“Most of the time, the joke is on the media, on white people, on white fear,” says Edwards. “ ‘Homeboy Shopping Network’ divided the staff. That one seemed to come from a different point of view where the people being made fun of were poor black people.” It was certainly possible to see Wiz and Ice as just a new version of the same Stepin Fetchit stereotypes Edwards had skewered in his 1934 NAACP Image Awards sketch. “For us black writers, it seemed like it was punching down, which you’re not supposed to do in comedy. It seemed like making fun of people who didn’t need to be made fun of.” The same, he says, applied to “Men on Film.” In both cases though, political righteousness proved less important than comedic effectiveness. “Sometimes when you take something to the stage and it gets a laugh, the laugh wins out,” he says. “Ultimately, we lost the battle.”
It was the first battle in a war that would last as long as the show itself.
Keenen had to be convinced to host In Living Color. He had no real interest in getting onstage to welcome the audience and introduce everyone. But there was a pervading feeling that not only would Keenen’s presence give the show a sense of cohesion—as opposed to being a bunch of disconnected sketches—Fox felt it would make it clear that the creative force behind these racially charged sketches was a black man.
For the pilot, the plan was to run through the show on two consecutive nights, in front of two different audiences. That way, they’d have two takes of every sketch. If necessary, they could do “pickups”—filming extra bits that didn’t work in the original takes—after the audience left.
The first night, after Tommy Davidson warmed up the crowd with some standup, Keenen opened the show by introducing the Fly Girls and the show’s DJ, a guy known as DJ Daddy Mack, who was dressed in a tall black top hat with a big Africa emblem on the front of it. Keenen then wandered backstage to introduce the cast and crew.
“I’ll tell you what I’m most proud of,” he says to the camera. “Unlike other shows, I’ve got nothing but qualified black people backstage making decisions.” With that, he opens the writers’ room door and a bunch of white writers scurry out. He claims they’re the cleaning staff. He introduces a black cleaning lady as the head writer.
“Now I’m going to introduce you to our cast,” he continues. “We went nationwide to find the most talented people in the country.” He then introduces “Damon Wayans,” “Kim Wayans,” “Crystal Wayans,” “TJ Wayans,” “Toney Wayans,” “Tommy Wayans,” and so on. Next, Keenen boasts about how integrated the show is. “People of all races working together as one big happy family,” he says as he opens a door marked, “White Cast Members Only.” Behind it are Carrey and Coffield. He’s shining shoes. She’s ironing. They’re both grinning broadly and singing, “Camp Town Ladies.” Keenen smiles. “Oh, those people. Always singing, always happy.” It was a whip-smart, playfully barbed reversal of the racial dynamics that had ruled television since the medium’s invention.
Back in front of the audience, Keenen is confronted by the network’s “censors,” who make it clear that most of what Keenen had been planning for the pilot is unacceptable. Keenen makes a show of defiance. “I refuse to be silenced,” he tells the audience. “We had this really great sketch that I wanted to do for you anyway. It started off like this: See, Ronald Reagan in 1975 . . .” At this point, Keenen is rendered inaudible by the sound of a loud, long beep. He continues ranting, but can’t be heard. The bit is a direct homage to—or, less charitably, a rip-off of—a routine from The Richard Pryor Show more than a decade earlier.
The first set-piece is the “Love Connection” sketch with Coles as a gold-digging Robin Givens, Keenen as Tyson, and Carrey as the show’s host, Chuck Woolery. Later in the show, Davidson does his Sammy Davis Jr. as Mandela. Dressed in a Star of David necklace, pinkie rings, and an African dashiki, Davidson turns the song “Candy Man” into “Mandy Man”: “Who can take apartheid/Turn it inside out/Show those Afrikaans what this freedom gig’s about?/The Mandy Man can . . . The Mandy Man can but they locked me in the can and threw the key away.”
Coffield pops up twice as part of a recurring meta-routine, playing an uptight white woman writing a letter to the network to complain about the show. “I realize in the past blacks have suffered some . . . unpleasantness,” she dictates aloud, “with that whole slavery thing and all, and that some resentment may be justified. Maybe it would help you if I shared with you a little secret I know. Just take a deep breath and say to yourselves, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but hundreds of years of oppression may never harm me.’ ”
There are other short interludes. The two “Great Moments in Black History” sketches—one with Toney Riley as a lazy gas station attendant who “invents” self-serve gas stations by telling a customer to “Get it your damn self!”; the other with Jeff Joseph as Slick Johnson, the first black man on the moon, left behind by the crew (and subsequently erased from history) when the mission needs to jettison weight for the return to Earth—are in and out in about a minute. A spoof of the show 227, called “Too-Too Ethnic,” is less than thirty seconds.
Keenen’s instincts seemed to be spot-on. For “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” a truck full of electronics and other “stolen” goods was driven onto the soundstage as a prop.
“When we did a rehearsal,” says Bright, “there was one of those smaller satellite dishes in the truck and Keenen said, ‘No, I want one of those big, giant satellite dishes.’ ” Bright wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble.
“It’s going to be awkward and hard to get that out of the truck,” he told Keenen.
“No, man, I want the big one,” Keenen insisted.
For the pilot taping, Bright got a huge dish with the words “Property of NASA” on it. Bright laughs. “Keenen was right. I remember him lugging that satellite dish out of the truck the first time. The big one was so much funnier.”
As the sketch was being filmed, Paul Miller was in the control booth. The technical staff was laughing uncontrollably. The show’s lighting director, an older white man, turned to Miller, a little sheepishly.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” he said about the “Homeboy” sketch. “Is this okay to say?”
Miller nodded. “Yeah, because Keenen is saying it. It wouldn’t be okay for you or me to say, but it’s okay for Keenen.”
The pilot’s tone was consistently cutting without ever falling into outright nastiness. It had a clear point of view. Edwards recalls that it took the crowd a sketch or two to get the rhythm of the show. Then, he says, the place went nuts.
“Black audiences don’t just laugh at stuff, we stomp our feet, we high-five,” he says. “People were literally running up and down the aisles during the taping, high-fiving each other. One of the executives turned to me and said, ‘Did you pay these guys to do that?’ ”
The second show, the next night, went just as well, if not better.
“I’ve never done a show that felt that way in front of an audience,” says Bright, who later became the co-creator of Friends. “At Friends, I’d never seen a first taping of anything where the audience was that crazy. They were on fire, both audiences. It was like the show had been on forever.” After the second show, Bright encountered Keenen backstage. “Keenen wasn’t an emotional, touchy-feely guy, and when we finished the second show, he physically lifted me up in the air and gave me this big bear hug. It can’t go better than that.”
Kim Wayans, who, in addition to her part in “The Wrath of Farrakhan,” also appeared in “Go On Girl” and “Too-Too Ethnic,” says the energy in the air was palpable. “You could feel something new, exciting, and fresh happening,” she says. “After the pilot, we all knew we had something special.”
14
“If He Ain’t Got No Jokes, I Don’t Need Him”
Keenen walked toward the conference room at Fox’s Executive Office Building not knowing what to expect. The pilot had gone great, but since then he’d heard a lot of nothing from the
network. There was research to be done. They were testing it. Today’s meeting was with something called “The Research Group.” Both Barry Diller and Peter Chernin were going to be there too.
Keenen liked Diller and Chernin and he thought they liked the show. Yet months had gone by since the pilot with no word of whether it would get ordered as a series. The cast members were under holding deals but had scattered to the wind. Damon, Jim, and Tommy were doing standup. Kim Wayans got a temp job as a secretary at an oil company in downtown Los Angeles. Coffield and Coles went to New York. All would occasionally call Keenen to check in. He wished he had more to tell them. Some began to assume the worst. A recent call from Coffield was typical.
“I just got offered a play in New York,” she told him.
“What are you asking?”
“I’m asking if you have any idea if this thing’s going to get picked up.”
“No idea,” he told her. “Just do the play.”
Keenen hoped this meeting would start to clear things up, though he wasn’t expecting much. When he sat down, he saw who The Research Group was: five stiff-looking white guys in dark suits and starched shirts. “I felt like I was sitting with the NSA,” he says. “Not a funny bone in their bodies.”
They told him about the work they’d been doing. They’d been showing the pilot to focus groups and asking people how it made them feel.
“Wow,” Keenen said, a little taken aback. “That’s deep.”
“Tell me what your vision is for the show,” said one of the suits.
Keenen told them it was going to be fresh and new. “It’s going to be revolutionary!” he said excitedly.
There was silence in the room. Keenen quickly divined that to these five men in dark suits, “revolutionary” wasn’t a good thing. It conjured visions of Black Panthers and Molotov cocktails. Of Malcolm X’s demand for freedom, justice, and equality “by any means necessary.” He tried to assuage their fears.
“No, not take-over-the-world revolutionary. Revolutionary in terms of funny.”
The room exhaled. The Research Group seemed satisfied. He’d never seen any of the men before that day, and once the meeting was over, he never saw any of them again.
Far from being an odd aberration, the meeting was a pretty good indicator of what went on for about nine months following the making of the pilot. Fox said they wanted edgy programming, but now that they had it in their hands, they weren’t sure what to do with it. It’s not that they didn’t like the show. They just didn’t know how everyone else would react to it.
“It was really, really funny but people were nervous to put the pilot on,” says Joe Davola, the VP of development who oversaw the show. “You’re talking about a Fox network that’s run by white executives. Everybody was oversensitive. We didn’t want to offend too many people.”
Diller, in particular, was very worried about being perceived as racist. The solution, Diller and others at Fox thought, was to get buy-in from prominent African-American groups. The pilot was screened for members of the NAACP and the Urban League. Fox reached out to C. Delores Tucker, a civil rights activist who later became a prominent crusader against rap music, and Alvin Poussaint, another activist who was a consultant on The Cosby Show. Meetings were arranged with various interest groups. Keenen was appalled and refused to attend.
“A couple of groups wanted to be brought on as consultants which Keenen thought was a bribe,” says Eric Gold. The quid pro quo was unstated but understood: If Fox paid a consulting fee, the groups wouldn’t make a fuss. “Keenen didn’t like it and wouldn’t even meet with them.”
As one story goes, at one point the NAACP tried to pressure Keenen by asking how many black writers and producers he’d hired. He challenged them to send over a list of all the black writers and producers they knew. They didn’t have any such list and that was the end of that. Keenen found the whole idea of checking his work with other black people galling. Did Woody Allen need a thumbs-up from the Anti-Defamation League before he released a film? Did studios clear every John Hughes movie with suburban white people?
“At one point, Fox brought this old black man that they wanted to hire as a consultant to the show,” says Keenen. “They told me how he’d marched with Dr. King and had a lump on the side of his head from when he got beat up. I said, ‘I respect all he has done, but if he ain’t got no jokes, I don’t need him. He’s no blacker than me. I don’t need him to validate me.’ ”
Gold was impressed. “His show’s future was on the line when it was sitting on the shelf. He stood up, erect, and said, ‘I’m not doing it that way.’ Can you imagine this? Where did this guy learn this kind of backbone?”
Fox had reasons to be optimistic about In Living Color. All around, the seeds planted in the earlier parts of the decade were beginning to flower. Arsenio’s talk show was becoming a cultural phenomenon. The Cosby Show was the top-rated show on television. Its spinoff, A Different World, was also a hit. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a vivid, funny, complex, and disturbing film that presented a slice of black life in Brooklyn that seemed a million miles away from the Huxtables’ home address, had been nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy’s directorial debut, which he starred in alongside his idols (Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx), his friends (Arsenio, Robin Harris), and his family (Charlie Murphy, Ray Murphy), was released in late 1989 to middling reviews but strong box office returns, eventually earning nearly one hundred million dollars. And in January 1990, Fox spun off a strange little cartoon family sitcom called The Simpsons from The Tracey Ullman Show. The early reviews were glowing.
Still, it wasn’t clear what might prod the network’s top brass into making a decision about ILC. Time dragged on. Nearly nine months had passed since they turned in the pilot and still no word. Tamara Rawitt tried to force their hand. She slipped videotape copies of the pilot to everyone she knew in the industry. The tapes got passed around. Davola gave out copies too.
Martha Frankel, a writer for Details magazine, went to dinner one night in Los Angeles with Rawitt and another friend. At dinner, Rawitt bemoaned the situation. She’d helped build this show from the ground up, they’d made this amazing pilot, everyone loved it, but Fox wouldn’t put it on.
Rawitt handed her a videotape, and when Frankel got back to her hotel, she popped it in the VCR. “It was truly the funniest thing I’d ever seen,” Frankel says. The following night, she invited several friends to her room and showed it to them. “We were screaming with laughter.” She called Rawitt and asked if she could write a story about the pilot. Rawitt encouraged her to.
Frankel wrote a page-long rave about the pilot, asking pointedly why Fox was sitting on it. When the issue hit newsstands, Rawitt ripped the article out and sent it to Diller’s office.
“I said, ‘Now what are you afraid of?’ The next day we got a pickup for eight episodes.”
Changes had to be made before the first episode aired. An hour of sketches every week was too much. Too much for the audience and too much for the creators. ILC was going to work better as a half-hour show, something Rawitt says she figured from the outset. Leave the audience wanting more.
Much to the chagrin of Chris Albrecht and Carmi Zlotnik, HBO, who produced the pilot, didn’t have the stomach to hang in there for the series. This wasn’t a reflection of the controversies the show might engender, it was a money issue. Michael Fuchs, the head of HBO, wasn’t prepared to “deficit finance” ILC—essentially, lose money in the short run in the hopes of turning a big profit if and when the series went into syndication.
“HBO really didn’t understand what [deficit financing] meant,” says Zlotnik. “When the full recognition of the financial responsibility dawned on them, they said, ‘No.’ ”
Without HBO, the project got passed to Fox’s own studio arm, Twentieth Television, in what was, at the time, an unusual arrangement. In 1970, the FCC had put in place a set of financial interest and syndication rules—or fin-syn rules—that
prevented networks from owning most of the prime-time programs they aired or airing syndicated programming in which they had a financial stake. This led to the rise of powerful independent production studios like Carsey-Werner, which produced and owned The Cosby Show, A Different World, and Roseanne, as well as Norman Lear’s Tandem Productions, which had a stable of shows that included All in the Family, Good Times, Sanford and Son, and Diff’rent Strokes. However, throughout the eighties, the fin-syn rules were relaxed, which allowed Fox to do the exact thing the rules had originally set out to forbid: both own and air a show, in this case In Living Color. It was an arrangement that would eventually have far-reaching consequences for the show and its creators. (The fin-syn rules would be eliminated completely in 1993, making ILC’s situation commonplace in the decades to follow.)
Although Zlotnik and Albrecht were disappointed to no longer be involved, Zlotnik says the experience sparked HBO to turn its attention toward original programming, a development that in the next two decades changed the face of television completely.
“The reason we were able to build everything that we did at HBO in some ways goes back to In Living Color,” says Zlotnik. Original programming had been something of a redheaded stepchild at HBO, with a relatively small budget and a similarly scaled ambition among the top executives. Now they’d produced the ILC pilot but handed the show to Fox because of that lack of ambition. Once the show became a hit, says Zlotnik, “Chris [Albrecht] used that as leverage to say, ‘I was able to develop a big hit that’s become good business for Fox. It could’ve been for HBO. I can do this more than once.” By 1990, he’d convinced the network to start HBO Independent Productions, which produced shows like Martin and Everybody Loves Raymond. The next step was to convince HBO he could make shows for their network too. Once Albrecht was installed as head of programming, shows like Sex and the City, Band of Brothers, and The Sopranos ushered in the next so-called Golden Age of Television. Albrecht subsequently became the company’s CEO. “I trace that all back to the inflection point of In Living Color,” says Zlotnik, “which proved Chris had an acumen for relationships with talent and producing shows that can make money.”
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