Diversity was the byword during ABC’s day at the TV Critics summer press tour.
“If you look at shows now that seem to lack diversity,” network chief Paul Lee said, “they actually feel dated, because America doesn’t look like that anymore.”
So there’s a credible Hispanic sitcom in “Cristela,” and a smart sitcom called “blackish,” the latter in part from Larry Wilmore, the former “Bernie Mac Show” creator who is best known as the “Senior Black Correspondent” on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
More recently, Wilmore was picked to take the spot being vacated by “The Colbert Report,” whose host will succeed David Letterman on “Late Night.”
At the press session for “black-ish,” which stars Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis Ross and Laurence Fishburne, he said he’d be able to work on the first half of the season of the ABC sitcom before he’s called away to do his nightly “The Minority Report with Larry Wilmore.”
“I’m going to be there until part of September, trying to help break the first 12 stories,” Wilmore said of “black-ish.” “I’ll be there for the first few tapings. We’ve already started on the first six scripts. So I’m trying to get through that first half of the season with the writing staff and oversee the writing and production of the first 12 episodes.
Once he begins the new Comedy Central show, Wilmore says he’ll largely be just “a visible cheerleader ” for the ABC sitcom.
Mostly “black-ish” will be in the hands of its co executive producer Kenya Barris who said, “the show has so much less to do with race than it does culture and identity and family. It’s honestly something we’re not running from, obviously, by our title, which we stick behind really fervently. But we feel like it is honestly about we’re living in a, quote/unquote, post Obama society where race is talked about and culture is talked about less than ever before.”
“Even with Obama,” Wilmore said, “he’s called the first black President, but he’s mixed. He’s really the first black-ish President.”
That got a laugh at the panel and was a reminder of his wry work as “senior black correspondent” on “The Daily Show,” a job, he said later at an ABC party, he only did about once every six weeks.
“It seems like I’m on more often than I really am,” Wilmore said. “But I feel that I’m on just enough.”
Of the new show, it will be a mix of news, commentary and interviews that are still being figured out. He’s happy he’ll have a lot of freedom.
Come next year, he said, “Stephen has to do the same format as Dave but I don’t have to do the same format as Stephen. I get to create my own thing with “Minority Report.”
“What excited Comedy Central,” he added, “is that I’m a show runner. I’ve created shows. That’s what I do so I’ve done both of those things. So they trust me to jump in there and figure it out.”
And all that still needs to happen. “Hopefully,” he said, “my thing will be something that isn’t there.”
But “black-ish” and “The Minority Report” aren’t the only Wilmore shows soon to come to TV. He wrote an adaptation of Issa Raye’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” for HBO.