Who the hell is ABC calling a caveman? - Racist sitcom from hack ad writers

The new fall lineup is in full swing and there is one show which stands out for me. The show is “Cavemen”, it’s on ABC, and it is easily the most racist show I have ever seen. I never thought any network would touch NBC’s insultingly unrealistic portrayal of ten 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 now, the caveman 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). Because 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 thirty-second ad. But what writer can’t be funny for thirty 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 (watching these hacks try to sputter out an explanation as the oxygen leaves their brains – now that’s funny).

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 gettin’ 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,” delivered by a caveman named Maurice. Again, I’m not making this up.

What on earth made Steve McPherson think that Joe Lawson, a hack copywriter from an ad agency in Virginia, could write a compelling sitcom? After all, you learn the skills you need to be an advertising copywriter in 8th grade. And 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. 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. Do yourself a favor, Steve McPherson, 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 idiots like Joe Lawson, Josh Gordon, and Will Speck say.

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”.