Platinum Goes Aluminum

UPN's much hyped "Hip-Hop Drama" Platinum, which sparked a lively discussion here last month, seems to have met its demise.

Platinum Gets Cancelled

The hip-hop drama "Platinum" has not been renewed for the fall season, representatives for UPN confirmed with AllHipHop.com. After starting with near record-breaking ratings, the show’s Nielson status plummeted.

“Its not coming back next year,” a rep for UPN said, "The ratings were the same as 'Haunted' was when we cancelled it last year."

"Platinum" was a hip-hop family saga based on two brothers, Jackson and Grady Ellis (Jason George and rapper Sticky Fingaz of Onyx), who ran an independent record company.

The Sophia Coppola-produced show was a huge success initially, garnering it extremely high reviews and generated significant controversy for its content. Even mogul Russell Simmons spoke out in support of the realism of the plot.

The show delved primarily into the seedy underbelly of the music industry, something that Naji [sic] Ali of Project Islamic H.O.P.E. said was the curse of the show.

"If they were true to making a real hip-hop show, they wouldn’t have focused on the negative," Ali told AllHipHop.com. “We are vindicated.” When the show debuted Ali and his organization proposed a boycott of the show if the creators didn’t attempt to change the content...

This show didn't spark enough interest for me to keep watching after the first two episodes, but I'm not happy to see it disappear so quickly, and I'm skeptical about Najee Ali's claim that his protests are vindicated by this result. As far as I can remember, commercial television has never gotten comfortable with any Black oriented show that wasn't a straight-up sitcom, from Frank's Place on down to City of Angels.