
'Frank's Place,' 'Charlie & Co.' and more forgotten Black TV shows you need to watch

The cast of "Charlie & Co.," clockwise, from bottom center: Gladys Knight Fran Robinson, Flip Wilson, Kristoff St. John, Jaleel White. Credit: CBS / Everett Collection / Mario Casilli
The long history of Black television has had a few triumphs, but a lot more travesties — a field of broken dreams where promising series were dashed by network avarice, poor execution or audience apathy.
Here are five forgotten shows you should know about. (All have clips available on YouTube.)
FRANK'S PLACE (CBS, 1987-88)

Daphne Maxwell Reid, Tim Reid and Virginia Capers (foreground) in "Frank's Place." Credit: CBS/Everett Collection
Tim Reid starred as Boston-area college professor Frank Parrish, who inherits his father's New Orleans restaurant, Chez Louisiana. Frank is soon drawn into the intoxicating world of Creole food, culture and music. Critics raved. Reid was a reasonably big star (Venus Flytrap on "WKRP in Cincinnati") and veteran stand-up comedian. But after the show was canceled after one season, Reid later said in a memoir (which he wrote with stand-up partner Tom Dreesen) that Walter Cronkite had told him CBS chief executive Laurence Tisch ordered the cancellation because of a storyline about hostile corporate takeovers.
CHARLIE & CO. (CBS, 1985-86)

The cast of "Charlie & Co.," clockwise, from bottom center: Gladys Knight Fran Robinson, Flip Wilson, Kristoff St. John, Jaleel White. Credit: CBS / Everett Collection / Mario Casilli
In this wan "Cosby Show" wannabe, Flip Wilson played Charlie, who worked for the Division of Highways, while Gladys Knight was wife Diana, a schoolteacher. (Jaleel White played their 9-year-old son in his first TV role.) By 1985, Knight was getting ready to split with The Pips, and TV beckoned as a side gig, but Wilson's star had faded. In other words, opportunity knocked for both of them. But the show was gone after 18 episodes.
ROC (Fox, 1991-94)

Charles S. Dutton and Ella Joyce in "Roc." Credit: HBO/Everett Collection
This sitcom about a Baltimore garbage collector (Charles S. Dutton), his wife (Ella Joyce), brother (Rocky Carroll), and father (Carl Gordon) — think "Sanford and Son"-meets-"The Honeymooners" — featured cast members who knew each other from Broadway, where Dutton had already earned a couple of Tony nominations. But when the ratings slipped — well — guess what happened next! Dutton called the network's ratings excuse for canceling a "blatant lie." In a more temperate moment, he told Newsday, "It would seem to me that Fox has been getting more criticism for its depiction of African-Americans, and that they could have taken this show as an example of what they could do." (Also streams on PlutoTV.)
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (ABC, 1970)
The Neil Simon play had already been a 1967 big-screen hit, while this TV version featured an all-Black cast, starring Scoey Mitchell as a Manhattan attorney and Tracy Reed as his wife. "Barefoot" landed Thursdays at 9, sandwiched between a fading "Bewitched" and the first season of "The Odd Couple" (another Simon TV adaptation). But by November, the axeman had cometh. Unaired episodes were burned off by adding them to rom-com anthology "Love, American Style," where Reed became a semi-regular.
UNDER ONE ROOF (CBS, 1995)

From left: Merlin Santana, Monique L. Ridge and James Earl Jones in "Under One Roof." Credit: CBS/Everett Collection/Cliff Lipson
After earning his bones as an actor ("The White Shadow"), prolific director ("Hill Street Blues") and producer ("Equal Justice"), Thomas Carter finally got his shot at TV history, or as he explained to the Los Angeles Times, a chance to create a show where "no African American family with this kind of breadth and complexity has ever been shown on a weekly drama." He was pretty much right. "Roof" was about veteran Marine Ron (Joe Morton), wife Maggie (Vanessa Bell Calloway) and father Neb (James Earl Jones), who lived together along with kids as a big, loving, happy family in Seattle. But CBS threw this into the breach opposite "Wings" (NBC) and "Full House" (ABC) and "Roof" was done after only six episodes.
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