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The Fly Girls

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In Living Color, 15 April 1990-1994 Created by Keenan Ivory Wayans and Damon Wayan, featuring Wayan siblings Kim, Shawn and Marlon, In Living Color made waves in the turbulent public sphere of the early 1990s. A top-rated show for its first two seasons (1990-1992) it also made a categorical break from existing mainstream sketch comedy. Sometimes called "the black Saturday Night Live," In Living Color created a proud, defiant, ghetto image of Hip-Hop and gangsta rap. The series launched the careers of Jennifer Lopez, Jamie Foxx, and many others. The show's dance troupe, The Fly Girls, choreographed by Rosa María "Rosie" Perez, who had starred in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), and would star also in Ron Shelton's White Men Can't Jump (1992). The Fly Girls introduced every show and provided the intros and outros to every commercial break, for a typical 8 numbers per episode. Rosie Perez was hired to bring Hip Hop dancing to the mainstream and she did so with a powerful, sexy, athletic, and highly kinetic style.

In Living Color produced the opposite message from that of NBC's The Cosby Show. Both shows were mainstream breakthroughs for mostly-African American casted prime-time television. Both won top-rated viewership among all viewers, the vast majority of whom were white. The Cosby Show didn't thematize or reflect on African-American culture at all. Cosby conceptualized his humor with race-ethnicity left out -- nearly all the time. The Wayans brothers made race-ethnicity a central theme, class, ideology, and political conflict. It was edgy, combative, and defiant as the contemporary Hip-Hop artists at the top of the charts during its four-seasons run. The Cosby Show was square: materially, culturally, the Huxtables were average and normal versions of successful white Americans. In Living Color was at the very edge between the genuine rebellion of Hip Hop and gangster rap, and commercially successful mainstream media.

The Wayans and the writers and actors tackled issues such as racist police violence, mass incarceration, African-Americans in show business, homelessness, censorship, and many other issues of the "Culture Wars." The contradiction that ultimately brought the show down, however, was that it was produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Television, owned by the upstart Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdock, who was already forging alliances with the New Right. Murdock built large audiences with edgy and sensational, often populist material, in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst.

Fox Executives were definitely improving the cultural diversity of television and cable int eh 1990s, even providing venues for critical, left-wing views. But although many writers on Fox discussed racial issues in their productions, columnist and scholar Kristal Brent Zook notes that they often faced much backlash from network executives.