was crying and David was crying and Kelsey was crying and even the host was tearing up as David sat across from him and worried aloud that some part of him would always be lodged in the girl he dumped that day. And then, as Kelsey stepped into a tiny rowboat to cross the blue lagoon to the island where David stood, alone, in a blue tux, surrounded by swans and yellow daffodils, I got up and straddled Harry.

“What’s going to happen?” he said, craning to see.

“She got there first,” I said. “Which means he dumps her and proposes to Melissa.” I started to fiddle with the zipper on his jeans. He wiggled out of them, still on the couch, his mouth slack.

“Within minutes?”

My lips were on his inner thigh. “What?” I said into his skin, which was sweaty and pungent.

“He dumps one and proposes to the other in, like, the same half hour?”

“Love is about extremes,” I said.

I lay on my back on Harry’s soft alpaca rug and pulled him onto me.

“Now just wait,” I said, when he went for my skirt.

“Wait?”

“Until Melissa gets there.”

He was pantsless and underpantsless, kneeling above fully clothed me, and I was turning my head a little awkwardly and watching David watch Kelsey approach. I was watching David accidentally drop to one knee in front of Kelsey, watching him shake his head like he’d been possessed, watching him admit that he’d been horribly confused. I was watching Kelsey punch the camera so hard that blood sprinkled the lens, watching her suck her hand like a self-cannibalizing vampire, watching her sprint away, holding her stilettos, bawling as she entered the black SUV that would take her to the airport. I was watching so closely that I didn’t feel the heat of Harry recede from me. I noticed only when Melissa arrived and I reached for Harry’s body—I had timed it all, so carefully—and I found that he was gone.

I made do alone. I watched David and Melissa say yes, yes, yes, love, love, love, while my breathing got fast and then I went home without saying goodbye.

David and Melissa broke up on Ellen, in front of 4 million viewers. Melissa took out her final rose and started chewing each petal and then even the stem shorn of thorns and then attempted to swallow the princess-cut Neil Lane engagement ring while shouting, “No one will ever be enough for you, you jerk,” while Ellen bounced on her toes and cried, “Hey, hey, guys, be kind to each other!”

After that night, after the tabloids declared that David was hot for the host, after the host sued them, after some of the bloggers finally started to note that there had been a sixth limousine that never showed, and wondered if David P. Li was self-hating and canceled the Asian contestants so he could successfully assimilate into white American society … after all that, David P. Li vanished.

People said he got plastic surgery in Korea. People said he moved to a part of the world where no one had seen the vampire movies or his blockbuster or The Bachelor or Ellen. People said he’d been kidnapped and killed by a crazy fan; people said all kinds of things about crazy fans. People said he’d always been shallow; hadn’t anyone noticed? There were the Bermuda Triangle theories. There was the suicide cover-up hypothesis.

I don’t talk to people about my theories, because I don’t want to be accused of being existential. I now discuss only the properties of hair follicles and clogged pores with customers; these topics cause people to believe I am a salon savant uninterested in chitchat. My Yelp reviews are adequate. All talk is small.

But. Just the other day, I did something. I posted a video to YouTube. Like those radio waves we broadcast into the cosmos in case any aliens are trying to get in touch.

Season 12, audition tape, unedited. Salon storeroom.

Behind me, a white plaster wall; edging the corners of the frame, piles of cosmetic wipes and aesthetician’s thread and waxing strips and those courtesy tampons. My hair, straightened, brushes my breasts; I’ve worn a lacy bralette that peekaboos through a plunging neckline because I’m not stupid; I understand how this works. I speak into my laptop camera.

Avanti, 24, aesthetician/Bachelor superfan, Decatur, Georgia. I spend all day trying to make people their most beautiful selves. It’s so important to me to try to make life as beautiful as possible. My parents aren’t around anymore. Family is so important. I have trouble opening up, because I know what it feels like to lose people. I am very afraid to have someone just disappear out of my life again, but with the right person, I’d be willing to take a leap of faith—hang on—

My brother knocks on the door a bunch of times, but I sit there silently. He says my name over and over, says he knows I’m in there, says I’ve got five minutes before I need to come back out. The knocking recedes. I adjust my bralette and sit back and for a second my picture freezes and I wave my hands to test whether it’s still recording, whether anything is there, in the machine, looking back at me.

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Sanford and Son. A Different World. Sister, Sister. For our October cover story, my colleague Hannah Giorgis delves into the untold stories—and unwritten rules—of Black TV.

Even as The Cosby Show’s ratings soared in the 1980s, both white executives and Black critics complained that its upper-middle-class family depicted an “unrealistic” version of Black life. Writers faced a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma,” Hannah writes: “Be Black, but not too Black. Or: Be Black, but not like that.”

The Cosby experience, Hannah argues, reflects how, for decades, Black writers have been pressured to tell stories that white executives find “authentic.” Here are three takeaways from her story:

1. White writers have dominated some of America’s favorite Black shows.

Some of the names might surprise you. Hannah shares one awkward conversation that arose in the mostly white writers’ room of Family Matters, after a Black writer pointed out just how unlikely it was that a Black father would not believe his son’s account of being harassed by a cop. “I mean, you can hear a pin drop.”

Even Issa Rae, whose HBO dramedy series, Insecure, shows Black life “without pathologizing or feeling burdened by it,” had to negotiate her authenticity early in her career. Rae, Hannah writes, was “continually told by non-Black Hollywood executives that her stories weren’t truly reflective of Black experiences.”

2. Some of the biggest advances in the industry are tied to one woman.

“The Shonda effect” is real. For a time, Shonda Rhimes—the creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal—was her own $2 billion industry, producing about 70 hours’ worth of television annually for Disney, which owns ABC. Her demands for a multiethnic ensemble in both casting and the writers’ room had observable consequences, Hannah argues.  

3. Audiences are evolving, and executives will need to as well.

Ratings for majority-minority shows are at all-time highs among young viewers. “Decades ago, Black visionaries were up against both market factors and corporate resistance—not a fair fight,” Hannah writes. “But demographics have changed, and so have public opinion and popular taste.”

Read Hannah’s full cover story.

(Getty; The Atlantic)

The news in three sentences:

(1) Tropical Storm Nicholas is expected to make landfall in Texas this evening. (2) Internal documents show that the Federal Election Commission ruled that Twitter did not violate election laws when it suppressed an article about Hunter Biden in October 2020. (3) U.S. Capitol Police arrested a man parked near the Democratic National Committee headquarters with a machete and bayonet in his truck.

One question, answered:

Should you get an illicit COVID-19 booster shot if you’re not immunocompromised? Our senior associate editor Rachel Gutman spoke with experts about the potential unintended consequences of booster banditry:

Esther Choo, an emergency-medicine professor at Oregon Health and Science University, recently told me that ​​lying (overtly or by omission) to get a third dose can mess up the data on how well third shots are performing among the immunocompromised and how well a two-dose regimen is protecting those with healthy immune systems. On an even more basic level, under-the-table boosting could skew data on national vaccination rates, making public-health authorities think more people have gotten their first or second shots than is actually the case. Essentially, getting a third shot before the CDC’s go-ahead can make it harder for health officials to determine when and if everyone else will really need them.

Getting another shot can offer a sense of safety and control, however fleeting, Rachel writes. But whether or not it’s ethical can depend a lot on your individual situation.

Tonight’s Atlantic-approved activity:

September book releases are in full swing. Lauren Groff’s new novel, Matrix, is “another masterpiece from a writer whom few at this point can best,” our Culture writer Sophie Gilbert maintains.

A break from the news:

Our staff writer James Parker spent an evening with the Eagles—and the band’s fans—on the Hotel California tour.

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

I. “You Can Hear a Pin Drop”

Carl Winslow, the protagonist of the ’90s sitcom Family Matters, wore his badge with honor. On the show, about a middle-class Black household in Chicago, Winslow (played by Reginald VelJohnson) loved being a police officer almost as much as he hated seeing the family’s pesky neighbor, Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), popping up in his home. Carl was a quintessential TV-sitcom cop, doughnut clichés and all. In one scene, he announces that he’s just had the worst day of his life: “I was in a high-speed car chase and ran out of gas.” The humor did not always break new ground.

The cast of Family Matters was predominantly Black, but the series was written and conceptualized mainly by white people. A 1994 episode, “Good Cop, Bad Cop,” illustrates the degree to which a Black writer could be sidelined, even on a show about a Black family. In the episode, Carl’s teenage son, Eddie (Darius McCrary), storms into the house, visibly upset about a run-in with the police. Yet Carl insists that Eddie’s account of being harassed and forced to the ground doesn’t add up: “That’s unusual procedure—unless you provoked it.” Carl’s response is jarring. He may be Officer Winslow when he’s on duty, but he’s still a Black father—one who ought to know how police in America often treat young Black men. Eddie walks away angry.

Felicia D. Henderson, a Black producer and screenwriter who worked on Family Matters from 1994 to 1996 before moving on to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Soul Food, and Empire, recalls the tension in the writers’ room when the episode was being workshopped. Television shows are typically written by a staff that collaborates on scripts; trading ideas and criticism around a table is an integral and sometimes raucous part of the process. Yet there’s a hierarchy in the room: The senior writers hold sway and the showrunner is ultimately in charge. Family Matters was no different. Then a junior writer, and one of only a few Black staffers on a team of more than a dozen, Henderson was at first hesitant to weigh in when a white writer tossed out the possibility of Carl responding the way he did. But the line felt wrong to her, and she spoke up. “I just said, ‘Well, no Black father would tell his Black son that,’ ” Henderson told me recently. “And the room got silent. I mean, you can hear a pin drop.” The white showrunner defended the line, and it went in. “It was clear in the room and in the moment that I had offended them,” Henderson recalled. “Like, ‘What, are you saying—we’re racist?’ No, but I am saying that’s not realistic.”

“Good Cop, Bad Cop” ends with Carl confronting the officer and reconciling with Eddie. Viewers get the kind of safe conclusion that wraps up a “very special episode”: Eddie was right to be upset, because some police officers really are racists. Last year, a month after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, the Family Matters cast reunited on Zoom to look back at the story line from 25 years ago. “When they wrote the episode, we didn’t realize it would be so revealing and telling today,” VelJohnson said.

Revealing and telling, yes, but maybe not in the way he thought. For Henderson, working on Family Matters offered an introduction to a defining feature of her long career in Hollywood. Negotiated authenticity is the phrase she uses to describe what many Black screenwriters are tasked with producing—Blackness, sure, but only of a kind that is acceptable to white showrunners, studio executives, and viewers.

From left to right: Eddie Winslow (Darius McCrary), Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), and Carl Winslow (Reginald VelJohnson) in Family Matters. The sitcom’s cast was predominantly Black, but the series was written and conceptualized mainly by white people. (ABC / Everett Collection)

The nature of the “negotiation” that Black writers must conduct has shifted over the years. Half a century ago, just getting Black characters on TV was a hurdle, and Black screenwriters were few. Today, as more networks and streaming platforms advertise the Black shows they’ve lined up—you’d be forgiven for thinking that every month is Black History Month—it is tempting to believe that Black performers and writers now have a wealth of opportunities, including wide creative latitude for those who make it to the top. This era of “peak TV,” in which the entertainment landscape is saturated with more high-quality series than ever before, has been a boon in some respects. According to data collected in UCLA’s 2020 “Hollywood Diversity Report,” an annual study of the entertainment industry’s progress, or lack of it, nearly 10 percent of lead roles on TV were filled by Black actors, likely the closest the industry has ever come to proportional representation (which would be about 13 percent). Shonda Rhimes, as titanic as any creative figure in the industry, is the force behind several of the most successful series in recent memory, ratings juggernauts such as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder. Kenya Barris, the creator of Black-ish, has produced comedic series that take on deadly serious issues of race while appealing to a diverse group of viewers.

Yet for all the strides that figures like Rhimes and Barris have made, the power in the television industry still rests mostly in the hands of white executives. The UCLA diversity report revealed that less than 11 percent of broadcast scripted-show creators, less than 15 percent of cable scripted-show creators, and less than 11 percent of digital scripted-show creators come from any underrepresented racial group. (These groups, taken together, make up roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population.) At Netflix, for which Rhimes produces shows and Barris did until recently, only 12 percent of scripted-series creators are people of color—this from a study commissioned by Netflix itself. According to a 2017 survey of the industry as a whole, 91 percent of shows are led by white showrunners. Too often, as Henderson put it to me, “it’s still white people determining what the Black experience is and then hiring Black writers to ‘authenticate’ it.”

Since its invention, television has shaped this country’s self-image. To the extent that we share notions of “normal,” “acceptable,” “funny,” “wrong,” and even “American,” television has helped define them. For decades, Black writers were shut out of the rooms in which those notions were scripted, and even today, they must navigate a set of implicit rules established by white executives—all while fighting for the power to write rules of their own.

II. Othello in Watts

The history of significant Black representation on television is a short one. The medium’s racial progress has been like that of most other American industries: slow, cyclical, uneven. In the early years, Black Americans turned on their TV sets and found themselves written out of the American story—or, worse, appearing only as caricatures. Not long ago, I came across a photograph of the 1963 March on Washington that made clear how starved Black audiences were to see their lives depicted on TV. In the photo, a protest sign, referring to the popular program Lassie, reads: Look Mom! Dogs have TV shows. Negroes don’t!!

That wasn’t completely true. In the 1950s and ’60s, African Americans like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. headlined variety shows. But the discontent expressed in messages like that March on Washington sign spoke to something bigger than token representation: a belief, at least among the middle class, that most existing television shows didn’t account for the political or cultural interests of Black people. At the time, comedies and dramas with Black writers and actors were virtually nonexistent. The few early roles available for actors of color drew on offensive stereotypes and outright minstrelsy—Amos ’n’ Andy, which aired from 1951 to 1953, was the most notorious example. White television executives were reluctant to sign off on story lines that featured Black people in complex roles or depicted them as a central part of American society. TV advertising was aimed at the white middle class.

In 1968, NBC debuted Julia, starring Diahann Carroll as a single mother raising a son while working as a nurse. Julia was the first middle-class Black woman to be featured as the lead character in a prime-time series, and given the show’s conceit—she had been widowed when her husband was killed in Vietnam—it might have offered a pointed commentary on the politics of the moment. In practice, however, the series stuck to easy laughs about family life, rarely touching on race except to make jokes that Carroll in a memoir characterized as “warm and genteel and ‘nice.’ ” The show’s creator, Hal Kanter, was white, and as he told Ebony in 1968, he wanted “entertainment,” not “agony.” In a cover interview for TV Guide, published eight months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Carroll acknowledged the show’s shortcomings. “At the moment,” she said, “we’re presenting the white Negro. And he has very little Negro-ness.” She would later tell Kanter that the stress of playing a role so far removed from the Black life she knew had made her physically ill.

Not until 1972 did a network attempt something more daring. That year, Norman Lear, the creator of the hit series All in the Family, and the producer Bud Yorkin launched Sanford and Son, an adaptation of the BBC’s Steptoe and Son. The show starred the Black actors John Elroy Sanford (better known as Redd Foxx) and Demond Wilson as father-son junk dealers Fred and Lamont. The Sanfords were hardly the archetypal family next door. They lived in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood that existed to most non-Black viewers as the focal point of the 1965 police-brutality protests that escalated into a week of violence. The series regularly addressed the racism its characters faced as Black men navigating a post-civil-rights-era America, and the passage of time has not blunted its edge. In one episode, Lamont, who dreams of the stage, is preparing to act in Othello. He has the title role—the dark-skinned “Moor.” A white woman plays Desdemona. When Fred stumbles on a rehearsal of the play’s murderous climax, he pulls his Black son and the white woman apart. He isn’t reassured when he’s told that it’s just a play. “Well you better have the National Guard standing by,” he warns.

For many Black viewers, seeing that kind of exchange between father and son in prime time was thrilling, a fact that Lear picked up on when he looked out at his studio audience. By then, he had been working in television for two decades; he knew firsthand how white most of those audiences were. The live audience for Sanford and Son was different. “There’s no experience like standing behind an audience composed like that—half Black, or half Black and brown, but all kinds of people—and watching them laugh hard, like, belly laugh,” Lear, who is 99, told me recently. “I’m very confident that added time to my life.”

Sanford and Son soared to the top of national ratings, challenging the long-held industry assumption that white audiences wouldn’t tune in to a series about Black characters. To some degree, this was a function of Lear’s earlier successes: Fred Sanford drew easy comparisons to Archie Bunker, the blue-collar patriarch of All in the Family. Both characters were cantankerous middle-aged men; both tossed around racial slurs and misogynistic commentary. Some of the humor has not aged well. Still, the later series, which ran for six seasons, exposed the prime-time audience to Black performers and Black modes of comedy. Foxx didn’t regularly write for the show, but Sanford’s incisive commentary on the indignities and joys of Black life in America worked so well thanks to his training as a stand-up comedian, with a style and sensibility the writers could channel. “He was a lounge act in Las Vegas, and we happened on him and couldn’t get over how much he belonged on television,” Lear recalled. Sanford brought the creative genius of Black comics to viewers who would never set foot in the kinds of clubs where Foxx and his peers performed. The show later pulled in the writing skills of other Black comics, including Paul Mooney and Richard Pryor, and employed Ilunga Adell, one of the first Black writers to work full-time on a network series.

Julia (Diahann Carroll, middle) was the first middle-class Black woman to be featured as the lead character in a prime-time series. The Norman Lear–produced shows Sanford and Son (top) and The Jeffersons (bottom) proved that series with predominantly Black casts could be hits. (Everett Collection; RGR Collection / Alamy; Columbia TV / Everett Collection)

Sanford and Son made possible the spate of Black sitcoms that followed, including others from Lear. The Jeffersons had a direct All in the Family connection: George (Sherman Hemsley) and Louise (Isabel Sanford) owned a dry-cleaning chain in Queens and had lived next door to the Bunkers. Their own series saw them shine, as business success allowed the couple to move from Queens to that “deeeeluxe apartment in the sky,” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Black writers on the series included Sara Finney-Johnson, who would go on to co-create the sitcom Moesha, and Booker Bradshaw, an actor who later wrote for Good Times and The Richard Pryor Show.

Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons proved that series with predominantly Black casts could be hits. Yet white executives continued to view Black shows as too much of a gamble. They didn’t want to risk losing a large, affluent white audience by appealing to what they dismissed as a smaller, poorer Black one. Television therefore remained almost entirely white; to be a Black writer or actor in the TV industry of the 1970s was to face exclusion at nearly every turn. When it came to staffing creative teams, the presumption was that white writers could write anything at all, but Black writers could contribute only to Black shows.

III. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

The 1980s produced little programming that focused on Black performers, and few of the shows lasted more than a single season. At the time, JET magazine published a weekly list of every Black appearance on television, a list that generally showed African Americans playing “comic support” or “minority sidekick” roles. The August 13, 1984, issue included the following: Kim Fields as the precocious Dorothy “Tootie” Ramsey on The Facts of Life, Roger E. Mosley as the helicopter pilot T.C. on Magnum P.I., Tim Reid as Lieutenant “Downtown” Brown on Simon & Simon, and Paula Kelly as the public defender Liz Williams on Night Court.

The lack of opportunities can partly be explained by the waning dominance of sitcoms, where Black writers and actors had made some inroads. Some of the explanation is cultural. Ronald Reagan was president. Family Ties, with its former-hippie parents raising a conservative son, was a reverse All in the Family, but there was no Sanford-style counterpart. On both Diff’rent Strokes, which ran from 1978 to 1986 on NBC, and Webster, which ran from 1983 to 1989 on ABC, Black youngsters (played by Gary Coleman and Emmanuel Lewis, respectively) were essentially rescued from poverty by rich white families, a parable of trickle-down harmony. The Blackness of the two boys existed in opposition to the white affluence surrounding them.

The Cosby Show was the great exception. Today, Bill Cosby’s name is synonymous with his crimes: The 84-year-old actor was convicted of felony sexual assault in 2018 and sentenced to a prison term of up to 10 years. (Earlier this year, he was released from prison after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction.) But The Cosby Show remains a touchstone. It was one of the few television shows in the 1980s with a predominantly Black cast. It was also hugely successful—among the highest-rated shows in the history of the medium.

By the time he developed his eponymous show, Cosby was a beloved comedian, and had co-starred with Robert Culp in the 1960s drama I Spy, a show whose international settings provided a convenient topical distance from civil-rights protests and urban strife in the U.S. Given this background, Cosby had far more control than other Black creators and performers in the industry. He envisioned his new series as a portrait of a family that any American could relate to. “I want to show a family like the kind I know: children who are almost a pain in the neck, and parents who aren’t far behind,” he told TV Guide in 1984. The series presented a rare vision of upper-middle-class Black life on TV. Cliff Huxtable (Cosby), a doctor, and his lawyer wife, Clair (Phylicia Rashad), lived in a Brooklyn brownstone and guided their children toward aspirational excellence—television’s very own Du Boisian “Talented Tenth.”

Cosby’s determination to depict an affluent Black family was radical in its way. For one, it challenged viewers who could only conceive of a Black household that looked like Fred and Lamont Sanford’s junk-strewn living room—or, at best, the bootstrapping success of the Jeffersons. But it also pushed back on a pernicious idea that had taken hold among television executives and critics alike: that Black programs must not only be compelling creative productions—good TV shows—but also somehow manage to capture Black life in a way that white people deem “realistic.” Susan Fales-Hill, one of just a handful of Black writers on Cosby’s creative staff, recalls a white Viacom executive dismissing the Huxtables as not representative of Black life: “Yeah, it’s a good show, but this family is not Black; they’re white.” When Fales-Hill asked him what made them white, the executive said, “Well, look at that house they live in.” Fales-Hill replied, “My mother grew up in Brooklyn in a house that looked a lot like that, taking violin lessons while her sister took piano lessons.”

The writer John Markus, who is white and was an executive producer on Cosby, remembers the show’s star explicitly pushing back against the expectation that his show be “Black” in a way that conformed to the perceptions of people who aren’t. Cosby also resisted the demand that a series about Black Americans be about race. The characters occasionally made references to global events, such as anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, but they were rarely seen having experiences with homegrown racism, despite living in a deeply segregated city. An episode that aired close to Martin Luther King’s birthday didn’t dwell on the politics of the holiday, instead marking the occasion more subtly: A squabble over borrowed clothing is exposed for its pettiness when the family becomes transfixed by King’s “I Have a Dream” speech playing on the Huxtables’ TV set. At the start of the second season, Markus told me, journalists “wanted an answer to the question ‘When will the show get into issues like multiracial dating—like, when are these kids going to date a white; when are you going to do that story?’ And at some point I said, ‘I’ve got to go talk to Bill about this,’ and I went to his dressing room. He didn’t even hesitate. He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘You go back to each one of them and tell them we’re leaving all of the racial issues up to Newhart,’ which was the whitest show on the planet.”

White executives weren’t alone in thinking that Cosby was an unrealistic representation of Black life. The series elicited barbed reactions from some Black critics as well. Ostensibly a “positive” image of a Black family, the show was criticized for inviting white viewers to believe that racial progress had already been achieved. “As long as all blacks were represented in demeaning or peripheral roles, it was possible to believe that American racism was, as it were, indiscriminate,” the Harvard historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a 1989 column in The New York Times. “The social vision of ‘Cosby,’ however, reflecting the minuscule integration of blacks into the upper middle class (having ‘white money,’ my mother used to say, rather than ‘colored’ money), reassuringly throws the blame for black poverty back onto the impoverished.”

Gates’s critique and the white executive’s incredulous reaction to the Huxtables’ lifestyle reflected the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma that Cosby writers faced: Be Black, but not too Black. Or: Be Black, but not like that. White writers were never whipsawed this way. The characters on Three’s Company or Cheers were not expected to convey some universal white experience. As even Gates allowed, the problem was bigger than Bill Cosby: “It’s not the representation itself (Cliff Huxtable, a child of college-educated parents, is altogether believable), but the role it begins to play in our culture, the status it takes on as being, well, truly representative.” A television landscape with a single prominent Black series gave viewers a single perspective on Black life.

At first, the Cosby spin-off A Different World seemed unlikely to escape this bind. The show followed Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) to Hillman College, the fictional historically Black institution that Cliff and Clair Huxtable had attended. When that series was first conceived, it focused just as much on a white student at Hillman (and the bias she experienced) as it did on Denise. Only later did the premise change, with Denise becoming the central character and her white roommate, an aspiring journalist played by Marisa Tomei, taking a supporting role. Throughout its first season, A Different World depicted a college atmosphere that failed to capture the spirit and nuances of HBCU life. Jasmine Guy, who played the snobbish Whitley Gilbert, remembers an early script in which students called professors by their first names. “My father taught at Morehouse,” Guy told me. “There’s just no way.”

The tone changed when Debbie Allen, an alumna of Howard University, was brought on as executive producer and director. “When Debbie came on board,” Susan Fales-Hill told me, “she was the one who really shook it up.” Allen was a formidable presence. While Cosby’s show largely ignored issues of race, Allen told Cosby that people on her show needed to talk about Blackness and about the issues of the day. “I almost fell off my chair,” Fales-Hill recalled, “when he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ”

Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy) and Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) in the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World. Though it never occupied the place in popular culture that Cosby did, it was far more radical, exploring racism, AIDS, and homelessness. (Carsey-Werner Co. / Everett Collection)

Under Allen, A Different World went all the places its progenitor wouldn’t. The series never occupied the place in popular culture that The Cosby Show did. But it was far more radical, subtly altering the trajectory of television—both through its handling of race and through the opportunities it gave to Black writers who have shaped the industry in the decades since.

A Different World explored racism, AIDS, homelessness, and rape, grounding its treatment of these subjects in the experiences of characters who varied in personality, appearance, and social status. Denise, of course, came from a comfortably upper-middle-class family. Her other roommate, Jaleesa Vinson (Dawnn Lewis), had enrolled at Hillman at the age of 25, after a failed marriage; she was typically shown working at a job. Guy’s Whitley Gilbert was the daughter of well-to-do Hillman alumni; she had arrived at school with the express intention of finding a husband. Other characters included the playboy Ron Johnson (Darryl M. Bell), the freewheeling activist Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer), the athletic graduate student Walter Oakes (Sinbad), and Whitley’s eventual romantic interest, the lovable nerd Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison). “What I loved about doing A Different World was the diversity of Black people that we had on the show,” Guy told me. “So none of us felt the burden of being all things to all people.”

This isn’t to say that the series avoided the scrutiny of white executives. Fales-Hill remembered an encounter with the network over a scene in which Whitley and Dwayne were arguing about the Amistad, the slave ship whose Black captives took control but were eventually apprehended and put on trial. She recalled, “The network came to us and said, ‘You know, can’t Whitley and Dwayne be arguing about their date on Saturday night?’ ”

In 1992, Allen and the show’s writers wanted to take on the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King. For the white executives to whom Allen, Fales-Hill, and the other writers reported, the riots were dangerous narrative territory. The Los Angeles that the executives knew best looked very different from King’s Los Angeles; they saw the riots as an ugly chapter in the city’s history, something to get past, not memorialize. Eventually, Allen and Fales-Hill persuaded the network to let them write a two-part episode that directly addressed the riots. Fales-Hill remembered having an ominous feeling after the meeting—as if it had been a pyrrhic victory. “They backed off, and she and I left that meeting going, ‘Okay, Thelma and Louise—we’ve driven off the cliff here.’ ”

The two-part episode, “Honeymoon in L.A.,” opened the show’s sixth season. Whitley and Dwayne are on their honeymoon in Los Angeles, and the couple is separated just as the city erupts. Whitley, ever the sheltered southern belle, takes refuge in the luxury-goods section of a department store; at one point, she pretends to be a mannequin. Dwayne, meanwhile, unwittingly helps some looters. Thirty years later, some of the dialogue feels trite or didactic; Sister Souljah makes a guest appearance to inform Whitley that “they can beat us, kill us, do whatever they wanna do—and get off, just like they always have.” But for Allen, the writers, and the cast, the episode was an important reflection of the reality that Black people, especially young Black people, around the country were experiencing. Getting such raw material onto prime-time television meant affirming that pain—and showing white viewers how the verdict had reverberated across Black households. At the end of the sixth season, the series was canceled.

IV. “Under-Paid Negroes”

The writers who came through A Different World went on to create some of the most prominent Black sitcoms of the ’90s, a period that proved to be a golden era for the form. Among these alumni were Yvette Lee Bowser, the force behind Living Single (the first prime-time TV show created by a Black American woman), and Cheryl Gard, a producer of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Those series ran on Fox and NBC, respectively, and won the wide audiences that more traditional broadcast networks could still command. Opportunities for other Black creators came from the newer networks UPN and The WB. An early example of the market fragmentation that was to come, these new outlets were less concerned with bringing as many viewers as possible to national advertisers. Rather, they were content—in their first few years, at least—to reach specific demographic groups and build intense loyalty.

[Read: How the ’90s kinda world of Living Single lives on today]

By the late ’90s, UPN and The WB had evening slates full of Black shows and employed a disproportionate share of the writers of color in the television industry. In 1996, UPN debuted Moesha, starring the R&B singer Brandy Norwood. With her dark skin and braids, the title character of Moesha was—and still is—a rarity in the coming-of-age subgenre. (While Moesha was on the air, and for several years afterward, Brandy’s photo seemed to be tacked up on the wall of every Black beauty salon in America.) The WB was home to family shows such as The Parent ’Hood and Smart Guy, which mostly served up earnest lessons and tender moments, though they occasionally took on weightier issues such as substance abuse and racism in sports. In 1995, the network also picked up Sister, Sister from ABC, a teen comedy co-created by the writer and director Kim Bass.

For Black writers, especially those who’d previously worked only on series with white showrunners, these new opportunities were a revelation—a chance to learn the craft in a space where at least some of the others in the room understood the lives of the characters they were tasked with depicting. During the season that they worked together on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Felicia Henderson and Larry Wilmore were the only Black writers on the show, which had been created by a white couple, Susan and Andy Borowitz. When we spoke, Henderson recalled that much of her job amounted to answering a single question: “Is that what Black people do?” She remembers white colleagues on another show looking her way and asking, “Does that sound right to you?,” as though there were a single specific way to be, or to sound, Black. Henderson would reply, “I was at a meeting of the All Black Writers Who Know What All Other Black People Think just last night …”

Henderson later went to work on Moesha—a very different atmosphere. Working under the creators, Sara Finney-Johnson, Vida Spears, and Ralph Farquhar, Henderson at last felt the creative freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself: “They made the decision that the room would reflect the people who knew the experience of the star.”

Working in such an environment required a trade-off, however. As the share of the audience claimed by the traditional Big Three networks continued to erode, TV was becoming less a single country than a collection of neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods where Black writers were welcome were shabbier than the white ones. The pay scale on many Black shows left something to be desired. A 2007 report released by the Writers Guild of America, West, found that the gap in median annual salary between white and Black writers was nearly $15,000 in 2005. The grim joke among Black writers and performers was that UPN stood for “Under-Paid Negroes.”

By the late ’90s, UPN and The WB had evening slates full of Black shows like
Sister, Sister (left) and Moesha (right). The short-lived networks employed a
disproportionate share of the writers of color in the industry. (R. Cartwright / Paramount Television / Everett Collection; PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy)

Black writers who tried to work on shows that weren’t pitched to Black audiences ran into a familiar double standard: White writers could—and did—work on Black shows. But Black writers on white projects remained rare. Kim Bass recalled being asked by a white executive to rewrite the screenplay of a buddy comedy—with the caveat that he touch only the Black character’s dialogue. Another executive once worried that Bass couldn’t “write white.”

In 2006, after years of struggling to make money and attract audiences, UPN and The WB were dissolved in a merger. The move coincided with the early days of peak TV, when cable networks, which by the turn of the century were reaching some 65 million homes, began producing an array of sophisticated series that have been compared to great cinema and even high literature. But few of these shows afforded more opportunities to Black writers or performers than many of the prestige broadcast series had. The Sopranos on HBO, Dexter on Showtime, Mad Men on AMC—these were shows created and performed primarily by white talent. Even HBO’s The Wire, which explored the drug trade in Baltimore and provided ample roles for Black actors, was scripted primarily by white writers. (The series creator, David Simon, has said that the late writer David Mills referred to himself as the “lone Negro” in the writers’ room.) Most Black writers didn’t have the luxury of wringing their hands over “representation” or “authenticity,” however. They were worried about their livelihood.

V. The Shonda Effect

On a recent morning, I sat down with Kim Bass at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where he sometimes meets with independent producers who have the power to finance his projects. We talked over breakfast about the ways in which Hollywood has shifted when it comes to Black America, a set of changes that Bass, 65, could not have imagined when he first broke into the business.

During the heyday of Black sitcoms, Bass created two multiseason series built around Black characters: Sister, Sister and Kenan & Kel, which made the young comedians Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell into beloved figures. (Thompson, long a fixture on Saturday Night Live, now also has his own series, Kenan, on NBC.) Sister, Sister, which ran from 1994 to 1999, revolved around twins who were adopted by different parents as infants and then encountered each other unexpectedly as teens. Bass recalled describing the character Ray (Tim Reid), the adoptive father of one of the twins, as a successful businessman whose name graced his company’s headquarters. A white executive insisted that no one would believe a Black man could be a millionaire. Ray’s corporate business would have to become a limousine service.

[Read: The unsung legacy of Black characters on soap operas]

In part because of his landmark ’90s productions, Bass told me, he hears from a lot of aspiring Black screenwriters, who at last have a significant cadre of Black creators they can reach out to for career advice. For Bass and for others who elbowed into the industry at a time when there were far fewer opportunities, mentoring a new generation of talent is both a responsibility and a challenge. “I feel for each and every one of them,” Bass said. He tries to help as much as he can, but he noted another reality: “If I spent my time focused on what everyone is trying to get me to do, well, I wouldn’t have time to do what I do.”

Some of the biggest changes Bass has seen in the industry are tied to the success of one woman: Shonda Rhimes. Rhimes came to television from the movies; she wrote her first TV pilot for ABC in 2003. The network didn’t move forward with that series, about female war correspondents, but it did take an interest in her next idea: a drama set in a Seattle hospital. Grey’s Anatomy became an immediate hit—it is still on the air after an astonishing 17 seasons—and one of the rare major network shows led by a Black showrunner. It follows a diverse group of doctors navigating chaos both medical and interpersonal. The staff of Seattle Grace Hospital rarely deals with capital-I Issues of race or gender; more often, they are just trying to keep their patients alive and their relationships afloat. Grey’s Anatomy isn’t a “Black show”—it is a mainstream hit that has made careers (Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh, Jesse Williams). By 2014 Rhimes had three shows airing back-to-back on Thursday evenings on ABC: Grey’s Anatomy; the political drama Scandal, starring Kerry Washington; and the legal mystery How to Get Away With Murder, starring Viola Davis. For a time, Rhimes was producing roughly 70 hours’ worth of television annually and generating more than $2 billion a year for Disney, which owns ABC.

Rhimes has spoken about her dislike of the word diversity, noting that her emphasis on creating complex characters of color, especially women, shouldn’t be thought of as something out of the ordinary. It is merely a reflection of the world around her. But by television standards, Rhimes’s approach—demanding a multiethnic ensemble in her writers’ room as well as on-screen—was remarkable, and had observable consequences. In the years following her breakaway success, the industry green-lit a wave of new series by and about people of color, a seismic change that has been called “the Shonda effect.”

One of those series was Black-ish, created by Kenya Barris. The show centers on Dre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) and his biracial wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), as they raise their children in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. If the milieu resembles that of The Cosby Show, the similarities end there. Its writers’ room has been staffed mostly with people of color. And from its inception, in 2014, the series has tackled social issues head-on, mining family-friendly yet acerbic humor from subjects such as gun control, class inequality, and the question of who can use the N-word.

Peter Saji wrote for Black-ish and went on to co-create the spin-off Mixed-ish, about Rainbow’s childhood. Earlier in his career, Saji had written for other series with less diverse writers’ rooms, and he recounted for me an incident that typified the experience. On his first day on a series, a veteran white writer told a joke in which the punch line was a white woman calling a Black performer the N-word. To Saji, it felt like a test, as if his reaction would determine whether he’d be welcome in the room. “That was like my Jackie Robinson moment, right? Like, I just got cleated—how do I take this? ” he remembered thinking. He didn’t voice his discomfort. “In that moment, I felt like, I understand psychologically what you’re trying to do. And as fucked-up as it is, the onus is on me to do well and not blow this opportunity for everyone that’s coming behind me.”

By contrast, the Black-ish writers’ room was, in Saji’s words, his Hollywood HBCU. Saji felt he had space to hone his craft and to dramatize the challenges he and others in the room had faced in their personal and professional lives. The series also responded, in something like real time, to the world around it. In 2016, it aired an episode titled “Hope,” in which the family learns of the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer. The incident is fictional, but the script evokes the real-life deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland; Barris has said that the episode was inspired by his struggle to explain the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to his own children. Dre and “Bow” differ over how to help their children process the shooting—and the eventual acquittal of the police officer. Dre insists that the police are an instrument of systemic racism, and the couple’s children “need to know the world that they’re living in” as young Black people. Bow tries to find a way to condemn the violence while preserving their children’s innocence so they can “be kids for a little while longer.” Barris’s sensibilities are idiosyncratic, and the series doesn’t always achieve its aims (or land its jokes). But “Hope” is a “very special episode” that manages, despite some awkward moments, to tackle a serious issue without making the entire viewing experience feel like a lesson, or a sermon.

[Read: Black-ish and how to talk to kids about police brutality]

Compared with the handling of police brutality in Family Matters two decades earlier, “Hope” looks like a great leap forward. Yet Saji noted that “Hope” could happen only because earlier shows had introduced white viewers to the subject. Many of the writers of Black-ish were aware of the work that shows such as A Different World and even Family Matters had done to clear some of that space for their own series. The treatment of police violence in Family Matters may have been far from perfect, Saji observed, but “I know the kinds of fights they would’ve had to have to even do that.”

VI. “Don’t You Have Enough?”

Despite the acclaim Black-ish earned for its unflinching treatment of race—no less a TV critic than Michelle Obama told Anderson it was her favorite show—Barris felt constrained by ABC and its parent company, Disney. In one instance, he was asked—and agreed—to put aside a story line based on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates outside the Harvard professor’s home. In 2017, Barris produced an episode—“Please, Baby, Please”—that explored the fear many Black Americans felt following the election of Donald Trump. The episode was shelved after a weeks-long battle that eventually involved Disney CEO Bob Iger himself. Barris and ABC framed the decision as an issue of “creative differences,” but some in the industry believed the network objected to the episode’s positive treatment of the quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who had been kneeling during the national anthem before football games to protest police violence against Black Americans. (ABC denied this explanation.) Barris ultimately left ABC for Netflix with three years left in his network contract.

Even Rhimes, the most successful showrunner of her generation, eventually came to feel stifled by network television. Last year, she told The Hollywood Reporter that her later years with ABC had been filled with conflict over content, budgets, and even her support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the breaking point came in 2017, when a Disney executive balked at her request for an additional pass to Disneyland. “Don’t you have enough?” he reportedly asked. Soon after, Rhimes signed a nine-figure deal with Netflix.

The success of Shonda Rhimes shows like Scandal (top) helped pave the way for series like Black-ish (middle) and later Insecure (bottom). Yet even as Black writers and producers have been afforded more opportunities, they continue to hit the same walls. (Danny Feld / ABC / Everett Collection; Kelsey McNeal / ABC / Everett Collection; Lisa Rose / HBO / Everett Collection)

There’s a reason Black writers and producers are heading to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other streaming platforms: The business model of streaming doesn’t depend as heavily on ratings. In essence, these platforms are selling gift baskets of content; all they need is for subscribers to want one thing in the basket. Darnell Hunt is a professor and dean at UCLA and the lead author of the “Hollywood Diversity Report.” “When you buy a subscription to Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever it is,” he told me, “you get everything they offer. So from their perspective, the broader their portfolio of titles, the better. If they have a show that African Americans really, really like in a cultlike fashion, and no one else likes, the show may be retained anyway if it draws in enough Black subscribers who might not otherwise subscribe to the platform.”

From Rhimes, of course, Netflix hoped for a demographic-spanning hit, which it got in the form of Bridgerton. The Regency-era romance series, based on the novels by Julia Quinn, is the platform’s most popular original show ever, pulling in viewers from an astounding 82 million households in its first 28 days on the site. From other Black writers and producers, however, the company is happy to have a series that has the niche appeal of a ’90s-era Black sitcom. Indeed, streaming services have been snapping up the distribution rights to series from that decade. Last summer, Netflix announced that it would be streaming a collection of Black sitcoms from the ’90s, Sister, Sister and Moesha among them. Hulu put new emphasis on its “Black Stories” hub, which features shows such as The Jeffersons, Living Single, and Family Matters. In August 2020, the Disney-owned streaming service even aired the Trump-themed episode of Black-ish that had been too hot for ABC three years earlier.

And yet Black writers and showrunners say they still hit the same old walls. Issa Rae first attracted industry interest after her YouTube series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl became an unexpected hit. In that low-budget comedy, which premiered in 2011, Rae plays a woman named J who makes it through the drudgeries of her post-college life in Los Angeles in part by rapping to herself in a mirror for confidence boosts. The show was delightfully silly and drew a large, dedicated audience. Rae’s J wasn’t a hypersexual reality star; she wasn’t the silent or sassy best friend of a white protagonist. She was, like the Different World and Living Single characters before her, just a young Black woman trying to figure herself out. But when Rae was approached about turning the viral hit into a television series, she was continually told by non-Black Hollywood executives that her stories weren’t truly reflective of Black experiences. Perhaps they doubted that huge numbers of educated Black women existed (Rae is a Stanford graduate) or were worth catering to. Perhaps they wanted to stress just one facet of Blackness that resonated with them, rather than portraying fully rounded Black characters. At the time, Rae was “deathly afraid of losing an opportunity by being a bit too authentic”—too much the person she actually was.

[From the May 2018 issue: An interview with Issa Rae]

In the end, Rae was able to portray those fully rounded characters; she had amassed enough influence by then. Her friendship-focused HBO dramedy, Insecure, which finished filming its fifth and final season earlier this year, follows two Black women in L.A. as they navigate the romantic and professional pitfalls of their late 20s and early 30s. The women certainly contend with racism and sexism in their lives, but, crucially, those issues aren’t the focus of the series. Some of the best episodes came in the fourth season, when Issa (played by Rae) and Molly (Yvonne Orji) drift apart in the painful, all-too-common way of early-30s friendships. The show’s emotional center of gravity is the love (and sometimes the enmity) they have for each other. Their falling-out sometimes feels more dramatic than most real-life disputes among friends—this is, after all, television—but Insecure accomplished the rare feat of being a series that depicts Black life without pathologizing or feeling burdened by it.

In some ways, Rae’s early experience is typical for Black writers today. Many TV viewers first met Lena Waithe when she played Denise on Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. Waithe wrote one of the show’s most popular episodes, in 2017, based on her own coming-out story, and it would win her an Emmy. By then, she’d begun to produce The Chi, a drama for Showtime set in her native Chicago. It was a great opportunity, but like Rae, Waithe found that her vision was circumscribed by the executives to whom she had to answer. “Nobody knew who I was, and there were still a lot of men—a lot of white men—who were in charge, and I just didn’t have any power,” Waithe says of her earliest days working on the show. “And then I won an Emmy and then all of a sudden they’re like, ‘Okay, you can be in charge now.’ ”

The creator of Julia, Hal Kanter, had demanded entertainment, not agony. Fifty years later, Black writers and producers are more likely to encounter the opposite problem. The Black stories that studios, networks, and streaming platforms feel most comfortable adding to their slates require writers to explore—and sometimes re-create—racial traumas. Following the killing of Michael Brown, a cottage industry of police-brutality dramas popped up. Fox had Shots Fired, which begins with a Black police officer shooting an unarmed white college student; in Netflix’s Seven Seconds, a white police officer fatally strikes a Black teen cyclist with his car. Rae relayed the experience of a fellow Black writer with a series in the works: “In the development process, they just kept on increasing the trauma to make it feel like it was worth watching,” she told me. Racist violence as a plot device hasn’t been restricted to realist dramas; it extends into genre works as well. The Spike Lee–produced Netflix sci-fi film See You Yesterday follows a young Black science prodigy who creates a time machine—in order to save her brother, who was killed by a police officer. And then there’s the new horror anthology series Them on Prime Video. The show follows a Black family that moves into a white neighborhood in the 1950s; its animating terror is the lengths white people will go to in order to preserve housing segregation. When the trailer was released in March, many Black viewers groaned. Why are Black characters always subjected to racism, even in genre productions? Can’t we have a Black Jeepers Creepers?

“When we’re still telling stories that are so focused on trauma, we’re actually still telling stories about white supremacy,” Tara Duncan, the president of Freeform, Disney’s young-adult-targeted cable network, told me when we met for coffee in New York City’s West Village recently. “We’re not talking about what our lives are like and how we see the world and our hopes and dreams and goals and imagination. We’re still talking about what life looks like in proximity to whiteness.”

In May, Duncan also became the president of Onyx Collective, Disney’s new content brand for creators of color. She is one of the few Black executives in an industry that remains dominated by white men. A 2021 study by McKinsey found that the bulk of opportunities afforded to Black offscreen talent comes from shows with at least one Black person in a senior role. In other words, the work of bringing on people from historically marginalized groups routinely falls to people from those same marginalized groups. Black people who do make it into the business are shouldering the burden of diversifying the entire industry. Yvette Lee Bowser, who recently developed and produced the Harlem-centric ensemble dramedy Run the World, takes that responsibility seriously: “That’s one of the reasons I started creating shows. I could actually create my own work environment and kind of dictate the DNA of the room and the experience that people were having in the room.”

But for all the prominence of Shonda Rhimes and Kenya Barris, as well as Tyler Perry, who heads his own studio in Atlanta, only 5 percent of TV showrunners are Black, according to the McKinsey study. As for the executive suite, Duncan and the new chair of Warner Bros. Television Group, Channing Dungey, are the exceptions. “Most everywhere else you look, it’s a white male,” UCLA’s Darnell Hunt observed. The handful of Black people with real power can’t undo decades of inequity.

Perhaps for the first time, however, an alignment of forces may now be bending toward something better. Decades ago, Black visionaries were up against both market factors and corporate resistance—not a fair fight. But demographics have changed, and so have public opinion and popular taste. For cable shows in particular, ratings among all young viewers, not just those reflecting Black, Latino, or Asian households, are at all-time highs for shows with “majority minority” casts—shows such as Insecure, Donald Glover’s Atlanta, and the Mindy Kaling–produced coming-of-age series Never Have I Ever. The television shows driving consistent interactions on Twitter and Instagram—a new coin of the realm in the industry, now that so much TV watching occurs on so-called second screens—are those with casts and writers’ rooms that more closely resemble the diversity of America.

To succeed in the country as it’s evolving, traditional networks and streaming platforms will need to do more than release statements about their commitment to principles of diversity and inclusion, or to aggregate their “Black Stories” or present viewers with a “Black Lives Matter Collection.” For changes to last, executives and other industry power brokers need to continue investing in creative visions that don’t match their own. They’ll have to cede the terms of “authenticity,” and any negotiations over it, to the Black creators whose voices have too long been ignored. Otherwise, they risk rendering themselves obsolete, a prospect that may motivate even those unstirred by the goodness of their hearts.

This article appears in the October 2021 print edition with the headline “The Unwritten Rules of Black TV.”

*Lead image: Illustration by Danielle Del Plato; sources: CBS / Getty; Elizabeth Sisson / Showtime / Everett Collection; ABC Photo Archives / Walt Disney Television / Getty; Carsey-Werner Co. / Everett Collection; Mitch Haaseth / ABC / Everett Collection; Globe Photos / Zuma Press / Alamy; Richard Cartwright / ABC / Everett Collection; NBCUniversal / Getty; 20th Century Fox / Everett Collection; NBC Productions / Photo 12 / Alamy; Everett Collection; Joe Viles / Paramount Television / Everett Collection; Andrew Semel / Warner Bros. Television / Everett Collection

A now-familiar joke that started circulating within the first year or two after September 11, 2001, goes like this:

“Knock-knock!”

“Who’s there?

“9/11.”

“9/11 who?”

“You promised you’d never forget.”

The punch line, of course, refers to the refrain that became ubiquitous in the United States following the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and shattered the country. “Never forget” embodied the reflexive patriotism of a time when people began to affix American flags to their cars and plant them on their front lawns. September 11 was quickly made into something hallowed and untouchable—a malleable symbol and political litmus test as much as a series of terrible events. The knock-knock joke was a small, transgressive gesture; it punctured the etiquette that said humans must approach certain tragedies with a deep moral seriousness.

[Read: Tragedy + comedy = catharsis]

Many such jokes were prevalent during those first years after 9/11. The question of whether they added up to something greater than the sum of their parts—whether they amounted to something like dissent during the George W. Bush era—is one that a new documentary attempts to answer. Too Soon, directed by Nick Scown and Julie Seabaugh, chronicles nearly two decades of 9/11 comedy through interviews with late-night hosts, writers, and stand-up performers. The film is an absorbing journey back to a cultural moment that indelibly altered the course of modern comedy, although it concludes by overstating the power of satire on its own to shape politics.

The film unfolds in roughly chronological order, beginning with the initial weeks after September 11, when several New York City comedy clubs temporarily closed and most comedians proceeded carefully for fear of offending a raw and hurting public. “Humor Goes Into Hiding,” announced the think-piece headlines. David Letterman and Jon Stewart issued earnest, tearful responses to 9/11 on air, but not everyone was so cautious. Too Soon takes its title from an audience member’s reaction to a joke told by Gilbert Gottfried two weeks after the towers fell, when there was still smoke in the Manhattan sky. Gottfried briefly lost the crowd after quipping that he couldn’t get a direct flight to California, because the plane had “to stop at the Empire State Building first.” He won them back with his off-color “aristocrats” routine, a version of a vaudeville-era gag involving incest. As Gottfried and other comics explain in the film, Americans were ready to laugh again, just not about terrorism.

[Read: Fighting Islamophobia with comedy]

Some of the comedic experimentation that immediately followed 9/11 tested the limits of free speech for entertainers, who made up the new rules of acceptable taste as they went along and found that even jokes about 9/11-adjacent subject matter occasionally crossed a line. Shortly after Bill Maher called U.S. military policy “cowardly” on Politically Incorrect, then–Press Secretary Ari Fleischer advised Americans to “watch what they say,” and ABC eventually canceled the show. Doug Stanhope’s irreverent jokes about first responders got him death threats. Janeane Garofalo’s anti-war comments later made her a target of a right-wing-media harassment campaign.

Other comedy writers played it safer, sensing a need for gentle, feel-good laughs rather than controversy. For instance, Saturday Night Live aired an episode on September 29, 2001, featuring the Ground Zero firefighters and then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an ode to the strength and resilience of New Yorkers. The Onion—then a small indie newspaper—distributed a warmhearted and well-received 9/11 issue with headlines such as “Hugging Up 76,000 Percent.” (Over the next few years—when the dust had settled, literally and figuratively—the paper pivoted to harsher takes on America’s response to terrorism, but these do not appear in the film.) The comedians and satirists interviewed in Too Soon describe humor serving as a coping mechanism for performers and audiences alike, an attempt to process tragedy and move on from it, a way of returning to normalcy.

But we know the spoiler here: There would be no return to normalcy for the country. Within a year or two of 9/11, comedy started taking up many of the changes that followed—government surveillance, color-coded threat levels, and a war justified by the unsubstantiated claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In the documentary, the comedian Laurie Kilmartin explains how performers calibrated their jokes for the audience, stating, “It’s never the actual thing you make fun of; it’s how everyone responds to it.” The political climate forced comedians to shore up their ideological stances—more sharply dividing those who leaned conservative, such as Dennis Miller, from liberals who mocked America’s botched response to the attacks and the chilling imperative against asking questions in the first place, such as Marc Maron and David Cross. Although not stated explicitly in the film, the liberal (and libertarian, since we should count South Park) perspective ultimately made the biggest cultural mark.

[Read: The dark psychology of being a good comedian]

Too Soon effectively reminds viewers how deeply the politics that grew out of 9/11 infiltrated comedic entertainment. It plays all the hits, including George Carlin on mindless consumerism (“go out and buy some jewelry and a new car, otherwise the terrorists win”) and The Simpsons on U.S. militarism (“war is not the answer, except to all of America’s problems”). The documentary includes clips from Team America: World Police, Chappelle’s Show, and the “Axis of Evil” comedy tour, featuring a troupe of Middle Eastern stand-ups who joked about the racial anxieties of white people during a time of frenzied jingoism and Islamophobia. This makes for a satisfying retrospective, even if the film omits some of the more biting, nihilistic humor (comic strips by Tom Tomorrow and Aaron McGruder, online memes about 9/11 truthers) that wouldn’t translate well to the screen.

Although humor about 9/11 and the Bush administration’s foreign policy proliferated across multiple genres, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert most visibly transformed the comedy landscape during this era. Too Soon explains how The Daily Show, which Stewart had hosted since 1999, gained new credibility among young viewers as it found its political footing, adopting a wry skepticism toward the Iraq War and the media’s manufacturing of consent. As the comedian Scott Aukerman points out, the show invented the “montage of hypocrisy,” an oft-imitated gotcha device highlighting the tendency of politicians to blatantly contradict themselves. Then came The Colbert Report, a satire of pundit programs that added truthiness to the national lexicon, a way of critiquing the steady American diet of political falsehoods disguised as facts. When these programs first intervened in the conversation, they offered a counterbalance to the blind hawkishness that had seized much of the populace, and for this, at the very least, they deserve credit. But it’s worth asking, to what end? And what happened afterward?

Too Soon misses some larger context that satirical news, one of comedy’s most dominant forms in the post-9/11 world, was a part of—namely, the unintended consequences of the shift toward infotainment. In some ways, this broader shift intensified divisions between red states and blue states, and may have helped erode public trust in the media. Satire and slant further entrenched many Americans where they already stood, splitting television into warring (if also smirking) echo chambers and likely contributing to the well-documented political polarization of the past 20 years. Any sense of unity via collective, cathartic laughter was short-lived; recall that Bush took less than a month to declare, “You’re either with us or against us,” and most people picked a side. Though his comment referred to the War on Terror, it encapsulated all manner of turn-of-the-millennium cultural squabbles. With the line between news and entertainment blurred, a rogue’s gallery of reporter-personality hybrids emerged on the major networks to preach to their respective choirs. As Leno has said, “You don’t change anyone’s mind with comedy; you just reinforce what they already believe.”

[Read: None of my students remember 9/11]

The comedians interviewed in Too Soon use words such as healing and reassurance to describe the impact of early 9/11 humor, making the (classically Freudian) case that jokes offered psychological relief to a nation in distress. As this humor evolved to meet the moment—to comment on issues such as racial profiling—it became a conduit, says the comedian Negin Farsad, for “social justice” and “social change.” The argument that 9/11 comedy functioned first as escapism and then as social criticism is compelling, not least because the best satire serves, as the old adage goes, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

But overstating 9/11 comedy’s power beyond the realm of culture would be misguided. Think of Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, when he confronted Bush and the media with their own ineptitude. The performance cemented Colbert’s status as a folk hero, but it didn’t affect policy or change anything materially. To get a bit of actual justice, Stewart had to aggressively lobby Congress (as a citizen, not a television persona) for years to win health care for injured and ailing 9/11 victims. Even he seemed to understand the limits of political satire. A medieval court jester had license to humble his monarch, but he could not redistribute the harvests. He could not end a war.