Yeah that is a big change. I worked for LA talent managers for a while and I’d spend all day reading breakdowns (descriptions of roles to be cast in upcoming productions) to flag ones to submit clients for. You’d see a lot of roles listed white, a few various types of brown, but the majority were unspecified. This being America though, unmarked race is implicitly white and while you can often get a nonwhite actor an audition for an unmarked role it’s rare to get a callback, let alone cast.

So all those cast at once for unmarked (or even other-marked!) major roles, yeah that is huge.

That said I guarantee you she’s right on the money when she chalks this up to the success of Empire and other minority-led shows last season, and if we don’t see any more such hits who knows. Hollywood output is easily 80% attempts to pattern-match to recent hits (and even that more the window dressing than the load-bearing elements).

The one exception though, the DisneyLodeon empires had very carefully engineered diversity, the ethnic mix of shows was calibrated before the concept was even fleshed out. (DisneyLodeon is the closest thing to the old studio “star system”, where roles and even whole productions are less important in themselves than as opportunities to “break” a member of your talent stable as a star, then to have lead roles and movies and music careers crafted around them).

Like, if a Disney show was written with roles for asian girl A, black girl B, and caucasian girl C, they might consider reworking B around a particularly good-fitting asian actress, but then A would definitely be reworked black to rebalance.

Back around the casting of the Wizards of Waverly Place pilot, we had a client, girl of 14 (but you might not have guessed it - among teen actors, boys tend runty so they can play younger than their age; girls tend short but precociously developed so they can play hotter than their age). She was maybe a quarter Mexican so we had two headshots and contact sheets, one with her real name and everyday blue-eyed appearance for white or unmarked roles, one with brown contacts, black hair, and a Spanish surname for latina roles.