2008 Woodie Awards
Can Ebony and Ivory Live Together in Harmony?
Jonathan Storm ; Knight Ridder Newspapers
Issue date: 3/8/06 Section: Life
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LOS ANGELES - It's the kind of TV show an anthropologist would dream up.
Two families, one black, one white, move in together. Using advanced make-up techniques, they change their appearances and go out into the world to learn how the other race thinks, and then come back home to chew on their experiences.
The show is called "Black. White." It premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST on cable's FX network, and it demonstrates the potential of reality television to go beyond determining who can eat the most worms or scream the loudest, to illuminate important social and cultural issues.
"I believe race is a defining issue in what America is," said executive producer R. J. Cutler in his office at Actual Reality Pictures, which he runs on Sunset Boulevard here.
Cutler, along with Ice Cube and Matt Alvarez, produced the show, but FX President John Landgraf, who earned a degree in anthropology and was headed into the social sciences before he took a detour into television, had the idea for "Black. White." nearly two years ago.
"Reality television was in some ways being unimaginative at that time," Landgraf said, in one of the understatements of the century. "We were excited about the possibilities of the form, to use real people as your stars, to not be about winning, to be about going on complicated, challenging, funny, dramatic journeys."
"Black. White." succeeds beautifully on that personal level, as the families lived together for six weeks last summer in a house in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, but it also works in a much larger arena.
It made an excellent focus for a high-school awards program late last month, administered by the Fox Diversity Development Department at a packed Darryl F. Zanuck Theater on the 20th Century Fox lot.
As viewers are bound to do, people in the audience groaned and applauded when the family members expressed themselves on screen. The participants, accompanied by a few experts on race relations, got similar responses when they expounded live on the stage.
Two families, one black, one white, move in together. Using advanced make-up techniques, they change their appearances and go out into the world to learn how the other race thinks, and then come back home to chew on their experiences.
The show is called "Black. White." It premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST on cable's FX network, and it demonstrates the potential of reality television to go beyond determining who can eat the most worms or scream the loudest, to illuminate important social and cultural issues.
"I believe race is a defining issue in what America is," said executive producer R. J. Cutler in his office at Actual Reality Pictures, which he runs on Sunset Boulevard here.
Cutler, along with Ice Cube and Matt Alvarez, produced the show, but FX President John Landgraf, who earned a degree in anthropology and was headed into the social sciences before he took a detour into television, had the idea for "Black. White." nearly two years ago.
"Reality television was in some ways being unimaginative at that time," Landgraf said, in one of the understatements of the century. "We were excited about the possibilities of the form, to use real people as your stars, to not be about winning, to be about going on complicated, challenging, funny, dramatic journeys."
"Black. White." succeeds beautifully on that personal level, as the families lived together for six weeks last summer in a house in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, but it also works in a much larger arena.
It made an excellent focus for a high-school awards program late last month, administered by the Fox Diversity Development Department at a packed Darryl F. Zanuck Theater on the 20th Century Fox lot.
As viewers are bound to do, people in the audience groaned and applauded when the family members expressed themselves on screen. The participants, accompanied by a few experts on race relations, got similar responses when they expounded live on the stage.