Come this fall there will be fewer of us on televison. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. I knew this was coming when I heard Khandi Alexander and Gary Dourdan where out of their respective CSI’s (with Dourdan’s departure both gruesome and definitive). But what does surprise me is that it looks like the NAACP feels the need to study such an obvious problem and issue another report (which will be coming soon). Perhaps they should have stopped those ridiculous awards (that recognize brown faces whether the project is good or bad) and they would have realized this situation has been painfully apparent forever.

Anyway, Entertainment Weekly  did an in-depth story about the Fall 2008 television black-out. What stood out the most for me is that the writers reminded me that once a start-up network is successful it abandons its minority programming, passing the task along to the next up-and-coming network. So Fox passed the baton to UPN and the WB. When they merged and became the CW they kept us around for a season but now the baton has been passed to My Network TV (the people that gave Flavor Flav a sitcom). I don’t know about you but I find this thoroughly depressing. My Network TV would probably revive Homeboys from Outerspace if they had the chance too.

This brings me to Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, which has its home at TBS. In my opinion, this is far from great television (but it is light years ahead of Under One Roof). It reminds me of a sitcom from the 70s when the characters were thinly drawn and were allowed to be one of the following: understanding big black woman, loud black man, sassy kids, and the struggling single parent (I am still glad Alan Payne has a job.). But Perry threw in one more: the resident crack-head. Whether I like what Perry is doing or not is beside the point. He was powerful enough to get a $200 million syndication deal with TBS. And I witnessed scores of people waiting on line last year to meet the cast at the Essence Music Festival last year. So the sitcoms debut with over 5 million viewers doesn’t seem like much of a surprise.

So with much power comes much responsibility. Tyler needs to understand that with the number of us on the decline on the small screen, he has got to make a better show or add a stronger one to his development deal. Because we’d really like to see ourselves depicted as more than the sassy friend or sidekick.