July 31, 2004 - When it comes to representation on television, are Hispanics the new blacks? Cheech Marin hopes so.

"Black shows were a great entree, and then they became part of the landscape . . . (Now) they don't have to be emblematic of a whole generation. They can just be what they want to be," said Marin, who will star as the patriarch of a Mexican family airing a celebrity talk show from their back yard in Fox's new sitcom The Ortegas. On the surface, the numbers sound impressive. This fall, network TV will feature three Hispanic-centered shows: The Ortegas; character actor Luis Guzman's Luis on Fox; and comic George Lopez's self-titled ABC sitcom.

The networks also will feature 14 series with black stars or mostly black casts, including five new series. Yet Hispanics are the largest minority group in the country, the U.S. Census shows.

"We're still in the business of incremental gains," said Felix Sanchez, founder of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts. "We have reached a point where we have been able to impress upon network executives the importance of a black/white diversity. Beyond that, they can't broaden out their concept . . . to include Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans." How did this happen? Follow the money: Damon Wayans' ABC show, My Wife and Kids, and Fox's The Bernie Mac Show proved that a mainstream network could make money with a black cast post-Cosby.

And ratings figures suggest that Hispanics don't watch series with Hispanic casts or lead actors the way black viewers flock to black-centered shows.

But Nielsen Media Research's list of the most popular shows in Hispanic households is packed with Spanish-language soap operas (telenovellas), with no English-language shows to be seen, regardless of the stars.

According to figures from Nielsen, Lopez's show was the 11th-ranked English-language network show among Hispanic households during May's "sweeps" ratings period. American Idol's Wednesday and Tuesday installments ranked first and second, respectively, and NBC's stunt show Fear Factor was third.

"I know that 65 percent of the people that watch my show are Anglo . . . and that really is more important to me than drawing a Hispanic audience," said Lopez, whose show is the first network sitcom since Chico and the Man starring a Hispanic actor to find mainstream success.

A longtime character actor known for playing the heavy in films such as Traffic and Anger Management, Guzman said that he got his first acting job by "killing the (casting director) with my eyes."

He's playing against that image in "Luis," a sitcom in which he stars as the owner of a doughnut shop in Spanish Harlem.

"I just think some people are set in their ways. . . . My mother still watches the novellas," said Guzman, who was born in Puerto Rico, raised in Manhattan and lives in Vermont.

"Until someone is offered an alternative like ours, they stay with what they know." Some network officials said that it's a supply-and-demand issue: Mainstream shows must fight for Hispanic viewers with two Spanish-language TV networks, Univision and Telemundo, that have served Hispanic communities for years.

WB Entertainment President Jordan Levin said that his network's experiment in Hispanic-centered comedy, last season's Greetings From Tucson, was canceled when advertisers failed to support the show.

"It felt like we were the strongest advocates for the show, in some cases," said Levin. "There was such an outcry on the part of advertisers for a Hispanic program. And yet we got no additional (advertising) benefit for putting it on."

Some say that the problem is less about viewer response than viewer measurement, maintaining that Nielsen simply doesn't count Hispanic viewers accurately.

But Karen Gyimesi, vice president of marketing and communications for Nielsen, said that the problems in measuring Hispanic viewer ship may stem more from differences in culture: Those who come from countries where TV viewing is not measured may not understand the company's efforts.

The viewer potential seems enormous. One of every six people age 18 to 34 is Hispanic, and 84 percent of the growth in the 18-to-49 group, the one prized by TV advertisers, was Hispanic, according to an analysis of Nielsen numbers by Univision reported last year in Media Life magazine.