Seinfeld didn’t just come from a Jewish perspective it leaned into New York’s diversity – from the iron-fisted Armenian running the trendy neighborhood soup spot to the Johnnie Cochran-like lawyer Jackie Chiles. But he is also routinely checked by his office manager, his best friend, an old high school pal – and none of these people are white. CBS’s Becker cast Ted Danson as a cranky Bronx doctor who is constantly annoyed with everything – not least a heterogeneous array of walk-in patients.

Only a handful of network sitcoms resisted the trend of presenting New York as monocultural. That New York, run first by Michael J Fox, then Charlie Sheen, was a fantasy, too. In ABC’s Spin City, a sitcom about the workings of the city government, the mayor’s office had only three non-white employees. But Cosby eventually yielded its place on CBS’s primetime schedule to the starkly white family sitcom worlds of Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens.

By and large, the sitcoms of the day reflected this siloed worldview at home and in the workplace.Ĭosby’s vision of two romantics striving to savor the autumn of their lives was the exceptional New York sitcom about Black people that found a home with white audiences (Cosby’s then pristine reputation and the show being based on the BBC’s One Foot in the Grave helped). Television in the late 90s assumed its audience was either Black or white.

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