Let’s never forget that this is the country in which The Black and White Minstrel Show, featuring white performers in blackface make-up, was aired in a primetime BBC1 slot right up until 1978. Things have changed since then, of course.

The major broadcasters have all affirmed their commitment to increasing employee diversity, while shows such as Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black demonstrate diversity’s appeal onscreen. Yes, TV has come a long way since racism equalled ratings, though if recent controversies about colour-blind casting are anything to go by, some would say perhaps too far.

The Handmaid’s Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabeth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It’s this that New York Magazine has described as the show’s “greatest failing”.

Atwood’s original novel passingly references the “resettlement of the Children of Ham”, but black characters are otherwise absent. In the TV series, however, Moira, Offred’s friend from “the time before” is played by black American actor Samira Wiley and Offred’s husband is played in flashbacks by OT Fagbenle, the British son of a Nigerian father and a white English mother. Post-revolution Gilead is also a fully integrated society, with black and Asian actors playing handmaids, commanders, wives and domestic workers.

Watch the trailer for The Handmaid’s Tale.

“I think Bruce and the producers have done a great job at making the cast diverse,” says Fagbenle – and this hasn’t always been his experience. “There are certain directors who just don’t cast diversely in prominent roles. Ever. Often it’s just because they don’t have a diverse social circle, so they don’t think of black or brown people as husbands, best friends, bosses.”

Showrunner Bruce Miller has explained in several interviews that casting decisions on The Handmaid’s Tale were made with the viewer in mind. “That was a very big discussion with Margaret [Atwood] about what the difference was between reading the words ‘There are no people of colour in this world’ and seeing an all-white world on your television,” he told Time magazine. “What’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show where you don’t hire any actors of colour? So that was part of it.”

But it wasn’t just that Miller and his team didn’t want to make a racist TV show; it was also that they didn’t want to make a TV show about race. “It just felt like in a world where birth rates have fallen so precipitously, fertility would trump everything,” he said.

In effect, casting television is as much about creating a neutral background that doesn’t distract from the storytelling as it is about finding the best actor for the role. One of the purest examples of colour-blind casting in the US is Grey’s Anatomy. Casting director Linda Lowy has recalled how showrunner Shonda Rhimes presented the scripts with no character surnames. “She just said, ‘Linda, I want you to cast it the way you see the world.’” The result was a hospital staff that accurately reflects the communities of big-city North America, yet race rarely comes up. According to comments Rhimes made back when the first season aired in 2005, this was true to her own experience: “We’re post-civil rights, post-feminist babies, and we take it for granted we live in a diverse world.”

Doctor and the medics ... the cast of Grey’s Anatomy. Photograph: ABC/Everett/Rex

Bruce Miller is probably right to assume that these same 21st-century viewers would have found an all-white cast in The Handmaid’s Tale jarring. What he seems not to have anticipated is that they might also find his post-racial vision jarring in a different way. In Gilead, handmaids such as Offred are forcibly separated from their families, regularly raped by their “commanders”, traded as if they were cattle, banned from reading and punished with maiming and public lynchings. None of these details are the inventions of Atwood’s imagination or embellishments from Miller’s writer’s room; this is what actually happened during 245 years of slavery in the US – albeit to black women rather than white ones. Isn’t it odd, then, to neither openly acknowledge this history, nor grapple with its legacy on screen?

Fagbenle feels the criticism is unfair. “Handmaid’s is the most profound television I’ve had the privilege to be a part of. Is there an opportunity to explore other social issues including race in a second season? Yes! Would I like to see that? Absolutely! But rather than focus my energy on other people’s writing and casting, I’m putting my heart into telling my stories myself.”

Maxxx, the three-part comedy blap that Fagbenle wrote, directed and stars in, will be streaming on Channel 4’s All4 website at the end of the month. “I’m interested in colour-blind hiring of directors, producers and writers,” he says. “Go to the source. Then we won’t need to have conversations about colour-blind casting.”

Back in a flash ... OT Fagbenle as Luke in The Handmaid’s Tale. Photograph: MGM/Hulu

In the meantime, though, this matter of historical accuracy is usually where colour-blind casting comes a cropper, especially in period drama-enamoured Britain. In 2012, in response to criticisms of Downton Abbey’s all-white cast, creator Julian Fellowes said, “You have to work it in in a way that is historically believable, but I am sure we could do that.” Jazz singer Jack Ross (played by Gary Carr) was then introduced as a “black and very handsome” love interest for Lady Rose and gone four episodes later, when the two realised their affair would never be accepted by polite society.

With Downton Abbey’s diversity box duly ticked, actor Gary Carr followed in the footsteps of so many under-served black British actors before him and hightailed it to the US, where he’ll soon be appearing in the latest series from The Wire creator David Simon. It’s not just Downton that has stumbled either. Star Wars actor John Boyega recently called out Game of Thrones for its presentation of a quasi-medieval world in which dragons exist but black people do not.

Last month, Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss revealed he’d been so discomforted by the casting of a black actor, Bayo Gbadamosi, as a Victorian soldier in series 10 episode The Empress of Mars that he felt compelled to write a “very difficult” email to his colleagues explaining his stance: “These are soldiers from the South African war, they’ve just been fighting the Zulus. There weren’t any black soldiers in Victoria’s army.”

Speaking to a gathering at Oxford University, Gatiss acknowledged the show’s fantasy setting and also its tradition of diverse casting, but said he’d still had his doubts. “I thought, Is this a specific example of where it’s slightly … I didn’t know what the answer was.” The matter was resolved when Gatiss undertook his own research and uncovered the true story of Jimmy Durham, a black soldier who served with the British army during the late 19th century.

Trading places ... Riz Ahmed in The Night Of. Photograph: Craig Blankenhorn/AP

Andy Pryor, casting director on Doctor Who since the 2005 reboot and the man jointly responsible for introducing the first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, says he was surprised by the controversy. “Since there have been BAME people in the UK for centuries, it didn’t seem implausible that there would have been a black soldier in the Victorian army … It’s all about finding the right stories to tell.” He was pleased when Gatiss’s research confirmed this instinct: “It does go to show that the impression we may have of history is not necessarily as it really was. Also, let’s face it, it wasn’t a documentary anyway!”



Yet it isn’t only in documentaries that casting is constrained by notions of what’s realistic. In sci-fi and fantasy shows TV-makers aren’t aiming for realism exactly, but something that feels plausible to their increasingly vocal fanbase as well as a wider potential audience. Deciding who these viewers are, and which disbeliefs they’ll willingly suspend, entails some telling assumptions.

“The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,” wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. “Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.” This too is starting to change, however. Ahmed’s character in The Night Of was originally white and played by Ben Whishaw in the British series on which it was based. The Night Of improves on its template by adding post-9/11 Islamaphobia to the show’s list of themes and nuances.

Colour-blind casting may be too blunt an instrument for today’s sophisticated TV dramas, but in combination with a kind of colour-conscious storytelling, it can both reflect and influence. In another episode from the last series of Doctor Who, the Doctor and Bill disembark the Tardis in London, 1814. “Interesting,” says Bill, as she surveys the scene. “Regency England is a bit more black than they show in the movies.”