ARE Australian TV dramas racist? That is the question I keep asking myself after returning from a recent visit to the US.
In America, ethnic diversity is front and centre in TV dramas, mainly thanks to celebrated showrunner Shonda Rhimes.
When Rhimes created Grey's Anatomy just over a decade ago, she made the cast racially diverse. 
The staff at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital covered a range of ethnicities. Rhimes employed "colour-blind casting", making stars out of Sandra Oh, a Canadian of Korean heritage, James Pickens Jr (African American) and Sara Ramirez (Hispanic) as well as Anglo actors Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey. Rhimes has continued with that on her other shows, including Scandal (with a cast headed by Kerry Washington) and How to Get Away with Murder (with Viola Davis as law professor Annalise Keating).
The ethnicity of her characters is not their defining quality. It is hardly spoken about. It is the same with their sexuality. Instead, they are defined by their strength, professionalism, relationships and, yes, sometimes their flaws.
What Rhimes started is being continued with India's Priyanka Chopra heading a diverse cast in new US drama Quantico. America's big new hit is hip hop drama Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P Henson.
"(In casting) it used to be 'this character's black, this character's Mexican, this character is Indian'," Quantico executive producer Mark Gordon says. "Now we're agnostic in that respect. It's allowed us the opportunity to be very aggressively looking for the best actors." The contrast couldn't be starker when it comes to local TV dramas, which seem stuck in some sort of 1950s all-white time warp.
Add up Home and Away, Neighbours, Love Child, House Husbands, A Beautiful Lie, Winter, Offspring and 800 Words and you would be lucky to come up with even a handful of characters that don't fit a white Anglo stereotype.
In 2012, House Husbands star Firass Dirani slammed the major commercial networks, saying they "did not create roles for people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds".
If you ask me, nothing much has changed. No wonder Love Child actor Miranda Tapsell name-checked Rhimes after she won Logies earlier this year for Most Popular New Talent and Most Outstanding Newcomer.
"Put more beautiful people of colour on TV and connect viewers in ways which transcend race and unite us," Tapsell said.
Seven is to be congratulated for taking a step in the right direction with The Secret Daughter, the new family drama about a part-time country singer starring Jessica Mauboy.
Yet drama producers and TV networks will wheel out all sorts of excuses for not doing more. They'll point out the TV careers of Deborah Mailman, Aaron Pedersen and Don Hany as if three success stories are good enough. They'll say they don't want to fall into the trap of casting different ethnicities out of guilt or to make up some sort of quota.
Former Neighbours executive producer Susan Bower tried to make a difference when she cast Hany Lee as South Korean exchange student Sunny Lee on the Eleven soapie in 2008. Lee lasted a year on the show.
Richard Jasek, who took over from Bower, introduced an Indian-Sri Lankan family, the Kapoors, in 2011. Not everyone was happy. Neighbours staff had to remove racist social media posts from fans angry that a non-white family were moving into Erinsborough.
When producers get that sort of response, you can see why they choose the safe white option. That is a losing game in a country as culturally diverse as Australia. Networks are disenfranchising whole sections of their potential audience. On the most superficial level, it is simply bad business.
BUT the damage to society is far deeper. An emotional Washington said it so powerfully when she was discussing the impact of Rhimes on American TV dramas.
"It's a way to attack somebody's soul, to never let them see themselves (represented on TV)," Washington said. "It's a subliminal message - that you don't matter." Here it is reality shows like MasterChef Australia, The Voice and The X Factor that show a far more representative picture of society.
They feature contestants who cover the spectrum of age, ethnicity and sexuality. They simply celebrate talent.
So what can we do to change our dramas? I think it is going to take our own version of Rhimes: a producer not afraid to not only break the rules but to smash them.
As Viola Davis says: "No matter what your age and your sexual orientation is, or your colour, you feel like you're included in the narrative of Shondaland (Rhimes' shows). That's how it should be, because it is like life." We need someone with the vision, guts and determination to revolutionise local drama to portray the wonderful diversity of Australian life.
COLIN VICKERY IS NATIONAL TV WRITER colin.vickery@news.com.au@colvick