Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend's luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane's sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu—the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her 'mulatto War and Peace'—she'll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don't work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with a hot young producer with a seven-figure deal to create 'diverse content' for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a 'real writer' to create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy ever to hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
Feels more like a summer blockbuster ... Funny, foxy and fleet; it’s aspirational about money and luxury items and mocking of those aspirations. There are times, especially near the end, when you might wish Senna pushed deeper into the themes and the pain she lays bare, but the jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart ... The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition ... In the end, Senna delivers a mostly inspired, and mostly happy, series of narrative double axels that will make you reconsider who the true sellouts are.
Funny, awkward and discomfiting ... With lacerating humor and a multitude of similarly revealing moments, Colored Television illuminates the axes around which its novelist protagonist Jane's life teeters ... An exhilarating yet poignant riff on the struggling artist as a wannabe middle-aged sellout ... Throughout Colored Television, what stands out is the virtuosity of Senna’s writing, which is endlessly quotable and intensely, meaningfully provocative, wielding language and metaphor.
Sly ... It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it ... [A] shrewd comedy ... Pries open this self-referential premise to explore the quandary of being an artist of color in America, and it has a surprising amount of fun along the way.
