Book excerpt: “Colored Television” by Danzy Senna

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“Colored Television” (Riverhead Books), a satirical novel from Danzy Senna (the bestselling author of “Caucasia”), features a writer who can’t sell her ambitious book about biracial people in history, who considers selling out to Hollywood by transforming it into a TV sit-com.

Read an excerpt below. 

“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna

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Today they were going to an open house in the neighborhood Jane had nicknamed Multicultural Mayberry, the neighborhood where she’d always wanted them to live. The house was way out of their price range, given that their price range was zero. But who really knew what their price range might be soon? It couldn’t hurt to look. If Josiah offered a lot of money and Lenny sold some paintings, on top of Jane’s getting tenure and a raise, who knew? They might become members of the functioning middle class sooner than they thought.

Multicultural Mayberry was only about fifteen minutes from downtown Los Angeles, but it felt like a different world altogether. Gone was the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome energy of downtown. Gone was the Manson Family Helter Skelter vibe of the hills. Gone was the suburban wasteland of Glendale and the trashy mini-mall sprawl of Mid-City. Gone was the relentless existential hum of the freeway, the racial blight of the LAPD, the handsome lying face of O.J. Simpson and the blank, bewildered face of his murdered wife, Nicole. Gone was the banally evil face of Mark Fuhrman and the nihilistic cokehead teens of Less than Zero. Gone were the Menéndez brothers and the white vigilante Michael Douglas played in Falling Down.

Movies over the years had depicted Los Angeles and its outskirts as a kind of dystopian futuristic hellscape—a clarion warning for the rest of the world about where we were all headed. But Multicultural May- berry made it feel as if none of that existed. The most charming aspects of America’s past had made love to its most hopeful Obamaesque future, creating this love child of a town.

The sunlight in Multicultural Mayberry was dappled because there were real trees here. Instead of chain stores and mini malls, its main street was home to businesses you didn’t know still existed: A ye olde frame shop. A hundred-year-old soda shop. A barbershop with a candy-cane pole out front. There were only three schools in the district, all of them blue ribbon, and the middle-class residents all sent their children to these schools, so you saw kids walking around in clusters, going to visit their friends, who all lived here too. And yet, this fifties-era set piece was not some blizzard of white supremacy as you might expect. It was famously multicultural. Hence the nickname.

She could see why the filmmakers loved it here. And boy did they love it. Every time Jane came, she saw some street blocked by a craft food-service truck or a phalanx of film equipment. The films that had been shot here were too long a list to remember. She did know the town had been a stand-in for Philadelphia in Thirtysomething. And it was most famous for being Illinois in Halloween. Every Halloween, the town was filled with tourists walking around in Michael Myers costumes, past the actual house where young Michael had slashed his big sister to death.

And yet, for a town that was so perfectly perfect for a horror movie set in Illinois, there was something distinctly Los Angeles about it. LA could be such a chameleon. It could be anything you wanted it to be. And here it was every small American town or treelined suburban street you’d ever seen in a television show or movie.

Excerpted from “Colored Television” by Danzy Senna. Copyright © 2024 by Danzy Senna. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna

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• “Colored Television” by Danzy Senna (­­­­­Riverhead Books), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats