Posted on 07/26/2007 10:19:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The producers of ABC's new sitcom Cavemen, based on a series of popular advertisements for the insurance company Geico, were ready to defend themselves against charges of rampant commercialism. But the charge that their show about put-upon Cro-Magnons in the modern world has racist undertones took them by surprise.
''I actually didn't know we would catch so much hell,'' Cavemen writer Joe Lawson ruefully told a room full of highly critical critics at a gathering of North American television writers here Wednesday. ``That's a pleasant surprise.''
Cavemen, which features shaggy Cro-Magnons trying to make their way through a hostile Homo Sapiens world, won't even air until October but is already drenched in its second wave of controversy.
The first came in May when ABC announced it was converting a handful of 30-second insurance commercials into a half-hour series. The Cavemen producers had to endure a seemingly endless round of cracks like the one on Saturday Night Live's satirical Weekend Update newscast, which announced NBC would counter with a new drama called 1-800-Mattress.
But as the show's pilot episode began circulating in Hollywood, so did a new round of criticism: that Cavemen trafficked in the very racial caricatures it was supposed to be lampooning. By depicting the Cro-Magnons as good dancers, great athletes and grand sexual partners, the show's detractors argued, Cavemen was using black stereotypes for cheap racist laughs. ''We finally get to laugh at all the stereotypes in the world directed at cavemen, without feeling guilty,'' wrote one Hollywood blogger. ABC's decision to reshoot the pilot didn't exactly help.
Wednesday's panel discussion here was the first time Cavemen producers have discussed the show in public, and they said people are reading too much into what they called a ''fish out of water'' story.
''Unfortunately, in our society, if you pick an offensive stereotype of any kind, it's going to bump into some ethnic group,'' said Mike Schiff, one of the executive producers. ``Is the show about race relations? No. Is that a background to the show? Yes, of course.''
Lawson, who wrote the original Geico commercials as well as the pilot, said that if the Cro-Magnons are an allegorical stand-in for anybody, it's not black people but outsiders.
''As human beings, we all have that need to fit in,'' he said. ``It's really a show about acclimation more than anything, and that's something that everybody deals with, doesn't matter if you're a minority or not.''
Not everybody -- in fact, almost nobody -- in the room was buying it, partly because some of the Cavemen story lines the producers offered as evidence the show isn't about race (for instance, one of the cavemen concealing the fact that he's dating a Homo Sapiens woman, for fear his Cro Magnon friends won't like it) sounded like race was exactly what they were about.
The cavemen are ''known for their athletic prowess, their sexual prowess, their dancing,'' complained one critic, to which director Josh Gordon deadpanned: ``They're Jewish.''
So many questions were about hot-button racial topics that the producers actually seemed relieved when anybody circled back to the subject of commercialism. When one critic sarcastically asked if the gecko lizard who stars in another group of Geico commercials would be making a guest appearance on Cavemen, Gordon replied that it ``depends on how ratings are.''
And he was sympathetic to the charge of another critic that Cavemen suffered ''a failure in anthropological verisimilitude'' by making its Cro-Magnons look more like Neanderthals and suggested that the show fire all its technical advisors.
''If we had technical advisors,'' Gordon conceded, ``we would probably fire them.''
I thought that might be Jobs but wasn’t sure. I guess he’s always been the more stylish of the two.
Ah, yes, they invented their own politically incorrect epithets! I hope the Caveman show does the same.
I'm not looking for deep intellectual stimulation here, just some chewing gum for my brain.
“I’m not looking for deep intellectual stimulation here, just some chewing gum for my brain.”
I like mine visual-imput, too, but I prefer it in text form. More scope for the imagination that way.
I’ll bet it’s the same people who yelled about a Star Wars movie with some kind of shuffling creature and said that it was racist.
The racists are the people who see these movies and immediately say “it’s about this racial group”.
“By depicting the Cro-Magnons as good dancers, great athletes and grand sexual partners . . .
Wait a minute . . . could . . . could I be? Hells Bells, I’m a Cro Magnon!
I wish they’d have a commercial with the cavemen roasting the gecko on a spit — along with a guy saying, “Can you hear me now?”
One criticism that would personally point to is that the series is similar to Star Wars' Expanded Universe's (the novels and such) treatment of aliens. Aliens are enslaved. There is a pro-human bias. Aliens are seen as filthy and stupid.
As with the cavemen (who are apparently Neanderthals or other non-homo sapiens sapiens) a big point is that aliens are not human. As such, some aliens would be stupider and filthier than humans. Cavemen are also not modern humans.
As opposed to such aliens or Neanderthals, non-European descendants are not on another level--neither lower nor higher--than European descendants. Genetically, the arguments for human races are very weak. To compare non-European descendants to aliens who supposedly underwent and are at another level in the evolution of their species, or to do the same with an extinct branch of humanity is bad, even though the Star Wars 'leadership' and the makers of "Cavemen" probably had good intentions.
Star Wars has finally seemed to have discovered that its kind-intent/not-so-great-result alien/racism parallel was not such a good idea, and its sort of alarming when a 'good character' comments that an alien is too stupid for a particular job, because of the trend of substituting aliens for non-European descendants. Cavemen still has this issue.
If they’re supposed to be Cro-Magnons, then they should be ‘modern’ humans. Cro-Magnons were homo sapiens sapiens who went to Europe, and maybe drove Neanderthals to extinction.
Yes, I’m sure all the cavemen are pissed beyond belief. So, I’ll ping a couple.....*snort*...personally I love cavemen...in furs and stuff. What’s to hate?
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