Yes you are right, there has always been a corporate approved mold in media. And its often the work that breaks the mold that tends to get remembered.
When I say pop liberalism I mean the kind corporate approved liberalism you see in pop culture.
That still doesn't tell me what pop liberalism is. Pop culture itself isn't "liberalism" or "conservatism", it's simply
popular culture. I'm not trying to be difficult but there's mainstream and niche. Mainstream is what comprises popular culture, aka "pop culture", and niche comprises everything else. Spiderman is mainstream, The Watchmen are niche. Both are comic book series that have been made into movies. Jay-Z is mainstream/pop culture, Joell Ortiz is niche. Both are NYC styled rappers.
Additionally, it's not just the work that breaks the mold that gets remembered, it's also the styles that become so ubiquitous that they come to define a genre - they becomes an expectation.
I don't really care about the exact proportion of this or that race but I have noticed that when a work seeks to be representative of some group, it tends to work better when most of the cast is from that one group. When only one character is black or Asian that one character tends to(but of course not always) become representative of that one race which can lead to safer, stale characters.
That's not always the case of course. Mean Girls has a diverse cast, its core character are mostly girls, and it has feminist messaging but I think its a pretty good movie.
But what if a work isn't seeking to be representative of some group? Which I think is getting to the core of the conversation and how the issue of stereotyping influences it. They write a detergent commercial and cast a black person, a white person, and an Asian person. The commercial script isn't seeking to be representative of any group, it's simply selling detergent. The casting agency or the brand wants diversity in actors for marketing purposes. Those 2 things can exist without blending. The individual person in the detergent commercial doesn't have to have some higher purpose beyond using detergent.
Swinging back to television shows and movies, it's the same thing. And very much what
@Jack V Savage was alluding to. Some movie has 3 friends and they're all different races, none of those 3 people have to be representative of some group - they simply are. However, it is the viewers who respond to the imagery. They are the ones who say "Casting that person in that role feels off to me for some reason. It's not what I expected therefore there must be something wrong."
To create a hypo - it would like a tv show casting an Arabic person as a Christian priest in an otherwise largely white cast. There's nothing wrong about it but because we're conditioned to think of Arabic people as Muslim, many people who find the casting strange. Not because Arabic people cannot be Christian priests but because it challenges their internalized expectations.
As you said, you'd prefer that they largely all be the same race - that Arabic Christian priest be cast in a largely Arabic production. But that simply reinforces the stereotypes. It says that these people can only take on these roles in narrow settings. When that person leaves the ethnic homogeneity of their community, they should revert back to expected roles.
The black doctor is expected in an all black cast but not in a majority white cast. But if the black doctor is an acceptable role for the black actor, it shouldn't matter what the rest of the cast look likes for the audience to be okay with it.
