H'wood in black and white simply looks blond

By BRIAN LOWRY

'Black. White.'

IN "BLACK. WHITE." -- the FX network's attention-grabbing unscripted series in which a white family and a black one, abetted by makeup, try to walk a mile in each other's skin -- the whites could hardly be more clueless.

In the movie "Something New," about an interracial romance, the blacks could hardly be more racist.

Welcome to the acceptable new stereotypes related to race in entertainment -- namely, pity those stupid white people, and if anyone's going to exhibit racial animus, it's funny if minorities do so.

Of course, neither treatment is particularly convincing, though "Black. White.," which premieres in March, is compelling in a rather dreadful way. Granted, the most odious "character," a white guy named Bruno Marcotulli, is an actor (they refer to him as a "substitute teacher," which he doubtless is most of the time) whose credits include roles in "Disney's Safety Patrol" and as a "sad mime" (in whiteface?) in the 1990s not-quite-classic "Spy Hard." As such, vamping for the cameras is surely involved, though his space-cadet wife doesn't come across much better.

As for "Something New," residents of an affluent African-American neighborhood within racially diverse Los Angeles behave as if they've just seen a gh-gh-ghost when a white dude wanders into Starbucks.

Throw in "Freedomland," the just-released drama in which a missing child triggers simmering racial discord, and it's clear we're not all just getting along.

THE CHALLENGE addressing race stems from the fact that these remain thorny issues, making them ripe for once-over-lightly treatment but poor fodder for meaningful examination. Notably, when I observed in a review that "Something New" was more a heart than head movie -- a criticism that easily could be leveled at most romantic comedies, especially one with plot gaps like this -- emails came from African-Americans accusing me of subtle racism.

For the record, blacks have no monopoly on watching dumb movies, which doesn't make the movies any less dumb.

Because race is so sensitive, it's an ideal topic to generate media interest, as "Black. White." has already done, including an "Oprah" episode.

Yet in order to make racial discussions palatable, whites are the ones who come off as being dim and get lumped together in inane ways. Los Angeles Times columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan, for example, recently voiced her displeasure with the concept of Black History Month, referring to "some stake that whites (and some blacks) have always had in keeping their narrative apart from that of black people."

Lest anyone think it accidental that whites were grouped without qualification, she later wrote, "Whites, and many blacks, resent the pall that the black struggle has always cast over the shining American myth of equality."

Hmm. At the last annual meeting of whites, I don't remember that being the consensus.

A FINAL IMPEDIMENT to tackling race intelligently is that entertainment has become more segregated -- not just by color, but gender, age groups and interests. As News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin observed in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, thanks to new technologies, "All of our stories no longer need to be geared to a mass audience. We are free to experiment ... free to explore our boldest impulses."

And, as a society, free to be more narrow and insular in what we consume.

So even as an exercise in heavily staged nonfiction, "Black. White.'s" approach conveys a message regarding whites' willful ignorance regarding race. After all, how else could a family that lives in Santa Monica display such mind-numbing insensitivity almost 15 years after the Rodney King case and a decade since O.J. Simpson's trials?

Strictly as a TV show, though, it's provocative, which serves FX's purposes -- just as "Something New" and, before that, "Guess Who," an inverted version of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," resonated in media circles more loudly than their modest box office tallies would suggest.

Taken together, these projects offer a reminder that beyond rare exceptions such as HBO's "The Wire," movies and TV programs -- especially of the unscripted variety -- clearly aren't the place to turn for depth in such matters. Because when it comes to race, Hollywood is still tethered to "The Mod Squad" template: white, black and -- in the most stereotypical sense -- irredeemably blond.