*Ask for a list of the best Black TV shows of all time and a few pop up. But in Jaleel White’s eyes, his show, “Family Matters” doesn’t make the cut.
Promoting the launch of his new book “Growing Up Urkel” at the Wilmington Library, the former sitcom fixture revealed his reason why the long-running series is absent from any mention of top Black shows. In his eyes, “Family Matters” inclusion in ABC’s TGIF lineup proved successful yet damaging to its perception among Black viewers.
“Being a part of the ‘TGIF’ [ABC programming block] brand sometimes makes you feel like you don’t belong in the pantheon of blackness,” White during an interview at the library. “Blackness has been treated as a very monolithic experience in entertainment. ‘If it’s not a hood story, it’s not a Black story.’ And you know, sometimes I feel left out of that.”
White’s view comes from a firsthand place, with playing Steven Quincy Urkel during “Family Matters’” nine-season run on ABC. While the show is a classic, White admits it’s rare that it comes up when folk name Black shows they grew up with, according to Complex.
“If there’s ever a poll, and they say what are your favorite black shows? Martin is in there, Living Single… I already know we’re coming in last,” he laughed. “But if there’s ever a poll and it’s just your favorite family shows, suddenly we rank really high. So it’s interesting in how we look at ourselves even as Black folks.”
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On a personal note, White’s time portraying Urkel carried an unexpected consequence in the form of him literally becoming the face of Black male nerd culture for an entire generation. Something he wasn’t ready for.
“Somehow I became a symbol of Black male nerd culture, I know this for a fact. Any brother that grew up in the 90s and 2000s, he was told that he looked like me,” he said. “He was called Urkel and he didn’t look anything like me, guaranteed. But still, his peers would find a way to call him Urkel. So it’s really humbling to see how far nerd culture has come. And really it’s not nerd culture, it’s smart culture, it’s hobbyist culture, it’s skateboarders… I could never have known in a million years that I could be the face of that.”
White’s comments come after revealing why he took a pass on playing Urkel again for a proposed reboot of Family Matters.” To hear him tell it, the refusal stems from not following the path Netflix’s “Fuller House” took to nostalgic success.
“Somewhere around 2013, 2014, I was approached by one of our former producers that Netflix had interest in doing a reboot of Family Matters on the heels of Fuller House having done so well. And that didn’t make any sense to me,” White said in November. “I didn’t feel that it was right for us to have to copy what Full House had done to fit inside someone’s business model to capture the magic that made our show make sense.”
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