Black Vikings / Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • "The Girl in the Fireplace" has a black noblewoman in the Court of Louis XVI. Some fans have attempted to explain this by pointing out the existence of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a real eighteenth-century composer and musician known as "the black Mozart", who did in fact perform at Versailles, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (father of Alexandre Dumas) who was Saint-Georges' student and later a general during the French Revolutionary Wars. It's especially jarring considering there is an Orientalist portrait of Madame de Pompadour dressed like a Turkish sultana and being served by a black slave girl — an exotic possession, for crying out loud.◊ Angel Coulby, the actress who played the black noblewoman, also played Gwen in Merlin (2008).
  • Averted with Martha's presence in "The Shakespeare Code": Martha initially worries that being black in 1600s London will cause trouble, but the Doctor laughs it off, assuring her that London has all types of people. In this case, he's right. Elizabethan London had a significant African population — large enough that Elizabeth complained about it on multiple occasions. It was also about half a century before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and thus, racialized slavery, really took off, and slavery in England itself was abolished way back in 1120.
  • "Human Nature", set in England just before World War I, averts this trope, as one of the students starts saying offensive things to Martha, and John Smith seems to find it utterly believable that Martha might not understand the concept of fiction. Smith's love interest understandably is rather incredulous when Martha claims to be a doctor, remarking that a woman doctor was conceivable but not "one of your colour" as said to Martha's face.
  • The titular character of "The Next Doctor" has a black female companion, Rosita, in 1851. She gets treated like anyone else in the story except for two brief, almost missable moments. The first is when the villainess asks whether the Doctor "paid [her] to speak," which could be either a servitude reference or merely an implied suggestion that she thinks Rosita is a prostitute. The second is at the end when they live happily ever after and Jackson Lake makes a comment about her being his son's nursemaid.
  • Isabella and her father from "The Vampires of Venice" are an exception. As a nexus of trade all across the Mediterranean, Venice would have been home to all sorts. (But she also has modern-day straightened hair.)
  • Richard Nixon has two black agents in his security detail in "The Impossible Astronaut". (In reality, Nixon did have at least one.)
  • The series 9 opener "The Magician's Apprentice" features some black extras in Essex in 1138, leading to some debate as to whether this is realistic or not.
  • Justified in the Series 10 episode "Thin Ice", set in London in the early 19th century (the Regency Era) when Bill notes that London seems "a bit more black" than the movies suggest. The Doctor replies that "history is a whitewash", while also indicating that Jesus was black, too.
  • The Series 10 episode "Empress of Mars'' features a black soldier, Vincey, serving in Queen Victoria's army — and, indeed, writer Mark Gatiss protested this until he did some research and discovered the existence of Jimmy Durham, a black man who was an officer in the Durham Light Infantry.
• This is all over Mortal Kombat: Conquest. While the series is set in ancient China, Kung Lao is the only one of the protagonists who is actually Asian. The rest of the cast is suspiciously multicultural. The only justified one is Raiden, who as a god could conceivably take any form he wished. But then why is he a white guy?
• An early episode of Robin Hood has Guy of Gisbourne's political scheming against the Sheriff's current Master at Arms. The fact that the Master at Arms is black in 12th-century England is never mentioned nor influence the plot. The producers have mentioned that originally there was no intention for the character to be black, but that the actor gave such a damned fine audition and performance that they felt he could pull it off regardless of the fact that that he would seem out of place, and gave him the part as-written, without any changes to make reference to his color. In Season 3, Friar Tuck is black.
• The start of Season 2 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World has an episode where several modern people are transported to the plateau. Even though the main characters are from the start of the 20th century, they don't seem to notice that the helicopter pilot is black and treat him like anyone else.
• NBC's Gulliver's Travels miniseries: In contrast to the lily-white Lilliputians, Brobdingnag is home to many black giants (including Alfre Woodard as the Queen) looking a little out-of-place in 18th century powdered wigs. This is actually consistent with the Utopian nature of the island and probably a way of playing up its superiority to both Lilliput and Gulliver's England.
• The Suite Life of Zack & Cody had Brenda Song playing an ancestor of London Tipton... during the American Revolutionary War. Hilariously but subtly lampshaded in that she seems to be (or believe that she is) French. Whether it was intentional and she really was supposed to be London's French paternal ancestor, it was intentional and she was absurdly somewhere in London's Thai ancestry, or it was completely unintended, it was completely Handwaved by being All Just a Dream had by Zack. Also, Mr. Moseby, who is black, is seen as a rich man. Most blacks in the Revolutionary War were slaves, but it is possible he was a free man.
• In The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nóg, set in pre-Christian Ireland, one of the heroes is black — but it's justified by having him come from Atlantis, which, being mythical, can have any ethnic mix it wants.
• Like The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog, the short-lived Roar, which starred Heath Ledger, is also set in pre-Christian Ireland and still features a black character named Tully amongst Ledger's band of Celtic chieftains. Unlike in Mystic Knights, there's no justification given.
• Both Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess had black Greeks. Knowing the extent of the Mediterranean trade in the Antiquity, there was a slight possibility for Ethiopian, Nubian, or darker-skinned Egyptian people to settle in Greek lands, even more so in port cities, as traders, sailors, mercenaries or former slaves. However, their numbers could not be great. Given that both shows are filmed in New Zealand, whenever they needed "ethnic" mooks (for example, to represent Egyptians), they would usually cast Maori or other Pacific Islanders and hope that audiences perceived them as just being Ambiguously Brown.
• Suggested but not confirmed in Power Rangers Samurai, as out of five descendants of Japanese samurai, only one is Asian. It's either this trope or the equally unlikely scenario that the families mingled with other races in just the right way to make a Five-Token Band. Don't bother thinking about it too hard as history has never been the franchise's strong suit.
• In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "Warrior of the Lost World", the guys remark on how the gangs of hats include black Nazis and white ninjas.
• A sketch on the CBBC show Horrible Histories about Vikings actually featured a Black Viking as an extra.
• In another History Channel example, Barbarians Rising, Hannibal and the rest of the Carthaginian people are played by black actors. In real life, Carthage's elite was formed by people of Phoenician ethnicity, a Semitic group closely related to Middle Eastern groups such as Jews and Arabs, while most of its African vassals were Berbers - none of whom are black.
• In The Musketeers, Porthos is black. According to Word of God, this is a tribute to Alexandre Dumas's actual black ancestry (his paternal grandmother was a black slave in Haiti). It isn't a case of colour-blind casting, as in several episodes his racial background is an explicit driver of the plot. It finally turns out that, like Dumas's father, he was the product of a nobleman's affair with a black servant woman, and he was brought into the Musketeers by a friend of his father who felt guilty about helping his father to discard his black mistress.
• The trope is discussed in an episode of Psych. When the creators of a play defend their all-white cast on the grounds that the show takes place in 1880s London, Gus gets annoyed and asks if they think black people hadn't been invented yet.
• Black Sails includes Joji, a katana-toting Japanese member of a Caribbean pirate crew in 1715. While it's possible that a single Japanese sailor might somehow get himself onto a Caribbean pirate ship, the show takes place during a period of extreme seclusion in Japan, where the Japanese government actively prohibited its people from leaving. His presence is obviously fuelled by Rule of Cool. That said, there were Japanese Catholic communities that did settle in Mexico in the 17th century, so it is plausible for Joji to be descended from them.
• Camelot: Vivian, Morgan's servant, is black. However, Vivian tells Morgan her ancestors were brought over as slaves from Africa by the Romans, which is actually possible, as some British archaeological findings show that people of African descent (both free and slave) really did come from Roman Africa to Roman Britain. This could also explain Sir Ulfius, Arthur's black knight.
• Merlin (2008): Guinevere, her father, her brother, and Sir Pellinore are all black. However, they also have dragons and fey, and Albion is portrayed less as a past historical England than as a standard fantasy land. It's also not so much of a stretch as people think, as there is evidence of some black people in medieval England. Of course, none were knights or queens that we know of.
• Troy: Fall of a City: Many of the Trojan and Greek characters are portrayed by black actors, which wasn't true in reality of these ethnicities. Of course, it's fictional to begin with. In fairness, Greeks and Trojans likely also looked different from the actors portraying them, who are mostly of British or Irish stock. Also other stories of the Trojan War really did have black characters, most notably the Ethiopian Memnon, a king on Troy's side who comes to fight the Greeks along with his army... but he's not included here.
• Legends of Tomorrow runs into this occasionally being a series about a team of people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds traveling into the (usually American) past. In "Night of the Hawk" Ray Palmer (white) and Hawkgirl (ethnicity in-universe unspecified although she is the reincarnation of an Egyptian; the actress has African-American and Native American ancestry) pose as a married couple in Oregon in the 1950s. Oregon did repeal its anti-miscegenation law in 1951 but mixed-race couples still drew negative attention and restrictive housing covenants prevented such couples from living in many neighborhoods. In the same episode, Martin Stein waxes nostalgic about the idyllic 1950s, only for the African-American Jax and the bisexual Sara to remind him things weren't so great in the 1950s if you weren't straight, white and male. As a Jew, Stein should have known that religious minorities didn't have it so great either. In "Abominations" Stein expresses guilt about Jax having to endure Civil War-era racism. Jax points out that pretty much every era of American history is racist. When the team travels to historical eras where the presence of non-white people would be remarkable, no one native to the time remarks on it.
• The Spanish Princess: The show gives Catherine of Aragon a black woman as her most senior lady-in-waiting and best friend, mixing or confusing her historical lady-in-waiting Catalina de Cardones and a slave named Catalina de Motril that was part of her entourage (and married a Morisco named Oviedo, basis of the other Token Black character in the series). The other lady-in-waiting is a fully fictional Romani.
• Miracle Workers: Though ostensibly set in Dark Age Europe, black or South Asian characters exist along with the white ones without an explanation. Al's father is white, though her (unseen) mother might also be South Asian. Of course, it's no less (or more) accurate than the rest.
• David Oyelowo plays Inspector Javert in the Masterpiece Mini Series production of Les Misérables. It's not likely that a black man could have risen to such a position in 19th century France.
• Rome presents Cleopatra's escort as played mostly by black actors. Probably because unlike Cleopatra herself (who was Greek) the rest were supposed to be native Egyptians. However though this is a complex and contentious matter (the exact race of the Egyptians) most historians consider they were mostly not Black in the modern sense of the word.^note Not including the Nubians who, indeed, ruled Egypt for a while and are still an ethnic minority there.
• Dickinson: A couple of East Asian people are shown in Amherst during the 1850s, when very few even lived in the US.
• Vikings: The series generally averts this, and while there's plenty of Fake Nationality, actors could still pass believably to the ethnicities they're supposed to portray. But there are two notable exception:
  • During the raid of Algericas, in Moorish Spain (Al-Andalus), the population is a mixture of Arab-Berbers and black people. Although the ethnic situation of Al-Andalus is still hotly debated among scholars, it's generally believed to have been a mixture of Arab-Berbers and native Spaniards, either Christians (so called Mozarabs) or Muslim converts. What is shown in the series is unlikely to have been the ethnic composition of any town in Al-Andalus.
  • The sixth series introduces the Kievan Rus', and the captain of Oleg's personal forces is a vaguely Turkic dude with a Mongolian name, Ganbaatar. While the presence of Turkic mercenaries among the Rus wouldn't be absurd (given that they bordered with Khazars, Pechenegs and Cumans), the Mongolian name pretty much is, since Batu Khan's invasion only took place 400 years later. Until then, Mongols were confined to their homeland in Northeast Asia, and even Central Asia was mostly a Turkic plain with no relevant Mongol presence. It doesn't help that the series employs generous Artistic License – History and portrays the Rus as absolutely ahistorical Hordes from the East, when they were actually similar to the Norse.
• Vikings: Valhalla: Jarl Haakon and Altöra play this trope straight and are portrayed by actresses of African descent. No such figures appear in the sagas or historical records. The closest parallel are the brothers Hámund and Geirmund Heljarskin, two princes who were of part White Sea descent and had features that likely resembled the Uralic Samoyeds.
• Happens very frequently in adaptations of fantasy novels that were made around 2020:
  • The Witcher takes place on a fantastic Alternate Universe Earth whose human peoples were displaced there from our own by the Conjunction of the Spheres. Race Lift is enacted many, many times, seemingly at random, when in the source material nearly every character looked Northern European, resulting in rustic pseudo Polish villages being half populated by black or Asian people. Given how humanity arrived on the planet originally, it'd actually be semi-justified for the populations to not correspond to geography, but what makes it count for this trope is how this is done: all of the populations are inexplicably mixed. Every single village, town, and city in every single country has demographics roughly in line with a modern American or British city. Despite the Conjunction of the Spheres having taken place over a thousand years prior, every country not only maintains visible racial minorities who are not acknowledged as such, but they all seem to have the exact same mix as every other country - including the native dwarves and elves. The Witcher: Blood Origin takes it even further.
  • The same can be said about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, including the inexplicably diverse small communities that would in any real setting have become a lot more homogenous due to intermarriage taking place.
  • While the source material for The Wheel of Time (2021) visits places that are generally a lot more multi-ethnic than most other classic fantasy novels, the population of the remote village Emondsfield is, again, as diverse as a modern Western urban area.
  • House of the Dragon has subjected the Velaryon family (who, as pure-blooded Valyrians, basically look the same as the Tagaryens in the source material) to a Race Lift, making them black, although still of Valyrian descent and sharing the white hair of their Targaryen cousins. Unlike aforementioned adaptations, however, this departure from the books is generally restricted to them; and the effects of intermarrying become an even more obvious plot point in the show than in the books (with the pallid skin tone of Rhaenyra Targaryen's first three children making it even clearer that they weren't fathered by her husband Laenor Velaryon as claimed).
• Knight Squad takes place in the fictional kingdom of Astoria, which is supposed to resemble medieval Europe. Ciara, the princess of Astoria and Warwick are black, and Sage is implied to be Latina, neither of which were common in medieval Europe. ^note The Kingdom of Astoria's exact location was never mentioned, so the series may have not actually taken place in medieval Europe.
• Children's BBC Series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men parodies the tendency for Robin Hood adaptations to include a Moorish character as one of Robin Hood's allies, with Barrington, a black Rastafarian Merry Man.
• The Buccaneers (2023): While American Nouveau Riche BIPOC were hardly impossible by the time of the Gilded Age (of the protagonists, Conchita is Black and the Elmsworths are MENA), the English aristocracy is also much more racially diverse than would have been — for example, several women of color are seen among the debutantes being presented to the queen, including Jean.
• Our Flag Means Death, set in 1717, has a very diverse cast, which would have been more common at the time among sailors and pirates. However, Blackbeard in particular is played by Taika Waititi, who is of half Maori ancestory, which is much less likely. Contact between western nations and New Zealand was basically unheard of in the early 18th century, and regular trading wouldn't begin for another 50 years. In addition, according to flashbacks he was a child in England, so presumably he had a parent who left New Zealand, at least 100 years before this was likely to have happened historically. It's unclear if the character is also meant to be Maori, or just Ambiguously Brown.