Racial Issues Cloud Premiere Of FOX Series `M.A.N.T.I.S.'

HOLLYWOOD - Television's first live-action black super-hero lifted off Friday night, weighted with controversy and ethnic baggage. Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, it's trouble.

After airing on Fox last January as a TV movie, "M.A.N.T.I.S." has returned as a weekly series with new producers, facing heavy criticism in some circles for changing its tone and exterminating some of the pilot's supporting characters.

Black characters.

A top executive at Fox television denied Thursday that his network attempted to "whiten" the new series "M.A.N.T.I.S." by changing the tone of the show and replacing three black actors.

Charges of racism had been leveled last week by the media watchdog group Commission on Fairness in the Media as well as by three actors who appeared in the two-hour pilot but were replaced when the show was picked up as a series.

Should Fox, obviously knowing the color of money, be faulted for appearing to lighten the complexion of "M.A.N.T.I.S." to attract more whites - a motivation it denies - even though no one protested when it earlier fattened up on black comedies as a strategy to reach more African Americans? Appealing to blacks through skin color is honorable business, yet employing the same strategy for whites is bigotry? Isn't this a double standard?

Fox insists that its "M.A.N.T.I.S." changes were made for creative reasons, a rationale "not acceptable to us," says Eddie Wong, head of the Commission on Fairness in the Media. There's "something more behind it," argues Gina Torres, one of the actors whose character was eliminated.

With a plot tiny enough to be extracted with tweezers and a champion who is un-super by super-hero standards, "M.A.N.T.I.S." has to get by pretty much on style. At the very least, though, the series opener was much less a laughable farce than the pilot (which showed blacks bonding and working cooperatively, but largely as ethnic stereotypes). And in its star Carl Lumbly - as a rare black protagonist in a drama series - the show has an actor with leading-man looks and the skill to impart both authority and sensitivity, even though he's a bit stony at times.

Of the new cast members joining Lumbly, Gorg is black, Rees and Gartin are white. If you're counting, that's a net loss of three blacks, a gain of two whites from pilot to series.

Nonetheless, new co-executive producer Bryce Zabel insists there's been no plan to "whiten the show up." But even if there were such an agenda, what would be the beef, given the silence of ethnic police when Fox earlier "blackened" a large chunk of its prime-time schedule - percentage-wise much greater than the nation's black population - for the purpose of carving out a specific ethnic niche in the ratings?

Black discontent over "M.A.N.T.I.S.," in fact, extends to other components of Fox's prime-time schedule, although Fox, more than any other network in the early '90s, has been committed to airing so-called black programs in prime time. Of course, raw numbers don't necessarily equate to quality. That aside, at one point last season, nearly a third of Fox's series were black-oriented (African-Americans compose 12.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Bureau of Census). Where were the ethnic police then?

And in the 1994-95 season, four of the network's 17 prime-time series - nearly 24 percent - either star or co-star black actors.

Although it added two hours of black-protagonist series for this season ("M.A.N.T.I.S" and the cop show "New York Undercover"), Fox was pilloried by Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus for canceling two hours of low-rated black comedies ("Roc," "In Living Color," "The Sinbad Show" and "South Central") at the end of last season, even though two of those series - "In Living Color" and "South Central" - were harshly criticized by some blacks on ethnic grounds.

As for "M.A.N.T.I.S.," meanwhile, rarely has material so scrawny and trivial provoked such a loud collision of social and economic interests.