White-Optic Regenerative Televisual Narratives Continue Apace

TV Shows: Reacher, Coyote, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Cobra Kai

In January 2021, deep in the pandemic’s grip, CBS’s marketing machine began hyping Coyote as a nuanced, complex drama set along the US/Mexico borderlands. The show’s executive producers, creators, and showrunners promised viewers something rare: a story that wouldn't fall into the tired white-savior trope. Instead, they touted a series that would center the transformation of a flawed white Everyman while giving visibility to the struggles of los de abajo—Brown folk from Mexico and Central America navigating life under imperial strain.

Even before I binged all six episodes (a lock-down silver lining), my araña senses were tingling. After all, how could a series with Michael Chiklis—Mr. Vic Mackey of The Shield fame (2002-2008)—as its star not center the white male protagonist? How could a show that devotes most of its narrative real estate to the psychological unraveling and rebuilding of a disgraced Border Patrol agent—who becomes entangled with a Mexican drug cartel—truly de-center whiteness?

I binged it. My Spidey senses were right. While I don’t subscribe to cancel culture, I felt a wave of relief when CBS pulled the plug. Here’s why.

What Coyote Tried to Do

Let’s first acknowledge the show’s stated intentions:

• Dash the white-savior myth. Chiklis’s Ben Clemens is no polished hero. He’s a blue-collar, washed-up bigot, estranged from his daughter, chewing on regret and sleeping in his truck.

• Create a transformation arc. Ben begins with a smug nationalism but, through encounters with María Elena (a pregnant Salvadoran teen) and entrapment by cartel boss El Catrin, he begins to see the humanity of Brown people.

• Humanize Latinx characters. The series tries to give backstories to Mexican, Salvadoran, and U.S. Latinx characters. We get flashbacks, trauma, family ruptures.

• Use metaphor and symbol to signal redemption. Ben’s project to rebuild his deceased ICE partner’s house in Mexico stands in for his attempt to reconstruct a moral identity.

• Drive home moral messages. Ben literally dons the clothes of a dead migrant in the desert. He walks in their shoes.

• Name the character with symbolism. Clemens = clemency. Get it? The white man’s guilt is the audience’s moral lesson.

All boxes checked.

What Coyote Actually Did

Despite its intentions, Coyote did what many shows before it have done: reinscribe whiteness at the center, with Brown characters serving as backdrop, prop, or peril. Here's the actual impact:

• Brown characters serve as catalysts. María Elena and El Catrin exist only to initiate and challenge Ben’s transformation. Their interiority is subordinated to his growth.

• Stereotypes, recycled. Latinas appear as pregnant, cooking, or pleading. Machismo runs unchecked—Latino men are violent protectors or lecherous threats.

• Queerphobia, unchecked. Mazo’s constant use of puñal reinforces regressive masculinities within Latinx representation.

• Hypersexualization. El Catrin has a mistress per episode. Javi can’t keep it in his pants.

• EZ disposability. A young Brown man dies—murdered and framed—with a shrug from our “reluctant” white protagonist.

• Native peoples as caricature. Desert trackers chase Ben and María Elena in a sequence that echoes the worst of Western film tropes—this time on ATVs instead of horses.

• Sonic othering. U.S. scenes are scored traditionally. Scenes in Mexico get the hip-hop “gritty” treatment, coding the South as a volatile, foreign world.

• Toys on a map. The show's title sequence uses a model trainset to map out the borderlands—an Olympian-god perspective that miniaturizes Brown life into a playground for white transformation.

Regenerated Whiteness through Brownness

Coyote is far from unique. Today’s white-optic televisual landscape teems with what I call white-regenerative narratives—stories in which worn-out, broken, or morally adrift white dudes are reinvigorated through contact with Brown suffering. In these stories, Brownness is not centered but instrumentalized; it is the gritty crucible through which whiteness is purified, transformed, and redeemed.

Consider the canonical trio: Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Ozark. These are household names with prestige accolades and massive viewerships:

·      In Breaking Bad, Walter White evolves from a meek high school chemistry teacher into drug lord Heisenberg through his violent entanglements with the Juárez cartel.

·      Better Call Saul charts the transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman, whose legal and ethical descent is intimately tied to cartel clientele.

·      Ozark follows Marty Byrde as he launders millions for the fictional Navarro cartel while still clinging to the suburban ideal of family and financial security. These shows don’t merely include Brownness—they demand it as the narrative engine for white male metamorphosis.

The pattern hasn’t faded. If anything, it has intensified since Coyote’s cancellation; cancelled because of pandemic logistics, and not because of its lazy, racist storytelling.

Season 3 of Reacher (2024) thrusts its white super-soldier into a maze of cartel conspiracies, stocked with stylized and ruthless Latin American villains. Reacher (played by Alan Ritchson) emerges from his encounter bruised and battered, his stoicism re-sharpened by Brown-coded danger.

The UK crime drama Mobland (2025- ) mirrors the same blueprint. Although it’s set in Britain, the show inexplicably involves a Latin American cartel—proving that the trope of Brown menace now serves as a kind of global seasoning for white crisis and regeneration.

Similarly, Mayor of Kingstown (2021- ) stars Jeremy Renner as Mike McLusky, a white intermediary between corrupt institutions and marginalized communities. The series positions him as a savior figure, mediating between law enforcement and the mostly Black and Brown prison population, while flattening those communities into narrative foils.

Yellowstone (2018-2024) and its spin-offs perpetuate this, and even more deeply. They elevate white ranchers as noble defenders of a threatened frontier, while Indigenous and Brown characters appear either as exoticized noble obstacles or treacherous interlopers. In each instance, the white character’s moral journey remains the central concern.

Even supposedly progressive series spin the same white regenerative narratives. Cobra Kai (2018-2015), for instance, cloaks its regenerative arc in feel-good nostalgia. Johnny Lawrence (played by an older William Zabka), the 1980s karate bully turned modern-day burnout (Zabka was in the original 1984 Karate Kid film), finds purpose only after he meets Miguel (the breakout role for Cholo Maridueña), a kind-hearted Latinx teen. Through training Miguel, mentoring him, and eventually romancing Miguel’s mama, Carmen (played by Vanessa Rubio), Johnny resurrects himself as a hero. Yet Miguel never becomes the show’s narrative center—he remains the vessel through which Johnny achieves growth and redemption.

These aren’t just narrative missteps or missed opportunities—they have tangible consequences. They reinforce harmful stereotypes: Latinos as violent criminals, Latinas as passive or pregnant, Indigenous people as either mystical or savage, and queer folk as either invisible or insulted.

The white-optic televisual complex continues apace to erase Latinx agency, relegating Brown characters to props in the white male character’s regenerative story arc. They normalize and justify white saviorism, turning Brown suffering into a tool for white moral awakening rather than a reality to be addressed with nuance and care. They limit future storytelling possibilities, training studios, writers' rooms, and algorithms to greenlight only those narratives that make Brownness legible through a white lens.

Flipping the script

The media industrial complex needs to flip scripts and reimagine these stories from the ground up. What if Breaking Bad had been created with a Latinx audience in mind—not just with Brown characters, but with Brown protagonism? What if Coyote had centered María Elena’s story—a teen mother fleeing violence, carrying trauma, and navigating a hostile world with her own voice and agency? These counterfactuals shouldn’t be wishful thinking; they should be the starting point.

It can be done.

Gigi Saul Guerrero’s 2019 film, Culture Shock (part of Hulu’s Into the Dark anthology), offers a genuinely chilling and layered narrative told from the perspective of an undocumented woman. It's a dystopian horror rooted in lived realities and south-of-the-border imagination, not white panic.

Brown created and cast shows like Gentefied (2020-2021), Vida (2018-2020), and One Day at a Time (2017-2020) dared to center Latinx life with humor, complexity, and zero need for white redemption arcs. They proved that Latinx stories can be rich, multidimensional, and resonant on their own terms. Yet all were canceled, despite critical acclaim and loyal audiences.

We make up 19+% of the U.S. population—yet appear in less than 3% of speaking roles in major media. And when we do, it’s often as narcos, maids, or dead bodies that white protagonists must avenge or learn from.

We need the white-optic media industrial complex to flip the script:

·       Latinx protagonists at the center, not the margin.

·       Multi-season arcs that explore our complexity—not just our trauma.

·       Writers' rooms and showrunners who come from and know our communities.

·       Marketing budgets and platform support equal to shows like Coyote or Ozark.

And we need them now—before another generation internalizes the white-optic constructed narratives continues to rope-burn our Brown souls with narratives of white, patriarchal redemption.