Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  The season’s most memorable performance—at least, in Rosie Perez’s opinion—was one that never happened. In early March, Tupac Shakur was booked to perform. Tupac was a good friend of Perez’s and, by extension, of the show. He’d just released his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., which would eventually sell more than a million copies and spawn two iconic singles, “Keep Ya Head Up” and “Holler If Ya Hear Me.” Sitting in a limo outside of the production office before his scheduled performance, Tupac and several friends decided to spark up a joint. Nobody bothered to ask the limo driver if he was okay with that. He wasn’t. An argument ensued, and when the driver walked toward the trunk of the car, Tupac assumed he was getting a gun. Fearing for their lives, Tupac and his friends pounced on the driver. A fight ensued. When the melee cleared, Tupac decamped to the show’s green room, which is where the police found him when they arrived. “The driver called the police,” says Perez.

  The scene grew more intense. The Fly Girls were told to stay in their dressing rooms, because as Lisa Joann Thompson explains, “Tupac was causing a scene, yelling, fighting, and being obnoxious. Rosie was so pissed. She was yelling. Tupac was throwing his hands around. He was all hyped up.”

  Deidre Lang recalls Perez in hysterics: “Rosie was like, ‘Tupac, no! Tupac, don’t fight him!’ ”

  David Alan Grier had been napping in his dressing room when he heard the commotion. “I get up and go out my door and there are a bunch of policemen running up and down the hallway,” says Grier. He was annoyed. “I’m like, ‘Why are these extras allowed back here in our dressing room?’ I complained to the stage manager and he’s like, ‘No, dude. Those are real police.’ ”

  Finally, after several minutes of mayhem, the cops subdued Tupac. “The police slam Tupac up against the wall, handcuff him, and cart him off to jail!” says Perez. “I was flabbergasted. It was crazy town.” Tupac’s performance was, needless to say, canceled. Heavy D & the Boyz performed in his place.

  “That was a typical night of In Living Color,” says Grier.

  It took the public time to catch up with the show’s problems. While the ratings dipped some in the weeks after Keenen, Damon, and Marlon left, they stayed reasonably strong until early April. Then the bottom fell out. Suddenly a show that had been reliably delivering seventeen to twenty million viewers was struggling to reach twelve or thirteen million. Fox’s solution: more guest stars. The back half of the season included a glut of cameos. Some of them made a certain amount of sense (Mario Van Peebles, Sherman Hemsley), some a little less so (James Brown, Rodney Dangerfield), some none at all (Super Dave Osborne).

  “Generally, when you see something incongruous to a show,” says Firestein, “and you’re like, ‘What the fuck is that person doing there?’—go back to the network and somewhere there’s a memo about sweeps, unquestionably.” There were these sorts of “fishing expeditions,” as Firestein calls them, to try to net someone the network could highlight in on-air promos. Almost always, the biggest names declined until “eventually as you’re edging toward shooting, it’s like, ‘Super Dave is willing to do it.’ Then Fox goes, ‘We love Super Dave!’ ”

  This was the kind of stuff Keenen had generally refused to submit to. On a personal level, Keenen had intimidated some of the Fox executives in a way that Firestein, Veasey, and Fields did not. As the show’s creator and part-owner, he also had more leverage. Now, when Fox wanted Super Dave, Fox got Super Dave.

  Guest stars often felt shoehorned into the show in a way that flattered neither the show nor the guest. Case in point: Dangerfield. His appearance seems completely contrived, and not very well contrived at that. The sketch opens with David Alan Grier and Jamie Foxx as cops who believe they’ve just pulled over Rodney King. But then Dangerfield emerges from the car—Grier actually says, “Wait a minute! It’s Rodney Dangerfield!”—and essentially just does a minute and a half of his standup act, reeling off a half dozen or so one-liners on little or no pretext. It’s not that the jokes weren’t funny; they simply made no sense in the context of the show. It felt like the writers and the cast around him were barely trying.

  “That was kind of a down time,” says Larry Wilmore. “Morale was down. It just never quite felt the same when Keenen was gone.”

  The show was limping toward the season’s finale. It was as if Kim and Shawn’s protest—or at least their attitude—was contagious. In an interview a couple months after Keenen’s departure, Grier didn’t bother masking his disdain.

  “I said a long time ago that if Keenen ever were hit by a car on the way to the studio, we wouldn’t last six weeks,” he told a newspaper reporter. “It was his show. It was his concept. His idea. He pointed us in a specific artistic direction. Right now, we’re doing shows, but we don’t have that artistic point of view any longer. It’s like we’re in the water, but we really don’t have a rudder.”

  Grier’s public badmouthing undermined the new production team and hung their dirty laundry out for the world to see. But it was an accurate reading of the cast’s mood. Coffield too wanted out.

  “I felt like I’d gotten to this place in terms of the different characters I was playing and the characters I wanted to play, but suddenly I didn’t have an advocate there anymore,” she says. “I realized that was what Keenen did. Suddenly, when he wasn’t there, there was all this pressure from the network to serve up a particular kind of humor. Everything was becoming very two-dimensional. Things were being asked of me that I just didn’t think were funny. I was gonna be doing old-lady fart jokes for the rest of my life. We didn’t have a leader anymore. It felt messy and labored and a pain in the ass, really. I just thought it was getting really stupid. So, I went to the network and said, ‘I don’t want to come back next year.’ ”

  At the taping of the season’s final episode before the show went on hiatus, David Alan Grier stood at center stage and addressed the studio audience. It had been an extraordinarily long season, and not just measured in months or episodes. The show had endured incredible turmoil, losing not only its creator, but also several cast members and its vision. Its future was in real doubt. It could’ve been a solemn moment, but ILC—and Grier, in particular—didn’t really do solemnity. Except, perhaps, with a heaping dollop of sarcasm.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Grier said with hushed fake reverence, “during the hiatus our very own Jim Carrey is going to be shooting a film called Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” The project had been a punch line around the show all season. A lot of people knew that the script had been bouncing around for years. Most knew it sucked. His co-stars were going to be Dan Marino and Tone Lōc. It was a bomb in the making, and choice ammunition in the chest-puffing game of one-upsmanship that often went on among the cast. “Let’s all wish him well,” Grier continued, laying it on thick with the studio audience. “We’re expecting big, big things.” The audience roared with laughter at Carrey, who could do little but sit there, red-faced, and take it.

  Before Carrey left for Miami to begin shooting, he had lunch with Sandy Grushow at the Ivy, a notorious industry hot spot. Grushow had recently taken over for Peter Chernin as the president of Fox’s entertainment group, and the purpose of the lunch was to feel out Carrey’s future on the show, and by extension, ILC’s future on Fox. Carrey was under contract for a fifth season, but as the show had learned during Season 4, holding people to contracts against their wishes didn’t make for a happy, productive workforce.

  “I remember sitting on the patio of the Ivy and asking him, ‘What are you doing this summer?’ ” says Grushow. “He told me he was going to make this movie. He was telling me Dan Marino was going to be in it. I just nodded my head. I didn’t think much of it.” That said, Grushow felt Carrey was “the lynchpin” to ILC continuing. Of the most popular characters remaining after the Wayans family’s departure, almost all were Carrey’s. “The ratings obviously had slipped significantly, but there was enough air left in the thing for me to explore Jim’s interest,” says Grush
ow. “Without Jim there would’ve been no reason whatsoever to bring the show back. With Jim Carrey, it was a discussion.” At the Ivy, Carrey told him he was enthusiastic about coming back for another season. He hoped Ace Ventura would launch his film career, and if it did, he might not be as readily available as during the first four seasons, but he liked the idea of having the show as a home base to come back to.

  Not too long after this lunch, Grushow had a programming meeting with network chairwoman Lucie Salhany and News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch to discuss the fall season. Murdoch stood at a big magnetic board while Grushow and Salhany sat at a conference table. On the board was the proposed fall prime-time schedule. Each potential show was represented by a small magnetic tile with the show’s name on it. The three of them could shuffle the tiles around the board like a puzzle to fit them on the schedule in a way that worked for the network. The tiles that didn’t end up on the board were shows that would be canceled.

  When the discussion turned to In Living Color, Grushow made a case for renewing it. Yes, the ratings were down, but they were still decent. And although the show had taken a serious blow with the departure of Keenen and his family, there was still a talented core cast—Grier, Foxx, Tommy Davidson, and of course, Carrey. It could work. “I think Jim Carrey is star,” Grushow said.

  Murdoch looked down imperiously at him and then up at the board. He plucked In Living Color’s tile off the board, then turned back to Grushow. “Jim Carrey is no star,” Murdoch told him. With that, he dropped the ILC tile into a small wastebasket at his feet.

  32

  “We Didn’t Land on Chris Rock. Chris Rock Landed on Us.”

  In Living Color was renewed anyway. It wasn’t some impassioned speech or a great epiphany that convinced Rupert Murdoch to change his mind, just the intrusion of harsh reality: Fox didn’t have another show to take its place. “Look, the show was riding on fumes,” says Sandy Grushow. “It no longer had a raison d’être but we picked it up because we knew we could rely on a certain baseline of performance. We needed ratings.”

  The show that would be returning needed to be significantly rebuilt. Along with the exodus of the Wayans siblings during Season 4, Coffield left the show as she’d promised.

  “We did a big search,” says Pam Veasey. “It wasn’t about replacing the Wayans. We knew that wouldn’t happen. It was about trying to find the next round of cast members, the same way they do on Saturday Night Live.” Once again, the possibility of hiring John Leguizamo surfaced but never materialized. Instead, the producers fanned out across the country that summer. They hit comedy clubs in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Al Sonja Rice recalls going to the Comedy Store with Greg Fields one night to see a handful of comics that included Dave Chappelle. “That was the first time I’d ever seen him,” says Rice. “He wasn’t killing but he didn’t care. I was going, ‘This guy’s really got something, but something ain’t clicking.’ ”

  At the end of the search, three new full-time cast members were hired: Jay Leggett, Carol Rosenthal, and Anne-Marie Johnson. Leggett, who died in 2013, was a heavyset improv actor who’d studied with the legendary Del Close in Chicago. Rosenthal had already been a cast member on the short-lived Fox sketch show The Edge, which counted several In Living Color alums, including Buddy Sheffield, Steve Tompkins, J.J. Paulsen, and Nancy Neufeld Callaway, among its writers. “When The Edge went off the air, I was offered In Living Color,” says Rosenthal. “I didn’t even have to audition for it, which was just unbelievable.”

  Johnson didn’t audition either. She was a veteran actress who’d been working steadily for more than a decade by the time she took the ILC gig. She’d been a regular on the mideighties reboot of What’s Happening!!, had worked with Keenen in Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and had just finished a five-year run as a lead in the CBS TV drama In the Heat of the Night. Tommy Davidson, who she’d starred alongside in Strictly Business, had helped bring her to ILC.

  Davidson himself was returning to the cast after being gone for most of the tumultuous fourth season dealing with his drug problems. He’d had his issues with Keenen, and wasn’t completely sorry to see him go. “I was relieved to have air to breathe,” he says.

  Marc Wilmore, who’d been appearing in sketches since late in Season 3, was officially added to the cast, and a black standup named Reggie McFadden was brought in, initially as a recurring supporting player.

  Perhaps the most surprising addition was Chris Rock. Rock, of course, had a history with the show, or at least with its creator. He’d been a latecomer to Eddie Murphy’s so-called Black Pack, and had a small but memorable part in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, but was passed over by Keenen for a spot in the original ILC cast. He got hired at SNL instead, where his stagnation made him the butt of an ILC sketch.

  Hiring Rock was reportedly the brainchild of Peter Roth, who’d taken over as the president of Twentieth Television in June of 1993. Few of the cast or producers seemed enthusiastic about the decision. “At the time, his stock wasn’t high,” says Firestein. “Saturday Night Live wasn’t great at that particular time and they didn’t write well enough for him. He was considered a funny guy, but I don’t think they were equipped to make Chris productive on Saturday Night Live.”

  Rock though was anxious to join ILC. At SNL, he’d felt out of place and misunderstood. As he told Marc Maron in 2011, “I had these instances where they wanted me to do certain things at SNL—whatever slave sketch or Ubangi tribesman—and I was like, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’ Not that I thought they were racist but if you’re the only black face that’s going to be seen for an hour and a half, it feels racist.” To Rock, ILC seemed like the center of the black comedy universe. “The decision was like, The culture is changing and I’m not a part of it,” he said. “This shit is getting hip, this shit is getting blacker, this shit is getting rap-ier. [On] SNL, I was the first black guy in, like, eight years. I wanted to be in an environment where I didn’t have to translate the comedy I wanted to do.”

  According to one Fox exec, Rock’s reps “essentially begged us to put him on the show.” But Rock wasn’t a great sketch performer and his aesthetic wasn’t necessarily a match for ILC. In years to come, he’d develop into a blistering, charismatic standup with a sharp observational eye, but that wasn’t the show’s bread and butter. Nonetheless, some Fox bigwigs were convinced he was the answer.

  “I don’t think Fox was so nuanced on how they viewed the show or maybe even how they viewed the African-American community,” says Firestein. “They didn’t care that Chris Rock hadn’t succeeded at SNL. To them it was another funny black person they knew the name of or that they thought black people liked.” Rock was brought on as a recurring guest star. “Our joke at the time,” says Firestein, “was We didn’t land on Chris Rock. Chris Rock landed on us.”

  The Fly Girls were also undergoing a transformation. Both Rosie Perez and Jennifer Lopez split after Season 4. Perez had a loyalty to Keenen, but she’d hardly been there much anyway lately. Both White Men Can’t Jump and Untamed Heart had been released during Season 4, and she’d arguably become a bigger movie star than any of the cast members. “I was leaving my assistant in charge, more and more,” she says. “That’s not fair to him.” In the end, her assistant, Arthur Rainer, took over as the choreographer.

  Lopez left after she’d begun landing acting roles, including one on a new Fox dramedy called South Central which was created by Married with Children writer Ralph Farquhar, who’d also written the classic hip-hop film Krush Groove. The Fly Girls themselves became somewhat diminished in the post-Keenen era. Laurie-Ann Gibson replaced Lopez, and several other dancers who worked more as day players than permanent members of the troupe also flitted in and out.

  “It was sad because we were Keenen’s baby,” says Deidre Lang, the only Fly Girl who lasted all five seasons. “When he ended up leaving, they put us on the back burner. We weren’t as important to the show, not to the writers or whoever was doing i
t at the time. They’d say, ‘Oh, girls, you don’t have to come in today.’ We were like, ‘Wait a second. We’re part of this show too.’ It got a little sad.”

  Besides the new cast, there was a bevy of new writers brought on to replace the nine who’d departed at the end of the previous season. Among the new hires were Tim Kelleher, who’d spent three years writing for Arsenio, and Colin Quinn, a standup who’d worked as an announcer on the MTV game show Remote Control in the late eighties. Buddy Sheffield, who’d left after Season 2, was lured back to become the show’s head writer. “Basically, they offered me a whole lot of money,” he says. During his prior stint as head writer, “the most I ever made was $7500 a week, which, to the average person sounds like a hell of a lot of money—and it is—but as far as that position goes, it wasn’t that much. They offered me much, much more to be head writer the fifth season.”

  The show also brought back director Paul Miller, and gave him more creative responsibility, part of an overall effort at regaining some of the magic of the show’s earlier seasons. “I was coming in as a producer and director,” says Miller. “I was looking forward to the challenge of trying to resurrect it and bring it back to what it had been in the beginning.”

  At the start of the 1993–94 season, the television landscape looked very different than it had when In Living Color debuted. Three of Fox’s seven nights of programming were built primarily around so-called black shows. The network was airing the largest crop of programs produced by African-Americans in television history. It’d be nice to think this was the result of more progressive-minded executives or a commitment to diversity, and while that may have played a part—the fact is it was just good business. As the nascent cable industry grew, it grew more quickly in white households. Black families watched more network television than other families. The older networks were less responsive to these changing viewing habits, but not totally unresponsive. Midseason, ABC added Sister, Sister to a Friday-night lineup already anchored by two black sitcoms, Family Matters and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. NBC was still pumping a lot of promo into The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and scoring big numbers as a result.