I came up with a test for watching movies and television shows. This test is for gauging the humanization of characters who are of the global majority, not white, or whatever you want to call it. The test is pretty simple.

I’ve been watching Severance as it comes out. I love the show by the way and I’m totally engaged. Severance offers us such well crafted and rich storytelling about agency and lack of agency in a corporate environment. It also depicts the places that capitalist extraction drains of all resources in a super compelling way—full of people, full of community, addicted to ether, and without memory.

But here’s something else that I have noticed. And I’m writing this as a fan of the show: we know that Mark and Devon’s mother’s eyes are brown and that her name is Fern Scout. We know that Irving’s dad was military. We know that Cobel’s mom was ill and that she died and that she was pushed into Lumon by her aunt. We even know all about Rickon Hale’s parents. For people who just watched the show, we know that he changed beds a lot and that his relationship with his parents isn’t good. For people who read his book, we know that his parents were artists and birthed him as a performance art piece. Of course, we know all about Helena Eagan’s father and her family.

But what about Dylan? Milchick? Gemma? Ms. Huang? Reghabi? Nathalie? No information whatsoever.

I wish we at least got some information about Dylan’s parents. Dylan is a dad and his identity and role as a father for both his character and the story as a whole. But what is Dylan’s relationship with his parents? Did he get along with them? Did he not get along with them? We have no idea. We really only see his identity as a father through his marriage and his wife, yes, is white.

Ms. Huang is also interesting because she’s a child, a minor. She doesn’t have as much agency and her parents would be able to make choices on her behalf. But who are they? What are they like? Milchick seems to be another management person who was parented in part by Lumon. Who are his parents? Nathalie and Reghabi are smaller characters so having no information about their parents, I think, is fine. But is Reghabi really a smaller role than Rickon? I’m not sure. She plays a pretty big narrative role. We know so many specifics about Rickon’s parents but nothing about Reghabi’s.

I find it really surprising that we never hear anything at all about Gemma’s parents. Like Dylan who is defined by his role as a father, her character is defined through her desire to be a mother. But where did Gemma come from? Did Mark ever meet her mother? What color are her mother’s eyes?

I think I started to notice this in Severance not because I was really looking but because the second question that the innies are asked when they are born is “What color are your mother’s eyes?” That’s the second question out of three that they use to provoke us to think about these people’s humanity. So it does stand out that none of the characters of color have any parents.

So, my test is really simple: If a character of color appears on screen, do we know anything at all about their parents?

This might be a stupid question but I think it’s an important one for storytelling in a place that has stolen so many babies. America has orphaned so many kids. American shows very often depict non-white characters as having any parents whatsoever.

You know, Severance isn’t the first show where I’ve noticed this. I’m also a fan of Killing Eve. What I found surprising about Killing Eve is that we get to know so much about Villanelle’s family and past. Villanelle is from Russia. Her mother’s name is Tatiana and her brother’s name is Pyotr. Her father died.

But what about Eve? Who is she? Why is she, a Korean person who speaks in an American accent, in the United Kingdom? Are her parents there too or in the US or in Korea?

I noticed this because, at the start of season 3, Eve is working in a restaurant and she speaks perfect Korean. That actually surprised me not because Asian Americans can’t speak in our ethnic languages or prepare our ethnic food but because that was the first time we saw Eve make Korean food. She does it so well! But we’ve only seen her make English dishes like shepherd’s pie before this. That scene was surprising from what we knew about her character and it definitely made me want to know more about how she was raised. Why does she prepare English dishes at home but cook Korean food so well? Why does she make those choices?

Eve is literally the main character of Killing Eve. It’s just so weird that we know absolutely nothing about what kind of diaspora she is or any information at all about her parents, especially when the other main character, Villanelle, does get a detailed backstory.

Parents are pretty big when it comes to fleshing a character out. So many of our emotional reactions come from our relationships with our parents. I assume that’s why writers usually give parents to their characters.

Game of Thrones, of course, has no parents for Khal Drogo, Greyworm, or Missandei. Jess in Succession has no parents. Yellowjackets passes my test because we see Taissa’s grandmother. Abbott Elementary, of course, also passes. I stopped watching The Handmaid’s Tale but, at least in the first few seasons, it doesn’t pass. We know about June’s mother but not Moira’s. That’s all the shows that I have been watching.

This is just a simple test. I know that representation on televisions is not really the most important thing and is even counterproductive but, hey, I watch TV so this entered my mind.

I’m still hopeful about Severance. I know that the writers' room isn’t all white so I’m hoping that the usual block of not knowing how to write a family that isn’t white isn’t there. I think that the thing that makes writing families that aren’t white for all white writers’ rooms is that a person is just a person but family is culture. You can make an individual very complicated and interesting but can you do that for a culture?

And maybe this shows the limit of on screen representation. The reason why representation can be so counterproductive to political awareness is because it focuses attention on individuals rather than societies. Maybe that’s true for democracies as well as television shows.

But, yeah, that’s the test. You can use this test on shows that you watch and see what happens. I just think that it’s surprising. Several of the most complicated and human-seeming and well acted characters are missing just that one thing that Severance asks us to ask when we think about whether a person is fully human: What color are your mother’s eyes?