• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, June 2, 2022

Issues of race, ethnicity and social class took center stage as recurring themes on TV during the 2021-22 season.

Shows engaged with these topics in a variety of ways, including rebooting older shows in which social issues played little or no part, and reimagining them with race at the forefront.

One of them was ABC’s reboot of “The Wonder Years,” the well-remembered ABC sitcom from the late 1980s and early ’90s about a white, suburban family.

The new version (pictured above) was refashioned as the story of a 12-year-old black youth and his family living in a middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968.

With its time frame and location, the new “Wonder Years” dealt inevitably with real-life outside events taking place in those turbulent times, including issues of lingering discrimination and segregation in the region the family lived in.

Another rebooted show that morphed into a race allegory was “4400” on The CW. Like the original (titled “The 4400” on USA Network, 2004-07), the new one concerned 4,400 people who were abducted by aliens in different eras who were all returned to Earth on the same day.

But in the new one, the majority of the returned abductees were African-American. As a result, the show focused mainly on these characters and the racial injustices they experienced in their respective eras and lifetimes.

Elsewhere, the new NBC sitcom “Grand Crew” announced right at the start of the premiere episode that its aim was to improve the image of black men in America who the show alleged were widely misunderstood.

Premiering last December, the show had an all African-American cast playing six 20-something friends in L.A. -- four men and two women -- who gathered daily in a bar to share stories about their everyday lives.

At least three other shows introduced this past season dealt with race, ethnicity and class -- “Our Kind of People” on Fox, “Promised Land” on ABC and “Bel-Air” on Peacock.

“Our Kind of People” could be described as “a black ‘Dynasty’.” It centered on a close-knit community on Martha’s Vineyard that was long populated by wealthy African-Americans.

Class issues emerged when an entrepreneurial black woman met resistance after arrived on the island seeking acceptance by the old families in this exclusive enclave.

The prime-time soap “Promised Land” told the story of another kind of dynasty -- a Latino family in California who became wealthy as winemakers.

However, the majority of the men and women who worked for them picking grapes and maintaining the vines were immigrants from Mexico and other Latin countries -- some legal and some not -- establishing the show as a drama about class.

“Bel-Air” was about a teenaged boy from a rough, lower-class neighborhood in Philadelphia that was based on the largely fictional story of Will Smith and first told in the old sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

Like the sitcom, the teen is “rescued” from the ’hood by his uber-rich Aunt and Uncle in Bel-Air. In the show, the teen is seen struggling to fit in with the other kids he meets, but whose backgrounds and social class are a lot different than his.

In the reality category, at least one unscripted show was positioned as an effort to promote tolerance and understanding along racial and ethnic lines. This was “Home Sweet Home,” which premiered on NBC last October.

Styled as a “social experiment,” the show had diverse families swapping houses and lifestyles for a short time, and then coming together to discuss what they learned.

In the premiere, the swappers were an American Greek Orthodox family and an African-American family with two moms.

Another reality show built around social issues and activism was “The Activist.” But after real activists decried the concept of an activism-competition show sight unseen, CBS shelved it.

It was a rare instance in which a show with social-justice intentions was actually condemned in our current era of social activism.