When Tracee Ellis Ross won the Golden Globe on Monday night for best actress in a TV comedy, she dedicated her award to "women of colour and colourful people". Ellis Ross is the first black woman to win the category in 35 years, for a show, Black-ish, that examines race and class in a groundbreaking way.
But the Golden Globe goes further than this, I think. Because the character Ellis Ross plays, Rainbow Johnson – a doctor, wife and mother to four (soon to be five) kids – is one of the most interesting on television.
![<i>Black-ish</i> actress Tracee Ellis Ross with the Golden Globe for best actress in a television series (musical or comedy).](/web/20170220025011im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/o/5/3/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtolpk.png/1484010230314.jpg)
It's true, we've seen professional mums in sitcoms before. Carol Malone Seaver was a reporter in Growing Pains. Clair Huxtable was a lawyer in The Cosby Show. But we never really believed they had a life outside of the family, much less a job. Rainbow Johnson's work is so demanding she had to marry her husband between shifts. We see this, we see her at work, and we see how proud she is of it because she brags about it whenever she can. Why shouldn't she? She has a high status, high paying job and one she doesn't get a lot of credit for because she's busy taking care of her family. And busy is key.
Rainbow Johnson is clever, she's compassionate and earthy, but, perhaps because she's based on an actual person (creator Kenya Barris is married to a doctor named Rainbow), we never get the sense that she's waiting in the kitchen like some unflappable earth mother, ready to dispel wisdom between spoonfuls of soup. This is not just because Rainbow is a proud feminist, but that, just a like every other real-life mother, she's often caught up in the emotional fray.
Roseanne showed us this two decades ago. But where Roseanne was petulant and crass, Rainbow is self-possessed, saving her energy for the things that matter. Yet she's not without a deep vulnerability, something very few sitcom wives are permitted to display.
Rainbow is buoyed by something else as well: her interiority. We know, through the skill of the writers, and the acting of Ellis Ross, that she inhabits her own imagination. In short, we know what she thinks about stuff. We know it also because we've seen it; we've met her friends, her parents, her brother and her work colleagues. She's given a proper life, not just a home life.
It's this, more than the job, the fashionable clothes, and the slightly dorky sense of humour, that makes the character – a biracial mother living in Los Angeles – feel like she could have her own spin-off show without her family. And that is surprising when you consider that she's often the voice of reason, a stereotypical sitcom trope.
But where other sitcom mums, like Marge Simpson, possess a level of self-restraint bordering on sainthood, Rainbow displays just the right amount of exasperation at her husband's cherry-picking logic. Rainbow might think of her husband as crazy, but her observations are mercifully devoid of the explosive sourness that Modern Family's Claire Dunphy throws at Phil, or the less evolved eye-rolls Debra Barone gave her husband on Everybody Loves Raymond. Unlike those two, we never question Rainbow's love for Dre. The same is true of her relationship to her children.
![Tracee Ellis Ross (L) plays opposite Miles Brown and Anthony Anderson in season three of <i>Black-ish</i>.](/web/20170220025011im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/o/m/h/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtolpk.png/1484003636485.jpg)
We can see the conflict arising in Rainbow when she wants the best for her eldest son, but also thinks he's a bit of a nerd, (just like her). Or when she's worried she is growing apart from her teenage daughter but instead of a heart-to-heart, Rainbow finds herself desperately seeking her daughter's approval. Or the grief she feels over her twins growing up before her eyes, which leads her not to shedding silent tears, but allowing herself to be tricked into doing too much for them. The dynamic with her mother-in-law is fresh, too, because Rainbow knows she's the bigger person, and while she's often annoyed, she won't let herself be bothered by someone so outrageous.
There's certain kind of poetic symmetry at work in the universe in 2017 when the first woman of colour to win a Golden Globe in this category for 35 years is also the most believable, relatable and aspirational wife and mother on television.