A Show About People Like Them

Olivia Stowell considers Danzy Senna’s new novel “Colored Television.”

By Olivia StowellNovember 22, 2024

• Fiction

WHAT’S IT WORTH to be a novelist in the age of television? Meeting with a Hollywood agent after the rejection of her would-be second novel, Jane, the protagonist of L.A. author Danzy Senna’s sixth book, Colored Television (2024), jokes that “the novel is dead”—only for the agent to reply that “[b]ooks are still alive, hugely important. Where do you think we get our IP?”

The exchange is meant to be funny, both on and off the page; it’s characteristic of Senna’s wry, well-observed prose. It also cuts to one of the novel’s central concerns and Jane’s biggest anxieties: the replacement of everything, all the time, often with better experiences or—as is more likely—narratives and images. “Movies were the new sex,” thinks Jane in the novel’s second paragraph while watching Soylent Green with her husband Lenny. And indeed, in the world of Colored Television, closely constructed through Jane’s third-person point of view, movies and pop culture generally seem to be not just the new sex but the new everything: standing in for, replacing, and rewriting the characters’ respective realities. Jane’s daughter Ruby covers her own dark hair with a platinum blonde Elsa (of Frozen) wig. Alongside Soylent Green, the book’s first 15 pages reference The Jerk, Jason Bourne, Carol Channing, Roots, and Thor—plus, to nix the “pop” momentarily, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Macbeth (trying to avoid thinking about race is described as an “‘out damn spot’ situation”).

Yet, for Senna, displacements and replacements aren’t limited to the usurpation of books by TV, or culture by poppier culture. Running parallel to this cultural inquisition is the question of race’s place in media and our day-to-day lives. To rewind: Colored Television is about Jane, a novelist-slash–creative writing professor slugging through attempts at her own ever-expanding second novel, a “four-hundred-year history of mulatto people in fictional form.” Jane’s modestly successful first novel came out nine years before the book’s opening; she’s been bogged down by drafting the second ever since.

Like the subjects of her novels—like Senna herself—Jane identifies as a “mulatto.” Pushed on the term by a white ecopoet at a party, she replies: “Biracial could be any old thing. Korean and Panamanian or Chinese and Egyptian. But a mulatto is always specifically a mulatto.” For Senna, the specificity of the term “mulatto” lies in how it “conjures the particularly American experience of those who identify as Black but appear to be brown, beige, écru, or even white,” as her New Yorker profile explains. And while Colored Television is broadly engaged with how we think and talk about race in relationship to culture and commodities, Senna seems most interested in parsing the ways this particularly American racial form is inflected by the culture industry’s entanglements with everyday life (which are made increasingly manifest as, beset by the pressures of her career and marriage, Jane gives up on novel writing and attempts to break into television). Race figures constantly in the narrative, not only in the characters’ experiences but also through cultural symbols that, in Jane’s imagination, accrue massive weight. A set of recurring objects—American Girl dolls, furniture and clothing catalogs, DNA testing kits—index how commodities function as both receptacles for and projectors of racial meaning.

These tensions between experience and representation emerge from the jump. It’s a testament to the strength of Senna’s prose and storytelling ability that the book doesn’t feel pedantic or overdetermined by intended commentary before it begins—instead, the narrative propels forward at a pace that nearly belies the weight of the ideas it’s juggling. The book is animated rather than constrained by Senna’s explication of popular culture as an inescapable script, choreographing behavior and desire.

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Colored Television demonstrates just how powerfully we might become attached to images of what our lives could look like—to seductive, commodified promises of who we could be. Jane’s marriage and domestic life is haunted by a Hanna Andersson catalog. The cover features an image of “a medium-brown-skinned Black man and a beautiful, brown-skinned Black woman with high cheekbones, the two of them flanked by a perfectly adorable boy and girl of the same skin tone”—a picture-perfect presentation of an always-smiling Black nuclear family that, for Jane, provokes a “peculiarly intense longing.”

Such longing isn’t surprising. According to historian Jackson Lears, advertisements “signify a certain vision of the good life; they validate a way of being in the world” and “focus private fantasy.” And while Lenny, a painter, longs to escape the United States to Japan, Jane privately nurtures fantasies of a more conventional existence, in a town 15 minutes outside of Los Angeles. Senna uses her personal, real-life nickname for this lightly fictionalized version of South Pasadena, “Multicultural Mayberry”—a charming, sun-dappled, soda shop town where “the most charming aspects of America’s past had made love to its most hopeful Obamaesque future, creating this love child of a town.” The moniker signals the specific kind of Americana the town represents: it’s a made-for-TV place where Jane and her young, artistic Black family could slot right in to enjoy tree-lined streets and top-rated elementary schools. Fittingly, “Multicultural Mayberry” is beloved not only by Jane but also by filmmakers. The town has been used as a stand-in for quintessentially “American” places from Philadelphia to Illinois; Jane, in other words, wants to be part of the kinds of families you find in catalogs, living in the kind of places you see—quite literally—on the screen.

The Hanna Andersson catalog is a fixture of fantasy and replication in Jane’s life with Lenny. The book flips back to the beginning and early stages of their relationship; even then, Jane is haunted by consumer fantasies. When Jane and Lenny get married, Jane gets “all that the Hanna Andersson catalog had promised.” When Jane and Lenny have children, Finn and Ruby, Jane compares each kid’s skin color to Crayola-brand crayons: “Lenny would be Fuzzy Wuzzy, the kids would be Blast Off Bronze, and Jane would be Tumbleweed.” And when Jane and Lenny have sex again for the first time in months after Jane finishes her second novel, she initially feels “as if they were actors playing a couple in a movie,” and then tries “to imagine they were the couple in the Hanna Andersson catalog, the ones in the striped pajamas.” However good, Jane’s relationship with Lenny is no match for visions of the good life posed and printed for her on glossy paper by ad execs.

Within the world of the novel, Los Angeles stands in, synecdochically, for the entire culture industry. That industry has seeped into Jane’s neural pathways; the recurring set of images it provides her to compose her life with proves as inescapable as the city’s infamous smog. Jane is preoccupied with images—slippery ones, prone to overlap. When Jane’s 150,000-word second novel is rejected by her agent and editor, the editor declares that it is “Frankensteinian,” a stitched-together monstrosity of disparate parts. Later, Jane asks Lenny if the monster lives at the end of Frankenstein; Lenny can only remember “the Mel Brooks version.” This move—between Frankenstein-as-novel for Jane, its mobilization as metaphor for the editor, and its metabolization as parody for Lenny—is only one of Colored Television’s many gestures toward copies of copies, its preoccupation with representations and representations of representations.

It’s no wonder, then, that following this rejection, Jane falls into Hollywood—television specifically. Because if, in Jane’s view, movies have replaced sex, then, correspondingly, television has replaced literature. (The coup feels apt, given the forms’ shared seriality.) She says as much, multiple times: she’s tired of trying to sell her book, something “nobody wanted or needed in the first place. Because they already have TV.”

It’s worth remembering that television is a domestic medium as well as a commercial one. Because of its central position within the domestic space—historically, the living room—we’ve long grown used to living alongside its rhythms, its repetitions. (Of course, as Senna illustrates, the advent of streaming platform apps on mobile devices has changed things; in one evocative scene, Lenny and the kids all sit on the couch, each wearing their own headphones, each watching their own shows on their own devices and looking “like they were on a long flight somewhere.”) As a medium, television, Jane Feuer argues, is defined by a “dialectic of segmentation and flow.” What we traditionally call “television” is the cumulative effect of different segments (programs, commercials, trailers, and so on) that run together in a sequence of—to borrow Mimi White’s phrasing—“continuities and discontinuities.” It’s hardly surprising that, when she turns to writing for TV, Jane is relieved to find something easy about the medium of a sitcom episode, something relaxing about composing a tight 20-minute comedy rather than a 150,000-word novel.

Not only does Jane feel freed by the structure and segmentation of television; she is also swayed by the promise of inhabiting the “Jane the TV writer” persona. For Feuer, television’s segmentation and flow are central to its “commodity logic,” or imbrication with the commercial. And unlike “Jane the novelist,” Jane the TV writer could become rich, even famous; television could catapult her family into the longed-for vision of Multicultural Mayberry, complete with a luxurious Craftsman house, luxe clothing, and multiple American Girl dolls for Ruby. Perhaps it’s because of these reprieves and promises—because, even, of TV’s inherent domesticity—that Jane’s career turn eases tensions between her and Lenny as well as the pressures of more-than-good-enough mothering and other anxieties associated with the home.

In keeping with Colored Television’s concern with representations, reproductions, and replications, Jane finds that it’s not so hard to become someone else, at least on the surface. She begins writing her TV script while long-term house-sitting for her grad-school friend Brett. Brett works in television himself; it’s through a few lies to Brett’s agent that Jane connects with Hampton Ford, a Black showrunner who has just landed a multimillion-dollar development deal to create “diverse content” for a network. (The deal was made on the strength of his previous series, which, in contrast to Senna’s own writing, Jane and Lenny found “unbearably messagey […] kind of a reboot of Diff’rent Strokes but with the races reversed.”)

Hampton is energetic and capricious, as likely to eviscerate Jane’s work as he is to hype her up. To impress him, Jane dons costumes of sorts, trying to dress herself into the kind of person she thinks that he thinks she should be. For their second meeting, she steals one of Brett’s vintage T-shirts, as well as his lime-green PUMAs, putting on Brett’s clothes in an attempt to assume, by extension, his role as TV writer—only to find that “she’d dressed all wrong […] like some kind of fourteen-year-old skater boy.” She later fashions herself “like a librarian […] in old horn-rimmed glasses, a ripped sweater, hair frizzy, unhip sneakers,” only to regret her choice again when Hampton “look[s] sort of horrified” at her appearance. It’s a fairly transparent albeit mostly sympathetic non sequitur: Jane repeatedly wears Brett’s (and Brett’s wife Piper’s) clothes, convinced that doing so will make her who and what she hopes to become.

In the end, her logic might not be so wrong. Over the course of Colored Television, boundaries grow porous; subjectivity proves difficult to pin down. Upon seeing a photo of Hampton, Jane and Lenny’s children insist that he looks just like Lenny (Jane protests). In addition to her clothes, Jane wears Piper’s perfume. And, perhaps most directly, the TV show that Jane pitches to Hampton wasn’t her idea originally, but Brett’s:

[A] comedy about a kooky but lovable mulatto family. Present day. Not an interracial couple—that’s last century’s news, you know. But a pair of grown-up mulattos who have married each other and have given birth to two second-generation mulatto kids. Mulatto squared. A family with normal problems but with a mulatto twist.

In the book’s concluding twist, Hampton steals Jane’s idea, translating her rejected novel manuscript into an Emmy Award–winning—and, not incidentally, totally warped and defanged—television show. This TV industry–attractive copy of Jane’s ambitious, book industry–rejected novel offers another, final example of the drift of reproduction and replacement.

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The ease with which people, ideas, and images are interchanged and replaced here renders them fundamentally unstable. It echoes the destabilization of straightforward racial categories presented by people like Jane, who stand within, between, and across them; Senna emphasizes how often people take recourse to the biological and familial to understand the categories of “biracial,” “multiracial,” “multicultural,” and “mulatto.” Hampton effectively asks Jane to “prove” her Black bona fides in both ways: first, he asks for her “numbers breakdown,” or DNA test results (“I know all you mixed nuts like to spit into vials”). After Jane tells him that she’s “thirty percent West African,” Hampton asks for a family photo (“Mixed people love to carry around pictures of their families”). Notably, Jane doesn’t blame Hampton for wanting proof. She, too, is acutely cognizant of white women who masquerade as “biracial or Native or Latinx,” thereby (among other things) making Jane “look like an imposter of—herself.”

The urge to stabilize racial categories, and the destabilization represented by people who are not immediately racially legible, is a consistent focus across Senna’s oeuvre. Her debut novel, Caucasia (1998), explores passing; her memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History (2009) describes her parents’ interracial marriage. Colored Television questions what images and genres do for those categories and the people positioned within them—it examines how cultural productions, from books to TV, determine those categories in the first place.

This collective experience of illegibility in a society structured by the distribution of power and privilege according to racial hierarchies—what Senna describes as the American experience of being “mulatto”—leads Hampton, in the middle of the book, to pick up Jane’s idea for a “mulatto comedy” (he does this ostensibly in good faith, before pivoting to steal her rejected novel outright). After all, he argues, “You all deserve it. I mean, this is America. Everybody deserves a show about people like them, right?”

The vision of “America” Hampton pitches here is one in which systems of power and privilege don’t change, necessarily, but instead stretch to accommodate more representation and recognition. “[A] show about people like them,” in his eyes, is the solution to experiences of illegibility. (This phrase itself is repurposed, fraught—invoked almost as often in the name of division as in that of inclusion or unity.) But Hampton picks up Jane’s pitch for a “mulatto comedy” only to drop it—and her—in favor of poaching her novel instead. Ultimately, the “show about people like [her]” that Jane gets is the product of Hampton’s desire for profit and prestige, personal ambition translated into a set of images palatable to awards voters.

Through Hampton, Senna skewers much popular “DEI” discourse, destabilizing and satirizing the media industry’s emphasis on representation as a—often the—central technology for progress. In its presentation of the culture industry’s use of people of color, Colored Television echoes questions Herman Gray posed almost two decades ago in Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (2005), which examines Black American popular culture:

And what of this desire for more images? More images of what, exactly? Of what we now have? More images that more positively and satisfyingly represent blackness? More realistic representation? Perhaps the problem is less with specific images than with the investment in a conception of cultural politics that continues to privilege representation itself as the primary site of hope and critique.

Images, as Senna so deftly shows, are as slippery as they are seductive. When Hampton wins an Emmy for the show he makes from Jane’s novel, he gives an acceptance speech about “the power of representation,” “his voice thick with emotion” (and affected to the point of italicization). We know Hampton is a grifter in a very literal sense; he takes Jane’s novel draft and never contacts her again. What he creates isn’t his to begin with—nor, anymore, is it truly Jane’s. In this way, Colored Television seeds suspicion around the layering of images onto life. Everybody may deserve a show about people like them, but Senna punctures any residual faith in simply amassing more images.