Fall TV Forecast: Snowy with a Sprinkling of Minorities

Taking a look at these shows and their casts, it seems like the number of minority actors with significant roles (i.e. not a corpse or food delivery person) on new and returning shows is sparse. The number of Asian American actors? Even smaller.

NBC

Masi Oka, Sendhil Ramamurthy, and James Kyson Lee from "Heroes"

B.D. Wong from "Law and Order: SVU"

Jack Yang from "Knight Rider"

Lindsay Price from "Lipstick Jungle"

Mindy Kaling from "The Office"

Parminder Nagra from "ER"

Vik Sahay, Julia Ling, and C.S. Lee from "Chuck"

Maulik Pancholy from "30 Rock"

NBC Asian Count: 12

ABC

James Saito from "Eli Stone"

Naveen Andrews, Daniel Dae Kim, and Yunjin Kim from "Lost"

Sandra Oh from "Grey's Anatomy"

Cheryl Burke and Carrie-Ann Inaba from "Dancing with the Stars"

ABC Asian count: 7

CBS

Kunal Nayyar from "Big Bang Theory"

Tim Kang from "The Mentalist" (new show)

Aya Sumika and Navi Rawat from "Numbers"

Archie Kao from "CSI"

Romy J. Park from "Eleventh Hour" (new show)

CBS Asian count: 6

The CW

If you count the Asian chick from Gossip Girl: 1.

Fox

If Kal Penn returns to "House, M.D.": 1.

Luckily it's still early, meaning characters and shows will probably be added before the fall TV season officially begins. There's always hope for midseason replacements, or that MTV will continuously loop America's Best Dance Crew all year round. I kind of hope the latter happens. Am I mistaken or does each remaining crew have, at the very least, one Asian dancer with disapproving parents?

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Sylvie Kim

contributing editor & blogger

Sylvie Kim is a contributing editor at Hyphen. She previously served as Hyphen's blog coeditor with erin Khue Ninh, film editor, and blog columnist.

She writes about gender, race, class and privilege in pop culture and media (fun fun fun!) at www.sylvie-kim.com and at SF Weekly's The Exhibitionist blog. Her work has also appeared on Racialicious and Salon.