UCLA report reveals viewers prefer TV content that reflects reality of a diverse America

Netflix's "Awkwafins is Nora from Queens" has a laregly Asian cast.

The changing demographic trends in the U.S. is slowly beginning to show up in movies houses and home screens even as Hollywood decision makers continue to cater to an audience that continues to shrink.

The latest UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, Part 2 published Tuesday, reveals that U.S. television viewers during the COVID-19 pandemic look for and prefer content that reflects the diversity of the real America and addresses concerns or situations faced by people of color. Surprisingly, and perhaps a ray of hope, White audiences shared the same preferences.

“We have seen this appetite for diverse content repeated over the history of our analyses,” said Darnell Hunt, co-author of the report and UCLA’s dean of social sciences. “The fact that shows with diverse writers rooms did well last year also illustrates that audiences are looking for authentic portrayals.”

The report comes a month after the Emmys featured all White nominees in the acting categories demonstrating Hollywood studio's apparent ingrained racial bias in casting prominent roles and producing entertainment catering to an audience from the 1950s made up primarily of Blacks and Whites.

Click here to download the complete UCLA report.

Asian, Latino and Indigenous talent in front of and behind the camera continue to get under represented.

The UCLA report, which covers statistics for the 2019–20 TV season, tracks racial and gender diversity among key job categories, as well as ratings and social media engagement for 461 scripted shows across 50 broadcast, cable and streaming providers.

Part 1 of the report released  by UCLA earlier this year, focused on the diversity efforts of the movie industry.

The new study found a continued correlation between the racial makeup of shows’ writers and TV ratings. For example, among households of all races in 2019–20, the scripted broadcast shows that earned the highest ratings were those in which people of color made up between 31% and 40% of the credited writers. 

Overall, racial diversity improved in almost every job category tracked by the report, and representation among women improved in about half of the job titles. Despite the better numbers of POC employment in the industry, Asians, Latinos and Indigenous talent continue to be underrepresented.

And for the first time in the report’s history, people of color had a higher percentage of scripted broadcast TV acting roles, 43.4%, than their overall percentage of the U.S. population.

Across all three platform types -- broadcast, streaming, digital -- there were more people of color credited as writers than in the previous report. Overall, people of color made up 26.4% of the credited writers for broadcast series last season (up from 23.4%), 28.6% of credited writers for cable (up from 25.8%) and 24.2% of credited writers for streaming (up from 22.8%). Most of those modest gains were recorded by women, according to the study.

But people of color are still largely underrepresented among TV writers, given that 42.7% of Americans are nonwhite.

More actors of color

Over the decade since the Hollywood Diversity Report began, diversity has improved the most among acting jobs, especially in TV, compared with all other TV and movie job types. In 2019–20, television shows with majority-nonwhite casts were more prevalent than ever.

Bolstered by Asian American shows such as Never Have I Ever and Awkwafina is Nora From Queens, for the first time since the researchers began tracking data, a plurality of shows on cable (28.1%) and streaming platforms (26.8%) featured casts in which the majority of actors were nonwhite. And 32.1% of broadcast shows had majority-nonwhite casts, up from just 2.0% in the first report 10 years ago.

The new report provides further support for the fact that audiences favor shows with diverse casts. During 2019–20, among white households, ratings for scripted broadcast shows were highest for shows whose actors were 31% to 40% nonwhite. Among Black households, scripted broadcast shows with the highest ratings where those in which cats were more than 50% nonwhite.

For streaming programming, which is dominated by Netflix, ratings among white, Black and Asian households were highest for shows with casts that were from 31% to 40% nonwhite.

TOP: Mindy Kaling's "Never Have I Ever" features a diverse cast and, bottom, the 2021 version
 of  "Kung Fu" centers on an Chinese American family.

The report’s authors also analyze audiences’ interaction with TV programs on social media, and how those trends correspond with cast diversity. For scripted cable shows during 2019–20, for example, they found that programs with majority nonwhite casts had the highest engagement on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And for streaming shows, audience engagement on Twitter specifically was highest for programs with majority nonwhite casts.

Diverse show creators equals mixed casts 

Another area in which diversity improved was among show creators such as Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina and Dean Devlin. That’s an important datapoint because show creators have influence over which stories are developed, whose stories they represent and how they’re told, said Ana-Christina Ramón, co-author of the report and the director of research and civic engagement in the UCLA Division of Social Sciences.

“We also see that when women and people of color hold high-level creative positions, there is greater diversity down the line in casting and likely for crew hiring,” Ramón said. “Women and people of color are still very underrepresented in these and other behind-the-camera jobs, which is why this report continues to exist.”

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