Race and Bad Television: The Case of Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry is awful. He makes extraordinarily bad movies and TV shows. And I do mean extraordinarily--they are not your normal philistine entertainment. Jersey Shore, the typical punching bag here, is truly a blight on everything intellectual and cultured. But it's a show for and about the people who have done the mindless blowout partying for decades. It is a reflection of something that has been around American culture for a while, and I would think hope that most a good portion of its audience accepts its "reality" with their tongues in their cheeks.

Tyler Perry, on the other hand, is something worse. His work appears in the same benign light as Jersey Shore, but what the (justifiably) pretentious dismissal of Diary of a Mad Black Woman or Madea’s Family Reunion or Madea Goes to Jail or Madea’s Big Happy Family or Madea’s Witness Protection (I’m assuming on this one) misses by putting it in the same category as the mundanely terrible is the effect it has in promoting racism. 

Now, before I go on with this, let me take a minute to explain what it is I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Tyler Perry is a racist. In no way am I claiming that he is positing a poor view of his people or that he is using racism to his own profit. I’m not saying that anything he’s done has been racist. His characters are poorly developed and his scripts are beyond cliche, and as a result his character types parallel certain racist stereotypes--but that is a fact of (some parts of) our culture twisting those stereotypes into a bad light (just the same as any stereotype can be). And finally, I’m not saying that I know more about any of these things than Perry himself. I am well aware that he knows far more about racism than I ever could.

But what I am trying to do is point out a fact that I’ve noticed--a fact that is perhaps more easily viewed from the perspective of a middle class white guy from South Carolina. (I privileged to the unveiled view of racism, after all.) That fact is that Perry’s work, in resting on common stereotypes, presents a picture of race relations that far too many white people point to as a way of justifying their own casual racism. Ignoring the obvious bigots and focusing on the more obscure--and more dangerous--racism, Perry’s work stands out as the thing people point to and say: “Look! See? Everything’s fine!”

But, of course, it’s not fine. Not at all.

I’ve watched and listened to far too many people use the very material Perry’s work is based on as the basis and justification of their racism to not think his work deserves some kind of deeper investigation. Whatever the race problem in this country is at its core, I can’t help but think it’s reflected in Tyler Perry’s House of Pain or Tyler Perry’s For Better or For Worse or Tyler Perry's whatever.

I’m not entirely sure what this calls for as a response. The scary thought is that Perry’s work is just like Jersey Shore but the fact that it’s a show by a black man and directed towards a black audience means that in being bad it will always be more than bad because our society will use its lack of quality in more nefarious ways. Or perhaps the fact that I’m not a part of Perry’s target audience means I’m missing something important that justifies it. The answer here is not something that I’ll ever be able to give. But I still feel like someone needs to ask the question.