Humphrey Barclay became Head of Comedy at LWT in 1977 and supervised various successful series including "No, Honestly", "A Fine Romance" (1981–84). In May 1980 he unveiled "Metal Mickey" as a show "with the appeal of "Star Wars", the Daleks and "Mork and Mindy"" Following criticism at the Edinburgh International Television Festival of what was seen as casual racism the LWT series "Mind Your Language" (1977–79; 1986), Barclay commissioned "No Problem!", transmitted by Channel 4 during 1983–85, the first original black-made sitcom for British TV (an earlier series featuring a black family, "The Fosters" (ITV, 1976–77), had been a remake of a
Black sitcom August 10, 2012, "Tyler Perry's House of Payne" surpassed "The Jeffersons" and became the longest-running sitcom with a predominantly African American cast in the history of American television in terms of number of episodes. On August 23 and 24, 2012, Debbie Allen, the former chief creative force of "A Different World" from 1988 to 1993, wrote on Twitter that she wants to reboot "A Different World". Over a million people on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs reacted to the tweet and approved the potential reboot. On September 24, 2014, the ABC sitcom "black-ish" premiered with over 11 million people watching the