Grushow is right about all that. But still there was pretty iron-clad logic around renewing it too. All the talent was coming back. The ratings were down but still better than about half the other shows Fox had on in prime time, including The X-Files, which hadn’t yet taken off. Dan McDermott, the VP of current programming, says it would’ve been down to either Grushow or Fox chairwoman Lucie Salhany to make the final call on bringing the show back, though Salhany says it wasn’t that straightforward.
“This wouldn’t have been one person’s decision,” she says. “This would’ve been Sandy’s and the whole network’s, because you never made a decision alone. Rupert [Murdoch] was always in there. So, if In Living Color went, it was all the way from Rupert down. That’s who made the decisions.”
ILC didn’t go down alone. The casualties at Fox that season included Townsend Television, Roc, South Central, and The Sinbad Show, leaving many to question if there was a broader strategy afoot. “There was this sense that Fox was cleaning out the black shows a little,” says Ali Wentworth. “ ‘Ethnic cleansing’ was the term they would’ve used back then.”
As Firestein puts it, “Fox was trying to change their complexion. They were trying to change their brand.”
In December, the network had pulled off a huge coup, outbidding CBS for the rights to air NFL games starting in the 1994–95 season. Most of the top executives who’d helped position Fox as an “alternative network”—Barry Diller, Peter Chernin, Jamie Kellner—were long gone, and one of the last remaining believers in that strategy, Grushow, would leave Fox in September. The network was thinking big now. Murdoch didn’t want a slice of the pie. He wanted the whole thing.
This “ethnic cleansing” didn’t go unnoticed. “We were used as laborers to build up Fox, and once that was done, we were let go,” says Anne-Marie Johnson. “It was like, ‘Okay, hired help, the indentured servitude is over. We are releasing you and thank you for building the mansion.’ Everybody knew that in the black community.” The Reverend Jesse Jackson threatened boycotts—not just of Fox, but of the four major networks—over what he saw as “institutionalized racism.” South Central producer Ralph Farquhar and the show’s star, Tina Lifford, enlisted the support of the Congressional Black Caucus. New York congressman Ed Towns hammered Fox for what he perceived to be “plantation programming.” Fox, he said in a press release, built its network on black programs, but “apparently, as the network moves to become more mainstream, its attitude to positive black programs is we don’t need nor want them anymore.” For In Living Color, it was quite a turnaround from its early days as the black establishment’s pariah to being its cause célèbre.
Grushow, Salhany, and McDermott all say the cancellations weren’t race-related. “Roc ran for three seasons and just, ratings-wise, we didn’t have the juice in the tank to keep going,” says McDermott. “Sinbad never really gelled creatively. Robert Townsend either. We definitely weren’t getting out of urban half hours.” The network still had both Martin and Living Single, and one of the new shows the following season was M.A.N.T.I.S., about a black superhero.
Salhany, who resigned in July of that year, says “there was no outward racism” regarding the cancellations, nor any decision made that “we don’t want any more black programming,” but she acknowledges that “Rupert wanted to broaden the advertiser base,” and that a lot of big brands had deeply ingrained institutional biases. “When I went to sell Arsenio Hall to Chrysler, the guy in charge said a black comedian will never work late-night because no man wants their wife watching a black comedian in bed.”
Interestingly, Arsenio’s show aired its own final episode just a week after the ILC finale. In the face of more competition on late-night television, Arsenio’s ratings had been declining, and not too long after a much-criticized, show-long interview with Louis Farrakhan, the decision was made to pull the plug. As Arsenio said at the time, “Everything must change, and it’s time.”
If there was one person definitely not sorry to see In Living Color go, it was Keenen Ivory Wayans. He was prepping his next film, A Low Down Dirty Shame, but couldn’t help feeling vindicated watching ILC careen off the tracks and into a ditch. “I was glad they had to shut it down because it wasn’t reflective of what I had created,” he says. “If it had been successful without me, I’d be in an institution.”
Many of the cast members had more nuanced views of the show’s demise. Even some who felt like their time at the show was up were disappointed.
“It should’ve gone on,” says Carrey. “It’s ridiculous that it didn’t. I didn’t want to go on with it, but the franchise should’ve been a continuous thing. It was a huge opportunity lost there.”
A few months after ILC was canceled, Firestein got a call from an executive in charge of specials at Fox. “This person said to me, ‘We want to do a couple of In Living Color specials,’ ” he explains. “The idea was Jim had become so mega-huge, they’re like, ‘We still have a contract with him. Let’s make him do these specials.’ I said, ‘I’m pretty sure your contract is null and void. Once you don’t pick up the show, it’s done.’ ” This seemed to be news to the executive but it drove home a point for Firestein. “There were people at Fox who still believed there was some mutation of In Living Color they could do. That, of course, turned out not to be true at all.”
There is a school of thought that ILC could’ve been retooled into something that could’ve run for many years, or even decades. Certainly, SNL has had many down years and even lived through the departure of its creator Lorne Michaels, though he eventually returned to the show. Fox could’ve ridden out some lean years. They might’ve been able to lure Keenen back into the fold. Or maybe Chris Rock would’ve stepped up in Season 6 and given the show the strong voice it had lost. Some point to the relative success of The Chris Rock Show, starting in 1997, as a sign that Rock may have been up to the task. But The Chris Rock Show was a much different show than ILC—more talk, more politics, a lot less sketch—and was on HBO, where it didn’t need the same sort of viewership numbers as on a network. There were rumblings that Fox was hoping to transition ILC from prime time to late night, which could’ve insulated it a little from the constant pressure for ratings. That could’ve worked.
Is Fox’s failure to stick with ILC as NBC stuck with SNL an indication of the same inherent prejudice Firestein bemoaned regarding Seinfeld? Were white shows given chances black shows weren’t? Possibly, although there’s a compelling case to be made that while deep-seated biases play into these decisions, they don’t explain everything. Sometimes decisions are made more as shrugs than proclamations.
Rob Edwards, who was a writer on the ILC pilot, later worked on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air during that show’s first season. The show’s ratings that first season were middling at best, and according to Edwards, few NBC executives really got the show. Most of the cast figured it wouldn’t survive more than a few episodes.
“I just remembered, having lived through In Living Color, saying, ‘Just have heart. The audience will find the show,’ ” says Edwards. But the attitude around NBC was that they should’ve stuck with the Cosby model of black family sitcoms. The Fresh Prince, built around rapper Will Smith, was too out there for mainstream America. Too black. Edwards says the show very well might’ve been canceled if not for one fan: NBC president Brandon Tartikoff’s young daughter. “Brandon’s daughter was a huge fan and couldn’t wait for Dad to bring home tapes. She’d come to the tapings, dance on the set, and do all kinds of stuff during breaks. We all said, ‘That little girl is the most important person on the stage.’ That’s what it took. She said, ‘Daddy, don’t cancel my favorite show.’ That’s how these shows survived.”
35
“Does Anybody Say NBC Has All This White Programming?”
Just a couple weeks after In Living Color’s cancellation, the entire country sat transfixed on a Friday in June watching the television event of the decade: A cavalcade of LAPD cruisers in extraordinarily
low-speed pursuit of a white Ford Bronco carrying ex-football-star-turned-accused-murderer O.J. Simpson. As the chase crawled up the 405 Freeway near Los Angeles, news helicopters followed overhead, and crowds gathered along the route to gawk, cheer, and wave signs reading “Go Juice Go” and “We love the Juice.”
The chase, the murder trial that followed—the entire O.J. saga—seemed both a surreal historical anomaly and a pointed encapsulation of the country’s feelings about race, celebrity, the justice system, and the media. For a lot of former In Living Color writers and cast members, the events hit them the way the start of a new baseball season might hit a recently retired ballplayer: They longed to be back on the field. Within minutes of the Bronco chase, Les Firestein was getting calls from old colleagues essentially pitching sketches for a show that no longer existed. Imagine if we redid the famous Hertz commercial with O.J. sprinting through the airport, but this time the LAPD would be on his tail? What if we crossed the chase with the new Keanu Reeves film Speed, and Keanu had to drive less than 50 mph or the Bronco would explode? What if Rodney King was driving instead of O.J.’s buddy, Al Cowlings?
The following April, months deep into the public circus that was the televised trial, Damon Wayans hosted Saturday Night Live. The gig was undoubtedly a big deal for Damon. This was a triumphant return to the show that had fired him nearly a decade before. Damon revived two ILC characters for the appearance: the homeless drunk Anton Jackson and Blaine Edwards, his half of the “Men on Film” duo. Anton shows up at the O.J. trial, wearing clothes O.J. discarded into the trash can Anton was living in.
There’s not much to the Anton sketch, at least not much in the way of social commentary, which was typical of SNL’s treatment of the O.J. saga. Far from ignoring the events, SNL went all in, with new O.J. sketches every week or two, and “Weekend Update” anchor Norm MacDonald going so hard on O.J., it eventually contributed to his dismissal from the show. But SNL’s sketches treated the saga much the way it would’ve treated any celebrity scandal—rarely, if ever, touching on the stark racial divide the trial exposed. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising: SNL had no black writers at the time, and their two black cast members, Tim Meadows and Ellen Cleghorne, were definitely more Garrett Morris than Eddie Murphy. If Damon’s very appearance on the show playing Anton and Blaine was an acknowledgment of ILC’s impact on pop culture, the show itself was a reminder that real fundamental change is often so gradual as to be imperceptible in the moment.
Damon’s post-ILC career did not blossom as nearly everyone had predicted. He starred in a parade of forgettable films (Major Payne, Celtic Pride, The Great White Hype, Bulletproof), before finally finding a modest hit, back on television with a surprisingly Cosby-ish ABC family sitcom called My Wife and Kids that lasted five seasons and has done well in syndication.
In 2000, Damon starred in Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s fascinating if flawed film that imagined the rise of a modern blackface minstrel show. The film asks hard questions about how blacks are portrayed in the media, and African-Americans’ own role in this portrayal. Bamboozled is perhaps a better idea than it is a movie, but for Damon, who’d lived out these questions for most of his career, it seemed a particularly apt satire. Unfortunately, New Line buried the film, and to those not paying much attention, it just looked like another flop for Damon. His next film, Marci X, in which he plays a cartoonish gangsta rapper, made it feel like he either didn’t get the point of Bamboozled or didn’t care. As Spike Lee himself put it a few years later, “One thing I don’t understand is that Mr. Damon Wayans can do this film and then go do Marci X, the type of film of which Bamboozled is an indictment.”
Keenen seemingly had designs on becoming an action hero after ILC, but audiences didn’t take to him as one. His first film, A Low Down Dirty Shame, an action-comedy that was a little short on both action and comedy, didn’t make much of a splash. Two more films, The Glimmer Man, opposite Steven Seagal, and Most Wanted, with Jon Voight, became unintentional punch lines. His attempt at a talk show, The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show, in 1997 was ill-conceived, if for no other reason than the fact that, as his brothers quickly pointed out to him, Keenen did not particularly like talking to people. Aimed at capturing the audience that had been abandoned when Arsenio’s show went off the air, it ended up competing for that audience with two other shows, the Quincy Jones–produced Vibe, hosted first by Chris Spencer and then by Sinbad, and Paramount’s Magic Hour, with Magic Johnson. In the end, all three shows went down in flames quickly.
As Arsenio put it, “The guys who came after me were simply capitalizing on economics they saw or projected. They canceled each other out by all hitting at the same time. Sinbad, I love him dearly, but the most incredible joke ever written was when Damon Wayans said Sinbad thought that a talk show meant that he talked all the motherfucking time. Keenen had a good barometer as to when to talk and when to shut up, but Keenen wasn’t going to succeed while there were so many people going after the same urban audience.”
Keenen’s biggest win during those years was as a producer of Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, a film Shawn and Marlon co-wrote with ex–In Living Color writer Phil Beauman. Of all the projects the Wayans family worked on during the few years immediately after ILC, it was the one most similar to the show. It lampooned the hardened street dramas then in vogue among black filmmakers.
“When we wrote Don’t Be a Menace, Keenen made us do nineteen drafts before we handed it in to the studio, and then we had to do six more,” says Marlon. “He was tough.” The Wayans brothers didn’t see eye to eye with the film’s director, Paris Barclay, and at one point, Keenen shut down production. When Shawn and Marlon looked at a rough cut of what they had, they were devastated. “The director messed up the movie and we had to rewrite a whole new movie and shoot it in ten days,” says Marlon. The results were far from perfect, but the movie became a minor hit, making nearly forty million dollars on a budget of less than four million. The comedy was broad, and it sometimes felt more like a collection of sketches stitched into a movie than a coherent film, but the same could’ve been said about Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.
Marlon and Shawn also developed a sitcom, The Wayans Bros. After the series debuted in 1995, it was accused of the same things ILC had been accused of five years earlier, the same things, in fact, that Amos ’n Andy had been accused of five decades earlier.
“There’s a fine line between when people are laughing with you and people are laughing at you,” Billie J. Green, president of the NAACP’s Hollywood chapter, told the Los Angeles Times. “Right now, people are laughing at us.” Green criticized several shows, but singled out The Wayans Bros. as the worst offender. “It is not a fair representation of black America. What we’re seeing is like Amos ’n Andy and Stepin Fetchit. In fact, Amos ’n Andy was a better show than what we’re seeing now.”
The criticism was, as Marlon explained, “because we were physical. I believe black comics can be physical without being coons. We overuse the word.”
It was a version of the same argument that had been going on for more than a generation. Did the nation’s checkered history require that black and white comics be judged by different standards? As Shawn put it, “You never see white people going, ‘Jim Carrey’s a coon.’ Never.”
The show was the inaugural offering from the WB, a joint venture between Warner Bros. and the Tribune Broadcasting Company. The choice of the show as the network’s first offering wasn’t surprising, particularly considering that the WB’s president and its chief programmer were both former Fox executives who’d help develop In Living Color, Jamie Kellner and Garth Ancier.
The WB launched around the same time as Paramount’s entry into the world of network television, UPN. Again, it was a former Fox exec at the helm, Lucie Salhany. As Fox steered away from black programming and toward the mainstream, both the WB and UPN slid into the void that had been created. The WB seemed eager to hand out sitcoms to blac
k comics: Besides The Wayans Bros., early WB entries included Cleghorne! (Ellen Cleghorne), The Parent ’Hood (Robert Townsend), The Jamie Foxx Show, and The Steve Harvey Show. UPN appeared just as committed to serving African-American audiences, with shows like Moesha, starring the young singer-actress Brandy Norwood, the LL Cool J sitcom In the House, and Malcolm & Eddie, built around ex–Cosby Show star Malcolm-Jamal Warner and up-and-coming comic Eddie Griffin.
“We recognized there was a demand,” says Kellner. “The black community wasn’t being serviced by the big networks, and when you’re starting out and you’re a counterprogrammer, you’re looking at what’s not sewed up. We probably had the highest percentage of African-American-starred and -produced programs in history for a while on the WB, because we found a bunch of good producers.”
A lot of them were ex–ILC hands. Sandy Frank and Larry Wilmore worked on The Jamie Foxx Show, B. Mark Seabrooks did The Steve Harvey Show, and Greg Fields, Franklyn Ajaye, Barry Douglas, Faye Griffin, Al Sonja Rice, and Michelle Jones all worked on The Parent ’Hood. At the UPN, Salhany admits to a similar counterprogramming mission as Kellner had, but bristles at classifying shows like In the House and Homeboys from Outer Space by the color of most of their cast members.
“It’s unfair for people to say they’re black shows,” she says. “They were funky comedies. Everybody said UPN had all this black programming. Does anybody say NBC has all this white programming?”
The Wayans Bros. lasted until 1999, when it was abruptly canceled. Marlon and Shawn then teamed back up with Keenen and a handful of the writers from his recently canceled talk show to work on an idea for a film they’d begun thinking about years earlier, Scary Movie.
On paper, Scary Movie is a strange idea: It’s a parody of films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, both of which are almost horror movie parodies themselves, full of nods and winks to knowing audiences. Much like Don’t Be a Menace, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and Hollywood Shuffle, Scary Movie—which Keenen directed and produced, and which Marlon and Shawn both had a hand in writing—feels like a collection of set-pieces loosely stacked around a paper-thin narrative. Keenen grew up a fan of Richard Pryor and blaxploitation films, watched up close as his friend Eddie Murphy broke ground with Trading Places and 48 Hrs., and was a part of the cultural renaissance that birthed Spike Lee and John Singleton’s films, but Scary Movie was more in the tradition of another, no less prominent side of Keenen’s personality, the one that loved the unadulterated silliness of Carol Burnett, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films (Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, The Naked Gun).
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