THE NEW FALL LINEUP IS IN FULL SWING and there is one show which stands out for me — “Cavemen.” It’s on ABC, and it is easily the most racist show in TV history.
I never thought any network would touch NBC’s insultingly unrealistic portrayal of 10 people living and working in New York City who don’t know a single black person socially (on “Seinfeld” and “Friends”), but ABC has done it.
Regardless of what the network says, the cavemen are really black guys with hairy faces — and that’s how they’re written. I can’t imagine why ABC president Steve McPherson green-lighted this steaming pile of crap, but just like the show’s writers (Joe Lawson, Josh Gordon, and Will Speck), I’m sending him a copy of this column. And when I see any of them, it’s on (metaphorically speaking, of course). This show about three token black guys living in San Diego (written, ironically, by three token white guys living in L.A.) would only be slightly less racist and offensive if they put the guys in blackface.
As a writer and comedian, I give Joe Lawson credit for a funny premise — in a 30-second ad. But what writer can’t be funny for 30 seconds? The joke in the commercials wasn’t the fact that the cavemen were the punchline, it was the fact that they existed at all.
So the comedy came from their righteous indignation at having to justify their existence — which ran the gamut from the angry caveman boom operator who storms off a set after being insulted by an anchorman to the mama’s boy caveman having an “existential meltdown” in his psychiatrist’s office. But as a black man, their execution makes me want to go Sprewell on ’em.
Before you say, “Come on, Kenny, it’s not that bad. Maybe they’re supposed to be a generic minority,” let me assure you these are not your mother’s Geico cavemen. Look at some of the dialogue Joe, Josh and Will gave us when the cavemen were talking about dating “Sapes,” or Homo Sapiens (their pathetic metaphor for interracial couples): “Stick to your kind, crave the cave.”“Keep your penis in your genus.” And my personal favorite, “She’s not ashamed of you, she’s ashamed of herself... her yearnings, her desires. Sapien women see us as the forbidden fruit. They think that we’ll take them to a place, sexually, that they’ve never been before... you gave her a little taste of something that she ain’t get-tin’ nowhere else. And afterwards, they feel naked, utterly transformed. Walking down the street they think to themselves, ‘everyone can tell, everyone knows what I’ve done.’ So they have to drive their impulses underground.”
I’m not making this up. What on earth made Steve McPherson think that Joe Lawson, a copywriter from an ad agency in Virginia, could write a compelling sitcom? What made him think these three white guys could back up their pitch (“a send-up of race the way ‘3rd Rock from the Sun’ is an analysis of human nature”) and actually write black people? ABC knew something was wrong because the show was “retooled” and “recast,” and the original pilot (which, God willing, nobody will see) had to be “reshot” after somebody at the network (rightly) thought there may be a problem with the cavemen’s original character traits: Athleticism, sexual prowess and laziness.
Again — I’m not making this up. In other words, the show that Joey, Joshie and Willie actually wrote wasn’t good enough, but ABC was already committed, so they’re trying to make it work. Steve McPherson should do himself a favor and stop trying. It’s not getting any better. It’s the wrong show, by the wrong guys, at the wrong time.
It’s not like there aren’t enough actual minority groups to write about — ABC didn’t have to invent a new one in order to put another “fish-out-of-water” sitcom on the air.
The fish-out-of-water isn’t funny any-more, and the premise is flawed in the first place. We don’t live in an America where white is the “norm” and everything else is “other,” despite what three white writers may think.
But if that’s what the networks want, I’ve got a pitch of my own: It’s a show about a black advice columnist in Santa Monica who dates out-of-control or over-the-hill starlets and turns their lives and careers around. I call it “Advice & Consent” — and it can’t possibly be worse than “Cavemen.”
KENNY MACK is a writer and comedian living in Santa Monica. He by any TV executive with the power to green-light a project at
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 10, 2007. Read the original PDF.