Emmy-nominated actress Tracee Ellis Ross called out late-night TV’s major blind spot—and called out Jay Leno by name.
Ross appeared on What Now? with Trevor Noah, where she reflected on feeling ostracized by the industry during her sitcom Girlfriends’ eight-year run from 2000 to 2008. The long-running series was overlooked by major awards bodies, save for a Cinematography Emmy nod for its third season—and Ross said the stars were never offered talk show appearances.
“No Tonight Show, no David Letterman, no Emmys. Had never been to the Emmys,” she recalled.
Ross has since been nominated for five consecutive Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for her role as Rainbow Johnson in Black-ish. She also earned a daytime nod for her travel show, Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross. But it took a suspiciously long time for her to earn that recognition, she said, pointing to Leno’s Tonight Show as a prime example.
“As a matter of fact, I have a story,” she began. “It was Jay Leno. And I had Girlfriends, and the comment was, ‘We love Tracee. Call us when she gets something.’”
Ross was still the lead in the long-running comedy series at the time, which she said had been completely ignored. “I was like, I remember thinking, ‘Get what? What else do you have to get?’ I don’t know. And it just was… ‘We love her,’ but it was not considered.”
To make matters worse, she saw at least one guest on Leno’s show at the time whose show was not nearly as popular as Girlfriends.
“I remember, specifically, the show Monk. Do you remember that show with Tony Shalhoub? That show had a quarter of our viewership. A quarter of our viewership,” she recalled. “And I remember seeing him on the show, and I was so confused. And I was like, I don’t understand. Is it viewership? And the only thing you can boil it down to, you’re like, ‘Is it just racism?’ I’m not sure how to—how do you categorize it? I don’t know what it is.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Leno for comment.
Girlfriends, which aired on the UPN network before moving to the CW for its seventh and eighth seasons, followed the friendships, romances, and careers of four Black women living in Los Angeles. Ross starred as Joan, a type-A attorney struggling to find love, alongside Golden Brooks (Maya), Persia White (Lynn), and Jill Marie Jones (Toni Childs). The characters’ contrasting personalities and approaches to romance fueled the show’s comedy throughout its run.
The series earned 29 NAACP Image Award nominations for its groundbreaking representation of Black women on television at the time. The series ended after the 2007-2008 writers’ strike interrupted its eighth season, leaving it without a proper series finale.
Despite its lack of industry embrace, the show has remained relevant in pop culture and launched the long-running spinoff series The Game with a backdoor pilot that aired during its sixth season. The Game ran for nine seasons between 2006 and 2015, before it was briefly revived at Paramount+ for another two seasons from 2021 to 2023.
