From too safe to stereotypical to a new reality

At one point in the first season of BET's "Baldwin Hills," one of the real-life teenage boys, angry at a real-life teenage girl, hurls a pointed insult at her: "Rudy Huxtable!"

It goes to show not only how the 1980s sitcom "The Cosby Show" left its mark on the cultural landscape, but how relatively rare its images remain. Rudy Huxtable, of course, was the youngest daughter in her upper-middle-class family, a privileged black girl with a comfortable life. And when it comes to images of African-Americans and wealth, the Huxtables still come to mind.

Then and now, efforts to portray that aspect of African-American life have been both a revelation and a challenge. In his 2001 book, "Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television," cultural critic Donald Bogle praises "The Cosby Show" for making black affluence feel perfunctory and normal. But Bogle also notes that, within the black community, some considered the show too safe to fulfill its cultural promise.

"At first," Bogle writes, "I thought the series seemed too soft and agreeable for its own good - without any social bite or political consciousness."

Indeed, "The Cosby Show" faced criticism for showing only one facet of the black experience, notes Kristal Brent Zook, author of the 1999 book "Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television." Among the most pointed responses was "Roc," an early-'90s series on Fox about a New York City sanitation worker, played by Charles S. Dutton. The topics were more pointed and more social, incorporating such issues as unemployment and gang violence.

And the series ran afoul of the network for straying too far into drama, Zook said by telephone from New York. The network was far more nurturing of "Martin," a broader comedy whose central character was more stereotypically buffoonish.

That has been a common criticism, from within the black community, about the bulk of scripted TV involving black characters, Zook says. "Somehow we always end up with very stereotypical mammy kind of programs . . . sassy female characters, life-in-the-hood kind of programming," Zook says. "It's like a constant push from below, or a constant struggle to portray diversity within the African-American experience and to make this argument that we're not a monolith, we're not a monolith, we're not a monolith."

For some shows, though, that can translate into pressure to be all things at once. In recent years, a flurry of shows created by black writers and producers have taken pains to be all-inclusive, Zook says. The CW series "Girlfriends," which ran for eight seasons, centered on the upper-middle-class Joan, but also featured Maya, whose background and mannerisms were more working class.

"It was almost like signifying to the viewer, there's a place for you in this," Zook says. The show tried to speak to all black women, she says, "by making these characters interact and get along and be girlfriends together."

That is, perhaps, an advantage of reality TV, and of a show like "Baldwin Hills" in particular. BET's most popular series, which draws 1.5 million viewers to its Tuesday night premieres, incorporates different socioeconomic classes as a matter of course, and a matter of geography. The title neighborhood is wealthy, but the surrounding neighborhoods aren't. The kids intermingle. The conflicts - and the insults - arise naturally.

And the audience seems to be responding. This season, as the producers have made an even more concerted point of showing rich, middle class, and poor, viewership of the series' premieres has risen 26 percent.