Hollywood Inn sign, Motel Drive, Fresno, California (1987) | John Margolies / Library of Congress / No known restrictions
I was prepared to laugh my way through Danzy Senna’s sixth novel, Colored Television (Riverhead, 2024), after reading review after review touting the book as a comedy. In this period of intense political and social divisiveness and strife, I hoped a fun satire (I like ridicule!) about a biracial (I’m mixed race!) writer (I write stuff, too!) would tick all the boxes of escapist fiction someone like me needs in a moment like this.
But even though I appreciated the antics that the protagonist, Jane Gibson, got into in this scathing glimpse into the life of a creative writer in Los Angeles, I didn’t feel the sweet buzz of a good laughing release at the end.
Jane is a professor whose ability to secure tenure (and financial stability for her family, which includes a willfully unsuccessful artist husband and two children, one of whom has special needs) is dependent on her getting a publishing deal for her second book.
She ignores all professional advice to just get the sophomore book over with and write something passable so she can move on. Instead, Jane spends most of her year-long sabbatical on a four-hundred-page passion project that her husband, Lenny, who is Black, calls her “mulatto War and Peace.”
The more we get to know our protagonist, the more it makes sense that she would want to make her mark with this second book. All writers want to feel that we have big, important ideas to express. Jane, for very legitimate reasons, hopes to explain “the mulatto experience” and to “write a history for a people without a race.” It is a lofty and noble goal, and she repeatedly references fictional philosopher Hiram Cavendish with long passages about how the “mulatto [outdoes] all [other] groups in marginality” because of their “double consciousness.” (Senna is herself a biracial writer and once noted in an interview that her racial ambiguity affords her the ability to see an America that others cannot.)
At the same time, Jane feels a pressing need to produce a bestseller. She fantasizes about affording a home in an idyllic, multicultural neighborhood, and her questionable choices are motivated by a bourgeois dream idealized in an image she frequently returns to: a smiley, brown-skinned family wearing matching sweaters in a Swedish catalog. If only she can earn enough money to buy that nice house with nice things in a nice neighborhood, then the kids will be happy, and she can “do what she wanted to do, which was to tell stories—and age richly.”
After her agent rejects her unwieldy manuscript, Jane is forced to find another source of income that might save her family from their perpetual shuffle between short-term rentals—a routine Jane finds increasingly unacceptable.
Desperate, she co-opts an abandoned idea from her best friend, Brett (also biracial), who jettisoned any literary ambitions after grad school to become a successful screenwriter. Jane secretly uses Brett’s professional contacts to connect with a producer named Hampton Ford. Hampton is tasked with creating diverse content for a prestige streaming service, and Jane pitches herself to him as the best biracial writer for the job because she brings with her ideas the esteem of the literary world.
Jane’s subsequent bad decisions include hiding her collaboration work with Hampton from her husband, Lenny, who jokingly refers to the producer as “Lincoln Perry” after the actor who played the racist caricature Stepin Fetchit. She also continuously lies to and avoids Brett, who has generously allowed their family to live in his opulent home while he is out of the country, as she and Lenny shamelessly consume every expensive bottle of wine in his cellar. Jane further unravels by staying out late with the increasingly smarmy Hampton and doing drugs with the vapid Hollywood people in his circle.
Normally, I would find all of these choices fun and relatable, but the stakes Senna set up for Jane actually made it less enjoyable to just go along for the ride in this comedy of errors.
Senna creates circumstances that make us want to empathize with Jane, but it is unclear if we are meant to root for her. Yes, I did find myself wanting the television series to be Jane’s golden ticket and the kids to get a stable home where she and Lenny could be wealthy bohemians with fully realized artistic lives. But that’s mostly because I believe that if anyone in America gets that, it should be the nice family of Black and biracial artists.
In an effort to fix perhaps the most pressing of her problems, Jane sends her husband a running list she has been keeping on her computer of things that they both hate together. It functions like a set of vows she renews about their shared values. The list of hated items includes “dignity, earnestness, poetry readings, white feminism, Black writers who have made it their whole mission to placate white guilt,” and, notably, “redemptive endings.”
Maybe Senna is telling us that we don’t deserve the escape a simple comedy can offer, or the happy endings most Hollywood films still demand, just because America still has too much to account for in acknowledging and repairing our racially violent past.
Then again, perhaps the best we can hope for—especially in dark times—is someone we love who hates the same things we do; often, they’re also the person who knows how to make us laugh.
