TV’s So White Again: Diversity Now Seen as “Optional”

When #Emmyssowhite began trending after white actors swept the lead and supporting acting categories during the Sept. 14 ceremony, it unearthed a reality deeper than the demand for equal acclaim: Actors of color can’t win accolades for roles that don’t exist.

“The Emmys ultimately reflect the work that makes it to our screens, and this year’s results are another reminder that progress is not linear,” Television Academy chair Cris Abrego says in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “We have seen meaningful gains in representation across our industry, but we have also seen real regression, and we cannot take progress for granted.”

UCLA documented the backsliding in its Hollywood Diversity Report, released in June, which noted, for the first time in three years, the proportion of lead actors of color on streaming fell below their proportion of the U.S. population, from a high of 51 percent in 2024 to 36 percent in 2025. Streaming films featuring casts with a majority of people of color slipped from 41 percent to 25.8 percent.

“It’s always two steps forward, one step back, but this time it feels like two steps back,” says Gloria Calderón Kellett, creator of the Prime Video series With Love. “It feels like four steps back, if I’m honest.”

When Black Lives Matter protests erupted across America in 2020, Hollywood positioned itself as an ally, and for a short while it appeared the industry had done more than offer lip service regarding its commitment to representing marginalized communities.

Netflix tweeted, “To be silent is to be complicit. Black lives matter. We have a platform, and we have a duty to our Black members, employees, creators and talent to speak up.” Bob Iger wrote in a letter to Disney employees published on the Walt Disney Company website, “While we don’t have all the answers, we resolve to use our compassion, our creative ideas and our collective sense of humanity to ensure we are fostering a culture that acknowledges our people’s feelings and their pain. We also realize that now more than ever is the time for us all to further strengthen our commitment to diversity and inclusion everywhere.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took what, arguably, seemed to be the most meaningful step, instituting diversity and inclusion requirements for best picture nominees — more on that come winter when we, inevitably, find ourselves in another #Oscarssowhite race, given the limited frontrunners of color in the earliest nominee predictions.

UCLA’s 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report showed the share of digital scripted series created by people of color increased from 14.7 percent in the 2019-20 season to 25.6 percent in 2020-21 — the largest year-to-year gain seen in the report’s nine-year history. Yet as the writers and actors strikes of 2023 brought an industry still reeling from the financial losses of the pandemic to a halt, a familiar trend emerged. UCLA’s Streaming Television in 2023 report found of the 228 scripted shows analyzed, only 25 (11 percent) had a BIPOC creator. One year later, that portion nominally increased to 12.2 percent.

“It oftentimes happens that diversity, in terms of race or ethnicity, is seen as something that’s optional or something that’s not essential when the research that we’ve done really has shown that it should be woven into all the decisions made because of the fact that audiences are more and more racially and ethnically diverse, and so they are also very much interested in seeing that reflected on screen,” says Ana-Christina Ramón, director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA and co-author of the Hollywood Diversity reports.

That outlook is how the Emmys went from a year of no winners of color in 2021 to a historic number in 2023 (five out of 12, tying the record set 32 years earlier) and back down to zero in 2026, says Ben Watkins, creator of Prime Video’s Cross and the upcoming Muhammad Ali drama The Greatest. “It’s important for us to acknowledge and say out loud that this isn’t an anomaly, it is a pattern … this is a reflection of a foundational issue.”

According to UCLA’s Ramón, that issue is two-fold. “It is part of a systemic bias that I think exists,” she says comparing the decline in racial parity to the underrepresentation of women in total streaming film actors, writers and directors seen across streaming in the past year, despite women making up the largest demographic of viewers. “There’s this all-across issue of relying on an old mindset and going back to a culture where it’s just this boys club,” she says. (UCLA’s 2020 report found that 92% of the chairs or CEOs of 11 major studios were white; 68% were men.) “A lot of people think, ‘oh, that’s probably long gone because of the advances that have been made,’ but there are stories about this resurgence of being able to be openly misogynistic, openly racist, from what I’ve heard from people behind the scenes.

The day he was sworn into his second term as president on Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order that terminated all diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices and programs within federal agencies. Shortly after Trump’s mandate, Disney, in its filing to regulators, removed all references to its Reimagine Tomorrow initiative, launched in 2021 to amplify underrepresented voices; Amazon Studios eliminated policies aimed at increasing diversity in its TV shows and films; Paramount abolished staffing goals tied to race, ethnicity and gender and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it was dropping the “D” and “E” in its recruitment efforts to now solely focus on inclusion.

“The rollback of DEI exposed how performative the effort always was, as if our opportunity to create was a result of a box being checked,” says Deli Boys creator Abdullah Saeed.

More perplexing is the industry’s retreat despite evidence that diversity is in its economic interest. The Latino Donor Collaborative’s 2024 Latinos in Media Report found that the industry could generate an additional $12 billion to $18 billion a year if it were to achieve proper Latin representation in TV and film.

A study released in January by USC’s Norman Lear Center Latino representation initiative ¡Pa’lante!, found Latinos accounted for only 6 percent of credited characters in the top broadcast series for the 2024-2025 TV season, despite making up 20 percent of the U.S. population. UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report also found streaming films with casts that were 21 percent-30 percent BIPOC had the second-highest median rating across all household and viewer groups and that in 2025, six of the top 10 streaming films and ten of the top 20 streaming films by total household ratings featured casts that were more than 30 percent BIPOC.

It also can’t be overlooked that HBO’s The Pitt, with its notably multi-ethnic cast, led all Emmy nominations this year, with 25, and won best drama for the second year in a row, and Abbott Elementary, the most diverse network Emmy contender, remains one of ABC’s most-watched comedies as it approaches its 100th-episode milestone in its sixth season this fall.

“I feel a fear that I did not feel before,” admits With Love creator Calderón Kellet. “I came into Hollywood and UPN had started and there were more shows that centered stories about people of color, comedies and dramas, and it felt like a very hopeful time. And then certainly when I had One Day at a Time, for a minute there, it was incredible. There was Gentefied and Vida, and we really were seeing this onslaught of all of these Latine-led shows, which was so exciting. And then the graveyard of those shows slowly started filling up.”

After doing some digging, Calderón Kellett found a common denominator. “Our budgets were not the same,” she says, qualifying the latest UCLA data that found fewer than one-fifth of streaming films directed by BIPOC filmmakers had a budget of more than $50 million, compared with slightly more than one-quarter of those directed by white men. “It’s like, oh, there are opportunities and that’s great, but we’re still starting the marathon five miles behind. It’s very difficult to win the race when you’re starting at such a disadvantage.”

When Saeed began shopping his Hulu crime drama centered on two Pakistani American brothers (Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh), he says, “Deli Boys was passed on by everybody except for Onyx Collective,” Disney’s content brand for creators of color and underrepresented voices launched in 2021. “While I’m very grateful for there being a platform specifically for us, I wish we didn’t live in a world where we needed that separate water fountain and that we just have access to the actual spaces,” he says.

The series, which premiered in March of 2025 aired for two seasons and submitted for 28 Emmy nominations across 22 categories this year — though it ultimately didn’t land any noms — before being canceled in August.

“The saddest thing about Deli Boys’ cancellation is that it eliminates at-bats for Brown creatives in every position, and the decision to end it was not made by Brown people,” says Saeed, who notes he was told viewership was the basis for the decision, though he also noticed a shift in attitude toward his post.

Calderón Kellett has felt that shift, too. “These are the same problems that were here in the ’90s; the difference is I did not feel the fear factor of this moment where suddenly by virtue of being Latina, my identity is political.”

The Paramount Warner Bros. merger harkens another reality of the ‘90s, considered the golden age of Black television before CBS and Warner Bros. Entertainment merged UPN and The WB to form The CW, dropping many of the predominately Black shows that aired on UPN with its founding. Earlier this year, Paramount phased out BET’s streaming platform BET+ and merged its content onto the Paramount+ app after buying out Tyler Perry Studios’ equity stake. The cable channel could also face divestiture if Paramount violates key terms of its settlement during the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition.

Bleak realities aside, creators of color remain focused on the bigger issues #Emmyssowhite brought into view and hopeful of a tide that will once again turn in their favor. “Times like this is when actually we got to get to work,” says Kellet. “This is when we have to reflect society. This is when we do have to tell the stories of what’s happening in our communities. This is when we should be challenging things that are keeping us down or atrocities that we’re seeing. I want to find a way to continue to do that and also support the next generation to do that. Everything is storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell each other, the stories that politicians tell us, we need to become masters of it so that we can use it for good.”

With his upcoming Muhammad Ali sports drama, The Greatest, launching Nov. 4, Watkins is hopeful more studios will pay greater attention to internal metrics than fluctuating external political attitudes when making content decisions. “[Prime Video] having confidence in me as a storyteller, combined with the success of Cross, made their decision on The Greatest, I think, easier. And I’ve seen that in other pockets too,” he says.

Adds Saeed, “We are inevitable. Just by nature of diffusion, we are going to end up in the positions of power. We are going to end up with the microphone, with the platform. Resistance to diversity and storytelling is a fool’s errand because storytelling is an uncontrollable river of energy, and you can’t constrain that. We’ve seen what happens to art and creativity when you restrain it; it ceases to be art and creativity. I believe that we are in that transitional time, not just in the business, but our whole world is making that shift, and we just have to be patient and hold onto each other and get through it,” says Saeed. “The golden age for the Browns is coming.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.