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This is only tangentially related to your post, but I totally agree with your effusive praise for Ramy. The show is brilliant, even though I rarely feel like watching it (because I don't feel like being sad most days). One of my biggest takeaways from the show was also about representation, similar to yours (though slightly different). To me, the show perfectly demonstrates why the push for representation in media is complete bullshit.
On paper, I should in no way feel like the show is for me, right? I'm a white Christian from the Midwest US, so Ramy and his family are about as outgroup as it gets. But actually I feel a deep connection to those characters. Part of that is the way the writers deftly ensure that everyone gets humanized (even characters you think are just there to be villains). But part of that is because growing up in a conservative Christian environment, I get it. I may not be Muslim but I totally understand feeling like you're just a bit out of step with the world because of what your faith teaches. I totally understand being a young man with a young man's unbearably strong sex drive, but with no ways to fulfill it without breaking God's rules. I totally understand having friends who vacillate between "don't take it so seriously bro" and "whoa how can you do that, you know it's sinful". I totally understand having parents who love you but wish you could live up to the faith more.
So while Hollywood probably thinks that show doesn't represent me (because it's about brown people who don't share my religion), it turns out that it actually totally does represent me. I feel seen, as the kids say. And the fact that I can identify so strongly with the characters on this show really demonstrated to me why the demand for representation in media is bullshit. It's because the people who are pushing this don't get it at all. They think that what people want is to see characters who superficially look like them. But what I want, and what I am willing to bet everyone wants, is to see characters who go through what I go through. I don't give a damn if the characters share my skin color, religion, or gender. That stuff is surface level. What actually matters is having people who live like you do, and have experiences similar to yours.
I feel like you wouldn't disagree with any of this, and is what you're getting at when you say you want "true representation". I just feel like it's so different from the "representation" that the woke ideology pushes, that it's really not the same thing at all. Representation, as practiced by Hollywood and the like, is complete bullshit. It doesn't actually represent people at all because it doesn't understand them. Having characters with similar culture and lives (or "true representation" as you put it) is what we need.
This would be fargroup.
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Yes!! What you describe is what, to me, should be the platonic ideal of narrative media. There's something almost deliriously wholesome about discovering a shared tenet of an alien human culture. The purposes here isn't to cement a permanent kumbaya sentiment, but solely to be reminded of how predictable we humans can be despite the kaleidoscope of superficial cultural differences we conjure up. The real differences are important as well, and highlighting both aspects is foundational to presenting a rich palette of human experience.
I don't want to experience a story (movie, tv, books, whatever) where the "diversity" of characters is just an algorithm that goes through the finished script and randomly assigns different identities, with no regard for how their experience changes.
There are so many other media examples that come to mind. One is the Isreali TV show "Shtisel" which depicts a strict ultra-orthodox Jewish community. I know nothing about their lives, but I absolutely resonated with and understood the main character's experience, as he struggled to balance familial obligations while chasing after romantic infatuation. And the differences were illuminating as well. I would notice innocuous details that were not remarked upon by the characters (such as the separate beds for husband and wife) and it would only pique my curiosity to figure out why.
Another is the Australian Aboriginal movie Ten Canoes (2006) [full movie link]. It's a simple story, set in an authentic ancient aboriginal past, and refreshing to me just how funny it can be despite the enormous cultural gap inherent.
Imagine how deprived, how barren, any of this would be if the only difference was a superficial adornment to meet a diversity quota.
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There are bit characters in Hollywood who are conservative Christians that live a bit out of step with the world and aren’t villains or completely flat, but for some reason Hollywood is unwilling to make them the star of the show. And that’s a shame; it’s a potentially interesting character arc that’s being left to reality shows which predictably are uninterested in exploring it.
I haven't watched either, but would Yellowstone and Hillbilly Effigy count as examples of them trying to broaden their reach? I assume there's plenty of money to be had by serving that demographic, so I'd assume the hurdle is the myopic biases that (typically liberal) media executives have.
There's an issue there in that a film studio doesn't just need customers - it needs employees. Using party affiliation as a rough proxy for tribe - every single Hollywood-related occupation I could think of is 90%+ Democrat and in some cases >99.5%. And the rest would be scared of "cancellation", because they depend on that 90%+ for any future job.
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Now there's a Freudian phrase. Elegy it is, but effigy it turned out to be.
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