Casting

The success of ‘Empire’ has TV execs suddenly noticing that non-white people exist. Jaime Weinman explains why the industry still sees diversity as a fad

Adding new regulars to a comedy can be tricky. Not dramas; today’s dramas at least, are more or less built to accommodate the coming and going of characters; you expect that they’ll add a regular or two every year and, on some shows like Lost, drop almost as many regulars as they add. But because a comedy is usually based around a relatively small core group, adding a new person to that group is usually taken as a sign of desperation, an admission that something wasn’t working the first time around or that the network is meddling. When a drama adds a new regular in the second season, it’s a normal occurrence; when a comedy adds a new regular, it’s usually because the original cast just didn’t quite cut it. Call it the Steve Urkel Theory of Comedy Casting: any character added as a regular to a comedy is added to make up for some deficiency in the regular cast.