The fall TV season will see a continued influx of scripted shows featuring people of color in front of and behind the camera across traditional cable and streaming services.

New shows from such acclaimed producers as Ava DuVernay (OWN’s Cherish the Day), Will Packer (BET+’s Bigger), Tonya Saracho (Starz’s Bruhas) and Lena Waithe (Showtime’s How to Make Love to a Black Woman) will launch during the 2019-20 season, adding to an already unprecedented number of scripted series featuring minority producers and actors.

According to the 2019 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, members of minority groups comprised 11.2% of all cable scripted show creators and producers during the 2016-17 television season, up from the 7.4% registered during the 2011-12 season. While there is room for improvement, show creators say that the signs are encouraging.

Multichannel News posed questions in separate interviews to some key content creators, producers and actors of color to get their thoughts on the opportunities today to create and produce shows that revolve around people of color.

MCN: Given the multitude of distribution outlets and platforms, is this the best time during your career to be a creator of multicultural-themed content?
Diallo Riddle (co-creator, IFC sketch comedy Sherman’s Showcase; Comedy Central sitcom South Side): I think it’s a good time to be in this business, being a black creator. I know there are all types of people out there with scripts and finished projects that you can’t sell, and you’re hitting walls. I don’t want to seem naive, but I do think that we are in a better time than we were a couple of years ago in the sense that I don’t think these executives — who for the most part are still white — are trying to force us to abandon our vision for what they think is best.

Dee Harris-Lawrence (showrunner, OWN drama series David Makes Man): What is great right now is there’s so much opportunity. When I started you only had the broadcast networks, but today you can film your story on your phone and post it for all to see. It’s such a great time to be able to not have any hindrances keeping you from telling your story. As long as you have a story to tell, it’s a great time to be in the industry.

George Takei (consultant/actor, AMC horror drama series Terror: Infamy): I do think that it’s a wonderful time to be in the business and that we have the opportunity to tell a story on this scale and this depth of detail. There’s also a lot of competition now — before there were only three networks — now there are more distributors and a thousand different stories being told, so the competition is there, but so is the opportunity.

MCN: Are cable networks allowing you the freedom to tell your story without editorial restrictions on language or casting?
Bashir Salahuddin (co-creator, Comedy Central’s South Side, IFC’s Sherman’s Showcase): As an artist you spend your whole career trying to get with people who trust you enough to secure and support your vision, and we’ve found that. We have the opportunity to come up with a lot of creative ideas and no one is telling us that we can’t do something.

Alexander Woo (co-creator, AMC’s Terror: Infamy): Not once was there ever any pushback about how we need to make this more accessible for the general viewer who might not be Japanese-American. The [dialogue] is often subtitled and most of the actors are Japanese-American, but I think we’re in an era now where broadcasters are willing to take greater risks because the rewards are being borne out.

Riddle: I think if you find the right place where they trust you and let you do the things you want to do you’re good. When we saw that invisible car pull off in that episode of Atlanta on FX, I was like [Atlanta creator Donald Glover] has a good relationship with them because we could not have pitched that in some of the places that we developed and not hit a deadly amount of pushback.

MCN: Will the industry continue to seek out new content that reflects the experiences and images of people of color?
Woo: When you have 500 different scripted shows, I think it’s incumbent for every broadcaster to have something that everyone doesn’t have one of already. Far from being a detriment to our show, the fact that we were so different was a strength, and I’m really glad that in this particular climate broadcasters are seeing difference as a strength.

Harris-Lawrence: I don’t have any concerns only because of how many channels we have, and it’s a different world due to social media. It’s also a different world with regards to the young people coming up — they are all unapologetic as to who they are, and they have a say and a vision that’s going global. It gets me excited to want to help as many young people be able to tell their stories and not allow it to go backwards; we’re flooding the gates.

Takei: I think [the distributors] will continue to want to tell our stories compellingly so that we can grab the audiences that want to see it.

Actor George Takei (Star Trek) speaks out on the horror of the relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans from their homes into internment camps during World War II, which is depicted in AMC drama/horror series Terror:Infamy. 

The series, which centers on a series of bizarre deaths amid the presence of a supernatural entity that haunt an interned Japanese-American community during WW II, debuts Aug. 12. 

Two new cable dramas will shine a light on two historical events revolving around racism and prejudice that have for the most part remained in the shadows of American history.

HBO’s Watchmen, which debuts this fall, is set in an alternative universe in which police officers wear masks to protect their identities against a group of white supremacists seeking to kill them. The series takes place in 2019 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where nearly 100 years earlier an angry white mob terrorized black homeowners and destroyed businesses in a thriving area known as Black Wall Street in arguably one of the worst occurrences of racial violence in American history.

Watchmen series creator Damon Lindelof said during the recent Television Critics Association press tour that reading about the Tulsa race riot in author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 essay The Case for Reparations gave him the idea to use the city as a symbolic launching pad to tackle the subjects of race, prejudice and law enforcement in his version of Watchmen, which is inspired by the classic 1980s graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

“That was the first time that I heard about Black Wall Street and what happened in Tulsa in ’21 … that was the beginning of my education,” said Lindelof. “When I started thinking about what Watchmen was going to be and trying to think about the original source material, the book was highly political ... it was about what was happening in American culture at the time. What in 2019 is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States? It just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America.”

AMC’s horror anthology series The Terror: Infamy -- premiering Aug. 12 -- bases its storyline around the true-life relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans from their homes into internment camps during World War II after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The series, created and produced by Alexander Woo (True Blood), prominently features Asian-Americans both in front of and behind the camera, including 82-year old actor George Takei of Star Trek fame who experienced life at an internment camp first hand. Takei, who was five-years old when his family was incarcerated, said the series's inclusion of a supernatural entity derived from vintage Japanese ghost stories -- or kaidan -- that ultimately terrorizes the inhabitants of the internment camps, helps to highlight the real horror stories of racial prejudice and imprisonment experienced by interned Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

“It was a harrowing experience, but the kaidan adds to the intensifying of that story,” said Takei. “I hope The Terror: Infamy will remind people that [racism] is still existing today. What we have is this endless cycle, the repetition of this kind of horror and injustice being inflicted on minority people. And we see it again today on our southern borders.”

Indeed, the two series serve as a creative spotlight in which fiction brings to light dark periods in American history.

AMC will welcome Star Trek actor George Takei to the second season of its anthology series The Terror, the network said Tuesday.

Takei will serve as consultant and series regular for The Terror, which stars Derek Mio. 

Additional casting includes Kiki Sukezane (Lost in Space), Miki Ishikawa (9-1-1), Shingo Usami (Unbroken) and Naoko Mori (Everest). The sophomore season of the series will debut on AMC next year with 10 episodes, said network officials.

The Terror will focus on a series of bizarre deaths that haunt a Japanese-American community, and a young man's journey to understand and combat the entity responsible, said the network. 

Season two of the series is co-created and executive produced by Alexander Woo (True Blood) and Max Borenstein (Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla). Ridley Scott, Dan Simmons, David W. Zucker, Alexandra Milchan, Scott Lambert and Guymon Casady also serve as executive producers.

George Takei, the Japanese-American actor and activist who portrayed Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek TV series, has launched a Care2 petition supporting Muslims in response to President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to suspend immigration from "terror-prone regions."

Takei's family was among those placed in internment camps by the U.S. government during World War II; he was just five years old at the time.

The petition comes in advance of Wednesday's Hill hearing on Trump's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, John Kelly.

Citing the internment of innocent Japanese-Americans, Takei said: “It starts with a registry, with restrictions, with irrationally ascribed guilt, and with fear. But we know well where it might lead. National security must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections."

At press time the petition had more than 43,000 signatures with a goal of 45,000.

In an e-mail to supporters this week, Trump asked for input on his planned priorities as president, which include "Suspend immigration from regions compromised by terrorism and where vetting cannot safely occur."

The full text of Takei's petition follows:

When I was just 5, my family was rounded up at gunpoint and forced from our home in Los Angeles into an internment camp. We were prisoners in our own country, held within barbed wire compounds, armed guards pointing guns down at us. It was an egregious violation of our rights under the U.S. Constitution, all in the name of "security.” During that time, fear and racism drove government policy, creating a living hell for over 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens. 

I have spent my life trying to ensure something like this never happens again. But dark clouds once more are gathering. A Trump spokesperson recently stated the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II "sets a precedent" for Trump to do the same today. And Trump continues to stand by his plans to establish a Muslim registry and ban immigrants from “certain” Muslim countries from the U.S. It starts with a registry, with restrictions, with irrationally ascribed guilt, and with fear. But we know well where it might lead.

National security must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.

Please sign this petition to let the Muslim community know you support them and oppose any policy targeting them based on their religion or national origin. Help send a message to Trump and his ilk that this will never again happen in America.