Weeds' black cast replaced with Mexicans

If you didn't have anything else better to do last night than to watch the new episode of Weeds (I'm not gonna lie, I didn't) one of the things you might have noticed is that all of the black people are gone from its cast.

I guess they figured, with the show moving from the town of Agrestic to some town on the beach down near the Mexican border, that Conrad and Heylia et al. couldn't possibly travel from LA to San Diego or whatever, what with gas prices these days.

And since they're stuck back in LA, they might as well be written out of the show entirely. Never mind the fact that Kevin Nealon and the broad from the movie Big are still on the show, despite the fact that they're both still in LA.

Hmm...

The official story re: the entire black cast of the series being let go after last season is that it had to do with the change in locales. Take for example the following bit, from an interview with the series' creator which ran on the E! website yesterday.

Who's Missing? Because Nancy burned down her house at the end of season three and pops up in a totally different locale (hint: grandma's house), Jenji confirms that previous regulars Heylia, Conrad and Vaneeta are gone for season four. (Dean, Celia and Doug remain part of the cast.) "Even though there a lot of changes from last season," Jenji says, "it really still feels like Weeds. It's still our show."

But according to a rumor I just heard, the real reason Showtime decided to get rid of the black cast of Weeds is because they were having some personnel issues with the black members of the show's writng staff. So they got rid of both of the show's black writers, and they decided they'd go ahead and get rid of the show's entire black cast along with them.

Damn.

Was it because they figured they needed black writers to craft dialog for the black characters, and they couldn't find any replacements? Or did they just not bother, because they figured it'd be easier to replace the show's black characters with Mexicans, as it appears they have? (I didn't bother to check to see if the show's writing staff includes any Mexicans, but something tells me it doesn't.)

I consulted the Google just now, and I couldn't find anything about such a shakeup. In fact, I could hardly find any reviews of last night's episode that even noted that the show's black characters are gone. They seemed mostly concerned with the change in locales. Which makes me wonder if that wasn't the purpose of the change in locales in the first place.

Someone with the tools and the talent might want to conduct an investigation. In the meantime, here's a link to a special report in Entertainment Weekly about some of the diversity issues that have been going on with these series.

Diversity in Entertainment: Why Is TV So White? [Entertainment Weekly]