Tracee Ellis Ross on the Difficulties and ‘Honor’ of Her Eight Years on ‘Black-ish’

variety.com:

Tracee Ellis Ross really wanted was to do it all over again. Fourteen years later, she has — and with more freedom than ever.As the 2022 Emmy campaigns ramp up, Ross reflected on the legacy of “Black-ish,” the ABC sitcom that she starred in as Dr.

Rainbow Johnson from September 2014 until April. Like “Girlfriends,” the show ran for eight seasons, but “Black-ish” got the privilege of a proper goodbye.Viewers never got closure on the stories of Joan Carol Clayton (Ross) and her friends, who were then some of the few Black female characters on primetime television as the CW canceled “Girlfriends” before a finale was even shot.

The experience left Ross unsure about her next steps. “When I was on ‘Girlfriends,’ Christina Applegate and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were the two sitcom actresses that had two long-running shows,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to be the Black woman who joins the ranks of Christina Applegate and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.’”“As a Black woman, there’s not a lot of those examples,” Ross continues. “I couldn’t point to Phylicia Rashad [as someone with a] second show.” Though the ’80s saw Rashad become one of the most prominent Black actors on TV for her work in “The Cosby Show,” there still wasn’t a lot of room for series featuring Black stories, or centering on Black women, until the 2000s.Ross became the kind of example her younger self was looking for — or one of them, anyway. “I know that I am a light-skinned woman, and I don’t represent the breadth and the beauty and the power of all of us,” she says. “We are not a monolith.

But I have taken [my career] with great responsibility. I think of ‘Girlfriends’ and ‘Black-ish’ and the many times that I have fought and said, ‘No.