Monochrome Casting/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A TV show with a not very diverse cast.

  • Straight: Sally and Friends, a lighthearted sitcom, has an entirely white main cast.
  • Exaggerated: The series is many seasons long, and not one minority ever shows up. Even in the background.
  • Downplayed: The main cast of Sally and Friends is all white, but a few background and/or very minor characters are played by non-white actors.
  • Justified: The setting of the series is a city or region that is known for not being very ethnically diverse.
    • Alternately, the series is set in a time during severe segregation, so you wouldn't expect to see a bunch of white kids hanging out with one black guy.
  • Inverted: The main cast of Sally and Friends is a highly diverse Five-Token Band, consisting of an African-American girl, an Asian girl, a Jewish boy, a Latino, an Indian girl, and the Token White guy in a wheelchair.
  • Subverted: Fawna joins the cast in the second season to be the Token Minority.
  • Double Subverted: But then Fawna falls victim to Chuck Cunningham Syndrome before season 3.
  • Parodied: An immigrant from Nigeria comes to town and is played by a very white actor.
  • Deconstructed: An American town becomes very concerned about their lack of diversity. Turns out it was set up during the segregation days and never blended.
  • Reconstructed: But the state they live in is 99% white, so a lack of minorities is not unusual. They get on with their lives in their middle class white suburb.
  • Zig Zagged: The cast is different every episode. Sometimes it's only one race. Sometimes it's a Five-Token Band.
  • Averted: The cast is realistically diverse for the setting.
  • Enforced: The writer is racist.
    • Or, the executives simply want to aim for a certain demographic.
  • Lampshaded: The history teacher in Sally and Friends teaches her students about black civil rights leaders. None of the students can relate and end up falling asleep.
  • Invoked: See "Justfied".
  • Defied: The series is about accepting differences, such as race.
  • Discussed: "Why are we so...white?"
  • Conversed: "God, don't you hate how these sitcoms always have a cast that's either all white or all black? Maybe that made sense in the '60s, but today it's just ridiculous!"

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