49 pages • 1 hour read
Danzy SennaColored Television
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Balancing Artistic Integrity and Financial Security
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and includes racist terms for Black and biracial people in direct quotes from the source material.
A core theme of Colored Television is the struggle artists face, particularly in Los Angeles, between balancing artistic integrity and financial security. Senna represents this through the life experiences of the four main characters in different ways. Brett MacNamara represents a commercial artist who has no qualms about creating work that suits the market. Although there are passion projects he would like to work on, he is happy and unashamed of his life choices. Hampton Ford feels some qualms about the shows he makes to please audiences and placate network executives, but he nevertheless pursues this goal single-mindedly. On the other end of the spectrum is Lenny Gibson, who views people like Brett and Hampton as “sellouts.” Lenny is steadfast in his artistic vision, even though he does ultimately make a small concession to branding by the novel’s end to sell his work. Throughout the novel, protagonist Jane Gibson changes her outlook. She begins by largely sharing the principle of artistic integrity with her husband, Lenny, but her desire for financial security leads her to sacrifice elements of her artistic vision to appeal to Hollywood agents and producers.
Jane Gibson’s second novel is a passion project. Although it has been an “albatross on their lives” for a decade (51), she would not have persisted in completing her sprawling over 500-page novel that covers 400 years of “mulatto” history in the United States had she not felt the work was important. When a publisher rejects it, Jane begins to reckon with the commercial unviability of her work. This, combined with the experience of living in her wealthy friend Brett’s house, leads her to pursue what she sees as more lucrative work as a writer for television.
In pursuit of this goal, Jane compromises on her lifelong values and ethics. She takes Brett’s idea of a comedy about “mulattos” and represents it as her own, a form of dishonesty if not light plagiarism. During her first meeting with a Hollywood agent, Marianne, Jane opens with a disavowal of the art form to which she has dedicated over a decade of her life, stating boldly, “the novel is dead” (93). In her meetings with Hampton, Jane says whatever she thinks he wants to hear. Although her idea was to make a show where the biracial identity of the characters is in the background, she quickly abandons this to come up with television plot ideas based on Hampton’s directions, such as an episode about the Bunches “attending a birthday party for a celebrity biracial toddler very loosely based on Stormi Webster” (191). Even these ideas prove not to be broad enough for Hampton. The novel culminates in the ultimate demonstration of lack of artistic integrity when Hampton steals Jane’s manuscript and uses it as the basis for his Emmy-award-winning new show. This ending to the novel implies that one must abandon all artistic integrity to be financially successful in Hollywood.
The Commodification of Racial Identity
In Colored Television, the commodification of racial identity, particularly Black or biracial identity, operates both in the background of the novel and as a driver in the plot. The Gibson family enjoy and contribute to some elements of this commodified representation even as they reject others. As portrayed in the novel, the commodification of racial identity results in portrayals of Black or biracial American life that play to common denominators, creating a presentation of identity that is flat, broad, and relies on stereotypes.
Commercialized representations of the Black experience are present in many of the cultural products with which Jane’s family interacts. The first example of this is the trashy television that Lenny and Jane enjoy in the early years of their marriage, what Lenny calls “colored television.” These are shows like those found on BET and/or made by prolific Black television and film producer Tyler Perry. Jane refers to it as “Chitlin’ Circuit stuff” (36). The Chitlin’ Circuit was a collection of venues for Black performers that operated from the 1930s to the 1960s. These shows rely on melodrama, over-the-top sentimentality, and “trauma” to tell a story. This commercialization of the Black experience extends into children’s toys, namely the American Girl doll Addy Walker. Lenny dismisses the American Girl dolls as “another late-capitalist, faux-feminist trap” (57). Jane herself recognizes that “Addy had the same deracinated features as every other American Girl doll” (59). Addy comes with a sentimental backstory about her escape from enslavement, seeking freedom in the North. Addy and the “colored television” are both examples of commodified representations of Black American identity.
Jane initially hopes to avoid this flattened, commercialized story by creating a complex novel about 400 years of biracial American history. Lenny initially rejects “adding a little emblem of Blackness” to his paintings to make them more commercially viable (10). Hampton is more comfortable with marketing Black identity, even as he denigrates the finished product as “total network schlock” (106). Eventually, both Jane and Lenny embrace the demands of the commercial market for an easily accessible, commodified representation of racial identity. For Jane, this comes through her ideas for The Bunches, a television show about a biracial family. For Lenny, this comes with his concession to “branding” his abstract paintings with “a tiny Black man’s face, mouth open, screaming” (276). As Black and biracial creatives in American capitalist society, Colored Television’s characters are all forced to varying degrees to market their identities.
The Demands of Motherhood
In Colored Television, Jane struggles with the demands of motherhood and her feelings of inadequacy of how well she fulfills her role as a mother. She attempts to balance the demands of a creative career with providing a stable life for her two children, Ruby and Finn. She hopes to give her children a better childhood than her own, which was characterized by poverty and divorce. Although Jane and Lenny are both parents, it is Jane who takes on most of the work of parenting their children.
The novel opens with Jane’s concerns about her son Finn. He is neurodivergent, and specialists are evaluating his behavior. Lenny is against having Finn evaluated, describing it as “another system of capitalist thought they had to resist” (2). Finn’s behavior proves difficult for Jane: he demands to be pushed endlessly on the swing, avoids socialization with other children, and becomes wrapped up in his obsessions. Although Jane loves her son, his needs exhaust her. Despite these circumstances, Jane persists in her role as a mother and eventually gets Finn a diagnosis and the proper care he needs. Jane takes her role as a caring mother seriously.
Given the intensity of her role as a mother, Jane finds it difficult to carve out time for her creative work. When she does make time for this work, either as a novelist or a prospective television writer, she feels guilty for neglecting her children. When working on completing her novel, “she worked until the voices of her family floated out to her, the children calling to her that they were hungry, so hungry” (16). When she capitulates to their demands for food, she nevertheless imagines “that another her” is still working in the studio on her work (16). Initially, Jane thinks that working on television writing will make her a better mother than novel writing because it demands less of her energy. Quickly, though, it becomes clear that the late-night meetings Hampton Ford demands result in her neglecting her duties as a mother, as shown when she misses their dinner and bedtime because she is in a meeting with him.
Although they are both creative professionals, Lenny and Jane do not equally share parenting duties. Lenny does do some parenting duties, like taking the children to the park. However, Lenny leaves the bulk of the cooking to Jane, going so far as to demand she cook for him specifically. In one scene, Jane finds herself cooking “four dinners for four different people” (118). When Jane is pulled away for her work, instead of cooking for the children himself, Lenny buys them fast food. Jane feels as if the “most feminist thing” about Lenny is his desire for her to achieve her artistic potential (50). However, by not taking a fully equal role in raising their children, Lenny does not provide her with the support she needs to do so. Thus, Jane is left feeling inadequate as both a mother and a creative.
