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Basic Trope: A TV show with a not very diverse cast.

  • Straight: Sally and Friends, a lighthearted sitcom, has an entirely white main cast.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Despite airing for many years, not one nonwhite person ever shows up on this series. Even in the background.
    • All characters look almost identical, with the same skin tone, hair color, eye color, etc.
    • The characters travel all over the world, and on every continent every single person is Caucasian.
    • Even the pets are white.
  • Downplayed: The main cast of Sally and Friends is all white, but a few background and/or very minor characters are played by nonwhite actors.
  • Justified:
    • The setting of the series is a city or region that is known for not being very ethnically diverse. If it happens to be a Sci-Fi story, it may also be taking place on a Planet of Hats, or similar.
    • Alternately, the series is set in a time during severe segregation (like South Africa during The Apartheid Era or pre-Civil Rights Movement southern states of the US), so you wouldn't expect to see a bunch of white kids hanging out with one black guy (or vice versa).
    • The characters are all blood relations and, as such, would be expected to all be of the same ethnicity - unless one of them happens to have parents of different races.
    • The series is based on Real Life events which only involved members of one ethnic group.
  • Inverted: The main cast of Sally and Friends is a highly diverse Five-Token Band, comprising an African-American girl, an Asian boy, a Jewish girl, a Hispanic boy, an Indigenous American girl, and the Token White guy in a wheelchair.
  • Subverted: Fawna joins the cast in season 2, becoming the Token Black Friend.
  • Double Subverted: But then Fawna falls victim to Chuck Cunningham Syndrome in season 3.
  • Parodied: A very white actor plays an immigrant putatively from Nigeria who moves into town one episode.
  • Zig Zagged: The cast is different every episode, or perhaps it's a Cast Herd. Sometimes all members are from only one race. Sometimes it's a Five-Token Band.
  • Averted:
    • The cast is realistically diverse for the setting.
    • At least one of the main characters isn't white.
    • The show is a cartoon about non-human creatures such as animals, aliens, anthropomorphic objects, etc. and therefore, none of the characters have any real-world races to begin with.
  • Enforced:
    • The writer is racist.
    • The writer doesn't know enough about other ethnic groups to portray them accurately. Rather than risk causing offence by resorting to stereotypes, they make all their characters the same ethnic group as them.
    • The executives simply want to aim for a certain demographic and think that demographic won't relate to the work if it includes too many characters of different ethnicities.
    • The work is a local production using local actors in an area which isn't very ethnically diverse, so the casting director can only cast members of one ethnic group.
    • All of the characters are played by one actor, who isn't willing to pretend to be an ethnicity that they're not.
  • Lampshaded: The history teacher in Sally and Friends teaches her students about black civil rights leaders. None of the students can relate and they all fall asleep.
  • Invoked: A Nazi by Any Other Name invades the setting and systematically kills off all the main characters (and anyone else they can get their hands on) who doesn’t have the traits of their “perfect race”.
  • Exploited: A relatively socially progressive antagonist shows up the main characters as Politically Incorrect Heroes.
  • Defied: The series is about accepting differences, racial and otherwise.
  • Discussed: "Why are we so...white?"
  • Conversed: "Don't you find anything wrong with how these sitcoms always have a cast that's either all white or all black? Maybe that made sense in The '60s, but today it's just ridiculous!"
  • Implied: A couple of white protagonists are the only two people shown on camera, and while they do talk to some unseen characters, those unseen characters have ... very similar voices to the shown characters, leading to the induction that they too are of European descent.
  • Deconstructed: A group of American townspeople becomes very concerned about their hometown's lack of diversity. The town was actually set up during the segregation days and never blended.
  • Reconstructed: But they live in a very white state such as Idaho, Utah, Vermont, Montana, Maine, North Dakota, or New Hampshire. A lack of minorities is not unusual, and they get on with their lives in their middle-class white suburb.
  • Plotted A Good Waste: Sally and Friends is set After the End, which was caused by a mysterious virus that decimated the world's non-European-descended population but left its white population relatively healthy.

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