Monochrome Casting/Playing With

Basic Trope: A TV show with a not very diverse cast.

• Straight: Sally and Friends, a lighthearted sitcom, has an entirely white main cast.
• Exaggerated: The series is many seasons long, and not one minority ever shows up. Even in the background.
• Downplayed: The main cast of Sally and Friends is all white, but a few background and/or very minor characters are played by non-white actors.
• Justified: The setting of the series is a city or region that is known for not being very ethnically diverse.
  • Alternately, the series is set in a time during severe segregation, so you wouldn't expect to see a bunch of white kids hanging out with one black guy.
• Inverted: The main cast of Sally and Friends is a highly diverse Five-Token Band, consisting of an African-American girl, an Asian girl, a Jewish boy, a Latino, an Indian girl, and the Token White guy in a wheelchair.
• Subverted: Fawna joins the cast in the second season to be the Token Minority.
• Double Subverted: But then Fawna falls victim to Chuck Cunningham Syndrome before season 3.
• Parodied: An immigrant from Nigeria comes to town and is played by a very white actor.
• Deconstructed: An American town becomes very concerned about their lack of diversity. Turns out it was set up during the segregation days and never blended.
• Reconstructed: But the state they live in is 99% white, so a lack of minorities is not unusual. They get on with their lives in their middle class white suburb.
• Zig Zagged: The cast is different every episode. Sometimes it's only one race. Sometimes it's a Five-Token Band.
• Averted: The cast is realistically diverse for the setting.
• Enforced: The writer is racist.
  • Or, the executives simply want to aim for a certain demographic.
• Lampshaded: The history teacher in Sally and Friends teaches her students about black civil rights leaders. None of the students can relate and end up falling asleep.
• Invoked: See "Justfied".
• Defied: The series is about accepting differences, such as race.
• Discussed: "Why are we so...white?"
• Conversed: "God, don't you hate how these sitcoms always have a cast that's either all white or all black? Maybe that made sense in the '60s, but today it's just ridiculous!"

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