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Monochrome Casting: Difference between revisions
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* ''[[How I Met Your Mother]]'' has an all-white primary cast, but a few recurring minority characters (cab driver Ranjit and Barney's gay black brother). In the seventh season both Barney and Robin's love interests were minorities, but {{spoiler|they are now gone for good.}} Ted's lack of variety in the girls he dates may be a necessity of the series' central gimmick: given we've seen the kids and they're both very white, an ethnic love interest is obviously not going to be the mother.
* ''[[The Class (TV series)|The Class]]'', with ''Friends'' creator David Crane as an executive producer, was highly criticised for having an all-white ast, especially considering Philadelphia has a very large black population.
* For a good while, the WB's nightly lineup consisted almost entirely of shows with this kind of casting, particularly of black families, like ''[[The Parent 'Hood]]'' and ''Sister Sister''. Sometimes white characters showed up when someone needed to be [[Very Special Episode|racist (the hockey episode of ''The Parent 'Hood'') or kidnapped (the, uh, kidnapping episode of the same show)]].
* Many classic sitcoms of [[The Fifties]] such as ''[[Leave It to Beaver]]'' and ''[[The Honeymooners]]'' were both notably white-washed portrayals of American life.
* The trope was notably averted back in the day by ''[[I Love Lucy]]'', featuring the Cuban Ricky Ricardo married to the red-headed and all-Amercian Lucy. Producers were reluctant to pair [[Lucille Ball]] with a Cuban man, and Ball had to jump through a number of hoops to get Arnez cast. One of the reasons the show is called ''I Love Lucy'' is to have an implied reference to Desi's character without having to state his name. However, at the time, Cubans were seen as "foreign" rather than a completely different "race" than white Americans. Therefore, Lucy and Desi were not considered to be a mixed-race couple.
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** Another ''[[Mad TV]]'' sketch spoofed ''Friends'', featuring a black girl as Ross' blind date, which shocks the entire gang. The narration states that this was done due to "a direct order from the United States Supreme Court".
* At the very beginning of ''[[The West Wing]]'', all the main characters were cast as white. When the NAACP criticized the show, the show's creators agreed with them—so they revived the character of Charlie Young (who was cut from the pilot somewhere between script and screen) and introduced him in the third episode. The characters on the show actually lampshade the situation by being seriously concerned with how it will look for the one visible black staff member to be the President's errand boy. The show gets better later on with several black Congresspeople and a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and National Security Advisor.
* ''[[Home Improvement (TV series)|Home Improvement]],'' ostensibly takes place in Detroit. There were very few black characters than should be realistically expected, though this is presumable a wealthy, white-bread suburb.
** Detroit was a mixed-race city until about the 1970s, at which point "white flight" kicked in with a vengeance (mostly in response to race riots).
* ''[[Beverly Hills, 90210]]'', so much so Aaron Spelling said he regretted it.
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* The ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]'' sourcebooks for [[New Orleans]], [[Atlanta]], and [[Milwaukee]] are conspicuously lacking in minority NPC characters, even though all three cities have either a black majority or plurality.
* Most medieval fantasy settings are white-only, even though historically Medieval Europe had black, latino, Middle Eastern and even ''Asian'' minorities.
** This was explicitly company policy at TSR for ''[[Dungeons
== Theater ==
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Race Tropes]]
[[Category:
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