Charlie Brown’s Token Black Friend Has Been Controversial for Decades. Peanuts Finally Has an Answer.

Consider the timeline of Black Americans entering predominantly white institutions; notable events include W.E.B. Du Bois’ schoolboy recognition of the “vast veil” of racial difference, Booker T. Washington’s dinner at the White House, Sidney Poitier at the 1963 Oscars, Dr. and Mrs. Huxtable at 8 p.m. Eastern, and Ice Spice’s arrival in Taylor Swift’s box at Super Bowl 58. Next up, a new Peanuts special on Apple TV+ invites us to track the progress of an odd icon of integration.

Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin is a most unfortunate 39-minute program centered on the first Black character introduced by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. The Peanuts franchise has programmed the show for Black History Month, that much is clear. But are we honoring Franklin for breaking down racial barriers and integrating the most popular comic strip of all time? For blazing a path followed by Beetle Bailey’s Lt. Jack Flap? Or will it suffice to consider the special problems in representation presented by Charlie Brown’s Black friend?

Franklin, inked into existence a little more than half a century ago, is a good kid in a difficult position, created to serve as a token figure. In April of 1968, Schulz received a letter urging him to diversify the strip. This is Franklin’s creation story: A nice white lady from Sherman Oaks—an “active citizen” from a “totally Peanuts-oriented family”—thought it important to promote social change by including Black kids among the characters. The writer, Harriet Glickman, had been moved to act by the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a clause which feels to me somehow hideous to type; this particular juxtaposition of hard news and funny pages feels uniquely obscene (or maybe just especially American).

Peanuts introduced Franklin on July 31, 1968, as an amiable child on a seashore. He rescues Charlie Brown’s beach ball from the ebb current, then helps the hero shore up a shoddy sand castle, while also establishing his own credentials as a boy from a “good” home. As we all know, adults in the world of Peanuts are little more than weak bleats of muted horn, but the strip makes a point of explaining that Franklin’s father is absent only because he is serving in Vietnam.

In the parlance of the times, in the calculus of images, Franklin was a respectable Negro, a mild-mannered vision of a model minority. One official text—The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Comic Strip—describes the character as an outlier in “the neurotic world of Peanuts”—that realm where Charlie Brown is seized by insecurity and frozen with indecision, where Lucy thrives as a shameless sadist, where the gods of transitional objects cursed Linus to shoulder his baby-blue burden forever. Franklin, by contrast, is “calm” and “relatively well-balanced ” and “gets good grades.” He is canonically bland and perfectly innocuous, and he has nonetheless, or maybe therefore, often been marginalized. Thirty-odd years ago on Saturday Night Live, Chris Rock worked up a steamed analysis of the character’s isolation in a Weekend Update editorial: “They don’t invite him to the parties, no. But Snoopy’s dancing his ass off, right?”

Peanuts committed  a notorious social faux pas in 1973, when finessing the dinner-party seating plan for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, a special in which Peppermint Patty pressures Chuck into hosting a meal. The relevant scene relegated Franklin to eat alone in a second-rate chair on the far side of the table. Last autumn, 50 years after the special’s release, a corner of pop-cultural discourse celebrated a special golden-anniversary edition of ritually regarding the segregation-ish arrangement with amused disgust.

This new Franklin special seems conceived for the express purpose of addressing the Franklin discourse. It begins in medias res, in the middle of a soap box derby race, with Charlie Brown and Franklin piloting a car named Friendship, like buddy cops in a franchise film. The car catches air and spins, fast and furiously, and Franklin’s voiceover promises an explanation of how he ended up here—aloft in this car, adjacent to the hero of a great American media property, in an ageless impossible small-town world of hopscotch and root beer.

In what the press materials call an “origin story,” before Franklin lived in the neurotic world of Peanuts, he lived all over the place, like an army brat. There is a pathos in his reflection about never wanting to completely unpack his suitcase. We see him preparing to ship out one more time, carrying a cardboard box to the wayback of a wood-paneled station wagon—and we see this series put a foot wrong in spectacular fashion. When Franklin, loading the car, says goodbye to his old friends, one of them accuses him, correctly, of trying to leave town with his basketball. To clarify: The Black kid gets caught stealing a basketball. Sensational! It is as if the people charged with giving this text a sensitivity read were trying to sabotage the production.

Franklin extends himself to try to make friends in his new town. He is guided in this endeavor by his grandpa’s journal, a handwritten book full of maxims and advice. But these dreams from his forefather all have a ring of How to Win Friends and Influence People, with some of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking sprinkled in. The sayings are lessons in ingratiation, and there is an accidental inkling of tragicomedy in Franklin’s extreme eagerness to please, in his desperate effort to win over Lucy van Pelt. It is almost as if he were Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man trying to make a good impression in Mr. Emerson’s waiting room, and the show were offering an acid comment on Franklin as a casualty of assimilationism.

Schulz fretted about condescending to his audience with Franklin. The creators of the new special demonstrate no such anxieties. It’s slightly embarrassing when Franklin lists his favorite musicians for Charlie Brown’s edification. There’s Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, James Brown—and then Franklin goes on about John Coltrane as if he were Phil Schaap. (Later, when Franklin praises Snoopy for playing a Coltrane record, Snoopy is wearing his Joe Cool shades while leaning against a jukebox.) Franklin is now apparently soulful. Also, he’s here to tell Charlie Brown about Jackie Robinson. Aaugh.

Of course, the special is obliged to address the Thanksgiving snub explicitly. Indeed, this is its dramatic climax. The soap box derby, scored to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” ends in disaster after Sally heedlessly lets an ice-cream cart roll onto the racecourse, causing Charlie Brown and Franklin to go airborne in their car. This is where we came in: According to what passes for logic here, Charlie Brown and Franklin sacrifice victory in order to prevent their peers from risking whatever passes in the Peanuts world for serious bodily harm. The car lands Mario-cathartically. The boys learn that “some things are more important than winning.” Franklin, hailed as a hero, becomes popular.

At the end, with all the characters gathered at a pizza place, Linus tells Franklin that he has saved him a seat, a good seat, right next to Charlie Brown. The moment is making meaning on a strange frequency, addressing Peanuts history as if paying some kind of entertainment reparations or doing metatextual DEI work. The moment combines fan service, hater service, and a rote corporate statement of support for Black Lives Matter. The viewer is afforded the peculiar gratification (if that’s what this sensation is) of witnessing a mass-market cultural brand revise, or reboot, its history of tokenism. I guess they can handle who’s coming to dinner.

Such is the substance of Welcome Home, Franklin, which, like all Peanuts specials of the past few decades, is thinner than a greeting card and incoherent even on its own terms. There is conflict between the characters, then they make up without properly resolving the conflict, just talking broadly about their feelings. It’s unclear what the moral of its story is. All of the children are annoying, except maybe Marcie and Schroeder. Snoopy is fine.

It would be nice to sound Franklin’s depths as if he were Pip on the Pequod, or even Cyborg on Teen Titans Go!; it could be fun just to riff on his flat persona as a façade erected for psychic survival, or to read him as a text about exceptionalism and acceptance. But the script is slim and the guy is dull, though now with an R&B playlist.

There was a time when adults read Peanuts daily and clipped it out of the paper because it distilled real frustrations into lucid four-panel reflections of life. There was a time when children watched Peanuts specials for similar reasons, and also for the music, and also because there was nothing else on. At this late date, we look to Peanuts for a variety of things—comfort food and compound nostalgia and graphic T-shirts somewhat less stupid than those licensed by Looney Tunes. Making cogent statements about American society is contrary to its ambitions; Peanuts is not the place to explore the dynamics that it is here pretending to explore. Franklin’s lack of depth is an essential feature of a figure fated never to be even skin deep.