I can get quite annoyed at TV shows feeling the need to make every group a rainbow of representation - not every friend group/super hero group/whathaveyou is, should be, or ought to be, made up of exactly 1 white male, at least 40% women, at least 1 black person, at least one Asian person, at least one LGBTQ+ person, and not every show needs to include at least one female black person in a position of authority, etc etc etc.
I know it's easy to speak from a position of cishet white guy on this; I just think that while all those groups (and others like neuro-atypical, disabled, etc) definitely need and deserve representation, there oughto be better ways to do it than enforce practically every show to adopt more or less the same group composition. The main cast of, say ,The Good Doctor, includes....one cishet white guy (depending on how you limit the groups - it's funny how Jewish people get lumped in as white these days while they were very much considered non-white up until at least the '90s), and I don't think the series is any better or worse for not happening to have a character that "fits" me. Which is easy since my group is still incredibly over-represented everywhere else. I'm not saying we need any less representation, I'd just wish tv makers were more daring in saying "yeah, this group happens to have 3 women and only 1 guy in the main cast, so what? And that show happens to have only 2 straight characters out of 5, what of it?". Right now, it's either "aimed at a specific audience" (and thus hasa full-ThisGroup cast - Sex and the City, The L-word, Family Matters, whatever), or it's "aimed at everyone, so we need to cut as close as possible to the agreed upon percentages of 37% non-white of which at least one black; 40% female, 18% non-straight, and...;". It's a meaningless self-imposed restriction based on fictional quotas, and while I get why it's done, I personally feel that having the balance be appropriate (that is, over-representing minorities by approximately a factor of 1.5 to 2, which studies have shown is in fact necessary to make it appear representative) across a larger number of shows would be in everyone's favor.
HAVING SAID THAT, if there's one show where the main cast definitely SHOULD be inclusive, representative, and showcase every type of character there is, it's Sesame Street, and the fact that there wasn't an Asian-American in there already for 30 years strikes me as odd and definitely something to recitify.
