Danzy Senna’s Colored Television is as satirical journary of interrogation. The story follows a biracial novelist who leaves behind the world of literary fiction to chase success in television, determined to write something sweeping and significant—a “mulatto War and Peace.” What unfolds is a sharp, darkly funny, and often scathing look at race, identity, and the ways art is packaged and sold to the highest bidder.
Senna has always been at her best when she’s picking apart the absurdities of racial performance in America, and Colored Television might be her most precise dissection yet. The novel doesn’t just critique Hollywood’s obsession with tokenism and palatable diversity. It shows how these forces shape the artists caught within them. The protagonist is both complicit and self-aware, constantly shifting between cynicism and ambition, deeply conscious of the compromises she’s making but unable to stop herself from making them. Senna never lets her off the hook, nor does she offer easy moralizing. Instead, she captures the uncomfortable truth of what it means to be both a creator and a commodity.
What makes Colored Television so compelling is how seamlessly it blends satire with something more intimate and searching. The humor is biting, the industry takedowns are ruthless, but beneath it all is a real reckoning with artistic integrity and self-betrayal. The protagonist doesn’t just wrestle with the expectations placed upon her by white executives eager for “authentic” stories—she wrestles with the weight of her own ambitions, her own complicity in the machine.
Senna’s prose is razor-sharp, quick and cutting but never self-indulgent. The dialogue crackles, the pacing is taut, and the novel moves with the kind of momentum that makes it impossible to put down. It’s no surprise that Colored Television has been widely praised, critics have called it “the new Great American Novel,” and for once, the hype feels justified.
Colored Television is a brutal, brilliant look at the uneasy relationship between art and commerce, race and representation, ambition and authenticity.
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