Many Shades Of Black

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: COLOR ADJUSTMENT

TIME: JUNE 15, 10 P.M., PBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: A provocative look at how TV has portrayed blacks, from Amos 'n' Andy through Roots to Cosby.

Marlon Riggs may be the most notorious unknown filmmaker in America. A lecturer at the University of California's Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley, he was the producer of Tongues Untied, a film about black homosexuals that aired on pbs last summer and became a cause celebre after being attacked by conservatives for its "offensive" material. The film -- an offbeat, heartfelt mix of documentary, poetry and performance art -- did not deserve the abuse. But the brouhaha may have the unintended benefit of alerting more viewers to Riggs' impressive new offering: Color Adjustment, a provocative look at how TV has portrayed blacks over the years. The film, which leads off this summer's P.O.V. series of independently produced documentaries, contains nothing that is likely to inflame the guardians of media morality. But that doesn't mean it won't leave viewers discomfited.

With a well-chosen mix of film clips and interviews, the program takes us back to the ancient 1950s, when virtually the only blacks on TV were comic stereotypes: Amos 'n' Andy, Beulah and the occasional bumbling menial. "There's no room for prejudice in our profession," Milton Berle tells Danny Thomas in a snippet from Berle's old Texaco Star Theater. But of the black stars of the '50s who had their own variety shows, only Nat King Cole lasted a full season, and he was canceled thereafter when he could not find sponsors.

Riggs ticks off the breakthroughs for blacks in the '60s and '70s, then puts each under a critical magnifying glass. Julia, in which Diahann Carroll played TV's first black sitcom mother, was intended as "some sort of an apology for a lot of the things we had done on Amos 'n' Andy," says creator Hal Kanter. Yet the show's sunny treatment of race relations was as far from reality as anything on the tube. (An encounter between Julia's little boy and a white playmate: "Your mother's colored!" "Of course. I'm colored too." "You are?" Squeal of laughter.)

Shows like Julia and I Spy (which teamed Bill Cosby with Robert Culp) succeeded by spotlighting black people who were fully assimilable -- the sort of blacks who, as one critic notes, "could move into your neighborhood and not disturb you at all." Ghetto comedies of the '70s like Good Times did a better job of reflecting black life, but they were betrayed by buffoonery (Jimmie Walker's strutting J.J.). Roots, of course, brought the black experience to a wider audience than any other show before or since, but its popularity, the documentary notes, came only by making slavery acceptable for prime time -- "transforming a national disgrace into an epic triumph of the family and the American Dream."