From left, Carmina Bernhardt, Lorne Hiro and 10-year-old Oliver Masuda at a Toronto casting call on Aug. 4.Jennifer Roberts for The Globe and Mail
On Wednesday, NBC Universal rolled its "diversity" train into Toronto, attracted by the potential of the city's multiculturalism to help fill a mandate of, essentially, beefing up the presence of visual minorities in its TV shows and movies.
The hundreds in line at the east-end studio comprised, as per the casting call, "First Nation, East Indian, Black, Hispanic and Asian" hopefuls, in all their glorious skin shades and skeletal builds, no doubt to the great delight of the execs inside.
On the surface, reflecting a variety of races, cultures, creeds and varying degrees of mobility ("physically diverse performers" were encouraged as well) seemed like good news. And yet something about the whole business (and it was very much business) struck me as suspect.
In dropping their casting net and trawling Toronto's great ethnic depths, what were the NBCU agents hoping to catch? The next Harold and Kumar, or just a bunch of beige-skinned extras for the sequel to Green Zone?
My friend Asim Wali is one local actor who didn't attend what he refers to as a "cattle call." Of Indo-Pakistani heritage and a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, Asim has been acting professionally in Toronto for the past decade.
He describes the majority of his previous roles as "terrorists, suspected terrorists, undercover operatives infiltrating terrorist organizations and, in a real twist, a domestic terrorist" - so it's no wonder that he was skeptical of the studio's motives.
He saw the initiative as geared only toward profit. "The more people to whom you make something appealing, the more likely they are to watch," he says. "More people watch, more money gets made."
NBCU is remarkably up-front about this: A promotional video details how diversity is "better for business" and "not just the right thing to do" - "the right thing to do," apparently, being in itself inadequate.
But how is this diversity being showcased in the output of major studios?
"While the casts of most dramas and many sitcoms have grown more diverse over the last decade," a recent feature in The Los Angeles Times says, "programs aimed at minority viewers are harder to find on both broadcast and cable television."
This type of diversity seems to presuppose, at best, that one black or brown person on a TV show represents all black or brown people - and at worst, that it appeases them.
Tokenism is not representation. It's party to that brand of multiculturalism, as Chicago culture critic Walter Benn Michaels puts it in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, that has gone "from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management tool."
Alternatively, creating programming that actually represents and speaks to specific ethnic groups runs the risk of ghettoizing entertainment.
We end up with shows that cater to specific viewerships while alienating most others, and do nothing to create the sort of mutual understanding between cultures that a hugely influential and vast venue like television could help foster.
Of course, there is value in Black Entertainment Television and in the language-specific programming offered by Omni Television in Ontario, Alberta and B.C., or by public-access stations across the country.
But once the casting agents have assembled their stable of culturally and physically diverse Canadian actors (I can't help picturing a giant Crayola box transporting them from set to set), I'm concerned about what they will do with them.
Still, there's hope. The blind call for presumably anyone who's not white and walking about on two legs is worrying, but that lack of cultural specificity is also encouraging.
The higher-ups at NBCU should consider two people: Ben Kingsley and Fez, the ethnically ambiguous exchange student on That '70s Show.
I always had a soft spot for Fez, whose nationality was never revealed and in fact became a running gag (in one episode, when asked where he was from, Fez lamented, "I can never tell"). The role not only mocked the sitcom archetype of the clueless, bumbling foreigner, it expanded ethnicity itself into a much more nebulous realm, free from cultural associations and restrictions.
The same can be said of Ben Kingsley. Born Krishna Bhanji to a British mother and Gujarati father, Mr. Kingsley has played Gandhi, a gritty London mobster, an Iranian war colonel, a Jewish New York psychiatrist. If, as my friend Asim notes, "the point of being an actor is to go outside of yourself," then Mr. Kingsley is a paragon of the craft, able to take on any role, regardless of his own or its supposed cultural background.
Forgetting the "post-race" talk that has been swirling around since, oh, November, 2008, Fez and Mr. Kingsley represent a potential for narratives outside the boundaries of culture or ethnicity.
TV and movies, after all, are built on performances in invented worlds, and where better than in fiction to explore, if not construct, a society unlimited by ethnic constraints - where the stories are universally human stories, well written (let's hope) and well told.
I'm writing this from St. John's, where Raoul Bhaneja will be bringing his one-man Hamlet: Solo show to town on Aug. 22. Nowhere in any of the press coverage, reviews or promotional material is there any mention of race. That Mr. Bhaneja is a guy of South Asian heritage playing the Prince of Denmark simply doesn't factor when the show is good - and by all accounts, it's a very good show indeed.I'm looking forward to this performance a lot, and I hope that, if it ever swings through Hollywood, those diversity folks at NBC Universal will give it a look too.
Pasha Malla is the author of the award-winning story collection The Withdrawal Method.