When season 2 of How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, debuted in 2006, the show doubled down on an American sitcom and media landscape trend, what would eventually be labeled in society as post racial, upon President Obama’s inauguration. HIMYM centers on the lives of an all-white friend group of three men and two women, as they develop relationships, job prospects, and social life in New York City. Season 2, episode 10 introduces a gay, Black sibling named James Stinson (Wayne Brady) for one of the main characters, Barney Stinton (Neil Patrick Harris). I believe this instance of multiculturalism that’s actually flat falls in line with the unnamed and stateless exchange student Fez (Wilmer Valderrama) in That 70s Show (1998-2006), as well as the Indian friend and coworker Raj (Kunal Nayyar) in The Big Bang Theory ( 2007-2019). While Brady’s character hardly acknowledges his race, Valderrama’s character avoids racial labeling all together, leaving Nayyar as the odd one out, more often than not mocking and denying his heritage and culture. I call attention to these shows because they are the wave following the ending of Friends (1991-2004). As scholars Cobb and Hamad, through Michael Rennet, put it “When Friends ended, it opened the floodgates for the emergence of what has become a cycle of …the emerging adult sitcoms” and it’s epitomized by HIMYM and TBBT, among others (127).

Why did the shift from monoculture in sitcoms move so quickly to a singular token character, all the while with an absence of Blackness? These programs attempted to avoid tropes, but also mocked at the same time. The Big Bang Theory, That 70s Show, and How I Met Your Mother covered a gambit of exoticism and diversity. They had an Indian man, a vaguely Latin man, and a straight, white man with a Black brother as the atypical and token friend in each group. The actors for each role identify as British with Indian heritage, American with Colombian and Venezuelan heritage, and American with European heritage respectively. So upon closer look, Raj, Fez, and Barney closely align with the actors playing them from a racial and ethnic perspective, yet not quite. So are they replacements? Do these characters represent anything? Their characterization is both defined and undefined. Considering the era of these programs coincides with Shonda Rhimes and other producers’ decisions to blind cast some of their productions, we must put pressure on the development and evolution of friendship and ensemble dynamics as well as individual characterization.

How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) is a half hour situational comedy, with no live studio audience or soundstage, a laugh track added during post production editing process, and a frame narrative to begin each episode (Novak 128). The main five characters have various careers, including teacher and reporter. Similar to The Big Bang Theory and That 70s Show, the central group develops relationships with one another over the seasons while also pursuing relationships outside of the group. The main character is Ted, played by Josh Radnor in flashbacks and voiced by Bob Saget in present, but the key character in the group because of his eccentricities, is Barney. Barney is more flirtatious than his group mates, often seeking a new female partner to take home from the local bar nightly, whether his friends play the role of wingman or not. He’s overtly sexual, a womanizer, lives a lavish lifestyle, and encourages his friends to live similarly. The comedy of Barney derives from his refusal to explain details of his life,  while at the same time refusing to acknowledge that Bob Barker from The Price is Right, for example, is not his father, though his mother always told him so. 

One detail the screenwriters illustrate early in terms of Barney’s characterization is his distant mother, played by Frances Conroy, and unconventional childhood. While the audience sees through his mother’s stories, such as Bob Barker as father, Barney is committed. He doesn’t question it, which sets the audience up to laugh at the gag in the present and flashbacks, but he doesn’t question his brother James. In season 2, Barney’s brother visits to function as a wingman. Each character is aware that Barney’s brother is gay and Black, except for Robin (Cobie Smulders), and the mediation only delays the acknowledgement of James’ race momentarily. The joke doesn’t stem from framing, rather the dialogue and subtle irony. The viewing audience can acknowledge James’ race and then debate the humor in how the characters see him, creating a gag out of his visuality. Throughout the episode in which James is first introduced, the group trades subtle jokes about not seeing color or judging a character by his skin. Seconds before meeting James, Ted informs Robin of James' sexuality and says “Yeah, we just wanted you to have a heads-up so you don't act all surprised when he gets here,” but when James enters the apartment, Robin sarcastically replies “Thanks for the heads-up.” The gag stems from Robin’s confusion around her white friend having a Black sibling and the remainder of the group playing straight faced and not acknowledging the confusion. They consistently remind her that Barney and James are exactly alike.. 

As HIMYM develops its following in the mid 2000s, CBS debuts another series with similar characters, plot, and narrative. The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019) centers around a group of scientists and their friends in Pasadena, CA, all in their 20s and focused on developing relationships, growing in their respective fields, and exploring their particular fandoms. TBBT begins with 3 central white men and 1 man of Indian descent This last character, nicknamed Raj, purports humor through his social anxiety around women, often cured situationally when drinking or on medication, and both his critique and mythologizing of his birthland, New Delhi, India. Like most of the male characters in the show, Raj is also a “mama’s boy…controlled or unhealthily influenced” by his mother as well as his father, all the way from India (Barkman 189). Raj eventually overcomes his anxiety halfway through the show's original broadcast run, partners with two white girlfriends, and settles down with an Indian woman named Anu in the final season, though they break up before the final episode. Raj is often characterized as having slightly feminine tastes, similar to Barney in HIMYM, and even takes on the feminine or subordinate role when hanging out with his male peers, a position Ted usually fills. 

While Raj maintains many of the gender norms illustrated by Ted in HIMYM, many of his traits also align with Barney and by association, James. One reason for this similarity, aside from sharing the same broadcast network, is that the programs have writers in common. His self-deprecating humor positions him overtly against Leonard, the more confident character, yet his naive sense of self aligns him with Sheldon, Howard, and even Penny, so he’s both aware enough to put himself down, yet not wise enough to lift himself back up. The actor Kunal doesn’t often speak to the characterization of Raj, but in a quick interview with The Hollywood Reporter in reference to other South Asian characters in comedies, he acknowledged that he “loves diversity” and finds those actors to be “very talented” though “the focus [should be] on their brilliance, really.” So while Kunal doesn’t have a story credit for The Big Bang Theory, he both acknowledges identity and dissipates it in the same sentence, very similar to his character and a similar logic employed by writers for HIMYM as well as Wayne Brady. We could almost argue that there’s a production culture and sentiment aimed at maintaining the neoliberal logic of post racialness. 

The last example of 2000s sitcoms, That 70s Show, predates the previous programs, debuting in 1998 and taking place in late 1970s Wisconsin. Even with this 20 year shift in time, the show contains the most particular example of indeterminate characterization and Black absence, and hyper(in)visibility (Petermon). The program focuses on a central group of teenagers as well as their parents, and like the other sitcoms, the main characters in this program move back and forth between platonic and romantic relationships throughout the series as they try to navigate high school, college, and hourly jobs. While HIMYM characters typically seek sexual relationships outside of the group and long term romantic relationships inside the group, almost all of the partners of The Big Bang Theory’s central characters become series regulars as the narrative moves along; without watching the show, you can almost guess who will struggle here. The teenagers of That 70s Show date one another and rotate partners throughout the seasons in an effort to mimic the real lives of teenagers, which separates the show from our other objects. HIMYM can be surmised as one traditional couple and a love triangle, while the main characters in TBBT all strive for traditional relationships. Each character in That 70s Show except one presents as white or white passing, though Mila Kunis, who plays Jackie, is of Jewish and Ukrainian descent; the most interesting character and the last piece of our argument is an exchange student nicknamed “Fez.” Though he’s overtly sexual, promiscuous, flirtatious, and stereotypically exotic, his advances on the women in the friend group are hardly ever returned. One of many tensions around the character is how the show plays with never revealing his actual name or home country. 

Fez actualizes generality, a stand in as the show takes advantage of his racial ambiguity. The actor’s Colombian and Venezuelan heritage make it difficult to not assume Fez is Latin, but the show puts effort into hinting his heritage to North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe as well. His exchange status conflicts with the thesis of Fez functioning as a replacement for the Black male body since he could be part of the Black diaspora, but the lack of full acknowledgment of the Black and brown body, which each television program has inadvertently approached, remains in flux here; he is literally unable to find a home, receive a name, or even achieve the one norm he hopes to fulfill, a romantic relationship, even as he presents both the exotic and erotic. Fez doesn’t find a girlfriend until the third season though he attempts to in multiple episodes per season. In a 2022 article, McWan and Cramer explain the concept of Raj from The Big Bang Theory as excluded from romantic relationships (once again, his character is the only one who’s partner doesn’t become a regular on the show), emphasizing how this otherizes him and implies his sexual fluidity. I believe a similar process takes place with Fez, though he does eventually develop relationships with the main, straight female characters of the show. But similar to Raj, his sexuality is often conveyed in a childlike fashion, which is where some of my reversion stems from. The Black and brown bodies become catalysts, similar to how reality TV dating shows purposefully or inadvertently position and mediate Black and brown people, becoming the undesirable body that helps lead the main white character towards their goals: hegemonic relationships.

Though these three series never overlapped during their original broadcast runs, from May 2006 through Sept. 2007, all three were present in American media and pop culture. They continue to cycle through spinoffs, podcast rewatches, and streaming. As That 70s Show wrapped its final season, HIMYM began its second season; their third season debuted the same day as The Big Bang Theory. Each is part of the sitcom evolution, coinciding with mockumentaries, which, unlike traditional sitcoms, tend to give Black characters the space to talk back, to both the camera, imagined audience, and actual audience, while still maintaining the dangerous balance of post-racialness. While sitcoms as a genre place the onus on the audience, if there’s any onus at all, mockumentaries push and pull Black identity in unique ways, giving it more space to critique the tropes present within the show. No current show is doing this more deftly than Abbot Elementary, which proves these series can be a place of exploration, critique, and discovery. 

 

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