Rae grew up in the ’90s, which is sometimes called the golden era of black television. Many of the most memorable shows on TV that decade — ‘‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,’’ ‘‘Family Matters,’’ ‘‘Martin,’’ ‘‘In Living Color,’’ ‘‘Sister, Sister’’ — starred black actors and were written by black writers, and many had long runs on major networks. Some smaller networks had entire lineups that skewed black, too: Fox, UPN and the WB in particular. But this era was short-lived. Kristal Brent Zook, the author of ‘‘Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television,’’ says that the collapse was caused by these networks tacking toward the mainstream. In the mid-’90s, Fox started to model itself after the Big Three networks. ‘‘Once they had the means to move up in the world, they didn’t need the African-American viewer anymore,’’ Zook says. ‘‘In 1994, they just canceled the majority of black-produced shows in one fell swoop.’’ UPN ended up in CBS’s portfolio and was then merged with the WB to form a new station called the CW, best known for ‘‘Gilmore Girls.’’

Image Rae’s best-selling memoir, published in February. Credit... Atria/37 INK Books

Black television was a lifeline for Rae, especially during a period of her childhood spent in Maryland. ‘‘When I was in Potomac as the sole black girl, these shows were my access to black culture in some ways,’’ she writes in her memoir. ‘‘When I moved to Los Angeles, and the kids said I talked white but had nappy hair, I found a sort of solace in knowing that Freddie from ‘A Different World’ and Synclaire from ‘Living Single’ were napped out, too. I could be worse things.’’ Freddie and Synclaire were free-spirited black women who could be described in many ways — artsy, oddballs, sporty, cultivators of strange hobbies and affectations — and yet were unequivocally and undeniably black.

As she grew up, Rae became disillusioned by the rise of catty reality-television tropes and token stock characters. She describes them in her book as the ‘‘extremely tragic black woman, or the magic helpless Negro, or the many black men in dresses.’’

‘‘How hard is it to portray a three-dimensional woman of color on television or in film?’’ she writes. ‘‘I’m surrounded by them. They’re my friends. I talk to them every day. How come Hollywood won’t acknowledge us? Are we a joke to them?’’

Her own show was an instant hit online in 2011, and soon a number of networks and production companies expressed interest in adapting ‘‘Awkward Black Girl’’ for prime-time TV. To Rae’s disappointment, most wanted to completely rework the show. Rae recalls a phone conversation with a network executive who wanted to make it into a pan-racial franchise operation, starting with ‘‘Awkward Indian Boy.’’ Another suggested Rae recast the lead with a lighter-skinned actress with long, straight hair — in essence, the exact opposite of Rae. She turned down the offers.

‘‘They wanted to make it as broad as possible, broadly niche, but I was like: No, that’s not what this is about,’’ she says. Another botched opportunity came in the summer of 2012 with Shonda Rhimes and Rhimes’s production partner, Betsy Beers. Rae pitched them a show called ‘‘I Hate L.A. Dudes,’’ a comedy about a woman trying to date preening, image-obsessed men in Hollywood. Rhimes and Beers loved it so much that they sold it to ABC. But Rae had trouble getting the script ready for pilot-reading season that winter. She recalls fielding constant, sometimes overlapping and contradictory notes from the network and Rhimes’s team. (Rhimes declined to be interviewed for this story.) In the end, her treatment fell short of expectations, and the pilot wasn’t picked up. ‘‘I compromised my vision, and it didn’t end up the show that I wanted,’’ she says. ‘‘It wasn’t funny anymore.’’