“I want to clarify a comment I made yesterday. I made a mistake. We do have a Latinx writer on the #MagnumPI staff, and she is an alumnus of the CBS Writers Mentoring Program @NHMC,” Lenkov wrote on his Twitter account.
I want to clarify a comment I made yesterday. I made a mistake. We do have a Latinx writer on the #MagnumPI staff, and she is an alumnus of the CBS Writers Mentoring Program @NHMC
— Peter M. Lenkov (@PLenkov) August 6, 2018
On Sunday, Lenkov and fellow executive producer Eric Guggenheim said they didn’t have any Latinx in the writers room for the reboot of the popular CBS series, which stars the Mexican-American Jay Hernandez in the title role.
Here is what Lenkov said.
“When you’re staffing the show, it’s incredibly hard to find writers,” he replied to a question from a critic during the show’s TCA panel on Sunday. “We have a very diverse writers room, it just so happens that we don’t have any [Latinax].”
Guggenheim added that it’s not like they’re going to pretend that Hernandez’s version of Magnum isn’t a different nationality compared to Tom Selleck. “We’re certainly not blind to the fact that he’s Latino,” Guggenheim said. “It is something that is acknowledged.”
The gender-neutral term “Latinx” has become more commonplace in recent years as a replacement for “Latino” or “Latina,” but it still is used as a reference to Latin-American cultural or racial identity. The plural is “Latinxs.”