The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts.
Scratchin’ and Survivin’ discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.
From 1989 through 2002 there was an unprecedented surge in American sitcoms featuring explicitly Jewish lead characters, thirty-two compared to seven in the previous forty years. Several of these—Mad About You, The Nanny, and Friends—were among the most popular and influential of all shows over this period; one program—Seinfeld—has been singled out as the “defining” series of the nineties. In addition, scriptwriters have increasingly created “Jewish” characters, although they may not be perceived to be by the show’s audience, Rachel Green on Friends being only one example.
In Something Ain’t Kosher Here, Vincent Brook asks two key questions: Why has this trend appeared at this particular historical moment and what is the significance of this phenomenon for Jews and non-Jews alike? He takes readers through three key phases of the Jewish sitcom trend: The early years of television before and after the first Jewish sitcom, The Goldbergs’, appeared; the second phase in which America found itself “Under the Sign of Seinfeld”; and the current era of what Brook calls “Post- Jewishness.”
Interviews with key writers, producers, and “showrunners” such as David Kohan, (Will and Grace), Marta Kauffman (Friends and Dream On), Bill Prady (Dharma and Greg), Peter Mehlman and Carol Leifer (Seinfeld), and close readings of individual episodes and series provoke the inescapable conclusion that we have entered uncharted “post-Jewish” territory. Brook reveals that the acceptance of Jews in mainstream white America at the very time when identity politics have put a premium on celebrating difference reinforces and threatens the historically unique insider/outsider status of Jews in American society. This paradox upsets a delicate balance that has been a defining component of American Jewish identity.
The rise of the Jewish sitcom represents a broader struggle in which American Jews and the TV industry, if not American society as a whole, are increasingly operating at cross-purposes— torn between the desire to celebrate unique ethnic identities, yet to assimilate: to assert independence, yet also to build a consensus to appeal to the widest possible audience. No reader of this book will ever be able to watch these television programs in quite the same way again.
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