There’s no little irony to the release of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. It’s come just when all those beleaguered novelists who thought writing for TV would make them some real money are realizing that writers’ rooms are the latest creative labor bait and switch. Instead of wealth and acclaim, they’re faced with impossible demands, zero respect and such dismal pay that they still have to take a second job to cover rent.
Jane Gibson and her husband Lenny belong to that class of people now called the precariat. These folks work, and may indeed be talented, but they find it tough to make a consistent living. Jane has published one novel and she’s been trying for a decade to produce a follow-up. She teaches, without tenure, to make ends meet. Lenny, supremely disdainful of just about everything and everyone, is an artist whose paintings don’t sell. Because of this, they suffer from a genteel homelessness; when we meet them they’re housesitting, yet again. This time their benefactor is Jane’s old friend Brett, who’s making a killing as a showrunner. Jane and Lenny have two young children to care for, too: Finn is bright and possibly autistic, and Ruby is now old enough to feel the effects of her family’s essentially vagabond state.
Then, almost miraculously, Jane finishes her book, a doorstopper about mixed-race Black and white Americans over centuries. She has a personal connection to the topic, since she’s biracial. But when she presents the fruit of her labor to her long-suffering agent, it’s rejected (unsurprisingly, to the reader). Shocked and desperate, Jane decides to pinch Brett’s agent. Instead of a book about mixed-race people, she’ll develop a TV show about them: “The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” exults a TV producer she meets with.
Senna’s sense of the absurd is impeccable, evident throughout Jane’s time in what Hollywood types call “development hell,” and building toward a moment near the very end that will make you gasp, “Oh no!” The book is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
Read our interview with Danzy Senna about Colored Television.
