It's a turn of progress not just in the representation of black British people on TV, but also in the way the industry treats black British actors. Just over a year ago, black British actor David Oyelowo starred as Martin Luther King in Oscar winning film Selma, the story of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama. To some, Oyelowo cast as Martin Luther King was a bit odd, in the same way it was odd to see Idris Elba and Naomie Harris play Nelson and Winnie Mandela in Long Walk To Freedom.Why was prime British acting talent being exported overseas? In an interview with Radio Times, Oyelowo was asked exactly that.He replied: "I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that, if it's not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don't understand. And I thought, 'OK – you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me. I can't live with that. So I've got to get out.'“There’s a string of black British actors passing through where I live now in LA. We don’t have Downton Abbey, or Call the Midwife, or Peaky Blinders, or the fiftieth iteration of Pride and Prejudice. We’re not in those. And it’s frustrating because it doesn’t have to be that way. I shouldn’t have to feel like I have to move to America to have a notable career.”Period dramas aside, fictionalised accounts of the black British experience on television – whether historical or modern day – are few and far between (except for the ever-reliable Eastenders). A search for black British television shows yields a meagre list of less than a dozen programmes over the past few decades. Better characters – or simply just more work for actors – might be found abroad.We have become used to certain types of portrayal of black characters in TV over the years. The feel-good, family values, sitcom like US export the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. The “heart-warming” television where a member of a black family gets into mild scrapes but it’s ok because everything always turns out alright in the end. The kind of TV in which it’s glaringly obvious that the creators are feeling the weight of writing perfect characters in order to challenge negative stereotypes of blackness – an effect that ends up as limiting and narrow as depictions of black folks as criminals and sidekicks.Instead, the characters in Undercover are interesting and complex. Good writing and acting means that a character’s bad decisions are met with audience sympathy rather than disdain. Whatever you think of them, it isn’t binary. Race neither comes first or last – it’s just a part of who these characters are. Despite some initial reviews calling the programme "so much more than about race", in my opinion, Undercover has everything to do with race.