The success of comedians Mindy Kaling and Issa Rae appear to indicate larger industrial and sociocultural shifts in the 2010s post-network television era toward increasing opportunities for women and people of color. This project examines the two showrunners’ star texts alongside the development of each of their respective series, The Mindy Project (2012–2017) and Insecure (2016–2021), and the corresponding raced and gendered depictions of the characters they have created. A comparison of the careful management of on-and-off screen images and of the exploitation of popular comedy genre conventions bring to light some of the ways in which Kaling and Rae have negotiated the US media industry’s white-centered and market-driven notions of diversity in the last decade. The correspondence between network branding as it relates to conceptualizations of quality and the visibility of Kaling and Rae as celebrity showrunners and performers presents compelling examples of the ways in which stardom, the industrial development of a series, and on-screen representation have become increasingly interlinked.