Homey Don't Play That!
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Shannon, Kelleher, and Bakay were all pretty instant contributors, but Quinn says he struggled. “I wouldn’t call myself the greatest attribute that ever existed on the show. I wrote a parody of [Canadian dancehall star] Snow for Jim Carrey, ‘Imposter,’ but they just used a couple lines of it.” That was a pretty common occurrence for him. He’d write a sketch, and only a line or two would get used. At first, he was annoyed, but after a while, he adjusted his expectations. “When you’re writing, you pick your victories.” Shannon says Quinn is being modest: “That guy’s such a great joke writer. He contributed.”
The so-called Irish Mafia definitely fit the no-holds-barred aesthetic Firestein sought to cultivate, and seemed to flaunt their disregard for convention.
“Me and Colin wrote ‘nigger’ in a sketch once,” says Shannon. “It was just one joke. It got pulled out of the sketch before anyone read it.” Shannon was told unequivocally that, “We don’t do that here.” He wasn’t really chastened. “I never worried about offending people. That’s where all the joy of comedy is, that danger zone.”
Todd Jones says that as a black writer working in network television, he’s accustomed to these kinds of things. “If you’re on a black show, there are going to be white writers and those white writers are going to pitch things that sometimes cross lines,” he says. It might be creating characters that conform to old stereotypes or it might be worse. “If you’re offended by stuff a white writer may pitch that goes too far, I don’t know how you’re going to write in Hollywood.”
Without Keenen as the ultimate arbiter of racial politics, this tension remained constant. Faye Griffin felt like the show was in danger of losing its core blackness. At pitch meetings, she’d sometimes cringe at ideas that promoted the same negative images of African-Americans that Keenen and Townsend had faced when they first arrived in Hollywood. “There was a little buffoonery being pitched around, but there were enough of us in the room—me and Sonja, the Jones boys—to squash anything that wasn’t cool.”
Of course, these were the same criticisms Keenen himself faced early in the show’s run. “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” Anton Jackson, Timbuk—these were all built on disparaging stereotypes even as they sought to subvert them. But as Paul Miller had noted way back during the first season when he sat in the control booth watching the first “Homeboy Shopping Network” sketch, those characters were only okay because they were coming from Keenen. A black man was fully entitled to make fun of his own culture in a way a white man wasn’t. Comedy purists have often struggled with this concept. Why shouldn’t T. Sean Shannon or Les Firestein be allowed to make the exact same jokes as Todd Jones or Faye Griffin? Under Keenen’s aegis, they could, because from a perception standpoint, when he was running the show, all the jokes were his, no matter who wrote them. Now those lines weren’t so clear.
Perhaps nothing illustrated this point better than a character Jamie Foxx had been trying to get on the show since Season 4. He pitched it to several writers, including Jeff Schimmel and Mike Schiff. The idea made Schimmel so uncomfortable that even more than twenty years later he didn’t want to describe it. Schiff says the character was called Mono Monkus, and the most important thing to know about him was that he was a monkey.
“Jamie had ideas and could act it out,” he explains. Foxx showed Schiff and Martin an ape-like walk he’d developed for the character and a way of grunting. They quickly stopped him.
“We can’t touch that,” Schiff told Foxx. “We can’t write you as a monkey.”
“No, it’s not a race thing,” Foxx insisted. “I just want to play out-of-the-box characters.”
But for Martin and Schiff the idea was a non-starter. “We were just too scared of it,” Schiff says.
Would Mono Monkus have gotten a chance during Keenen’s tenure? Hard to say. Moreover, was the fact white writers wouldn’t accede to a black cast member’s request to play a monkey without a black figurehead’s approval a sign of progress or regress? The show’s tangled racial dynamics were growing more dizzying by the day.
Early in the season, Sheffield wrote a spoof of the John Singleton film Poetic Justice. The film stars Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson, and features poems written by Maya Angelou. Sheffield says he wrote “stupid-ass poetry that seemed to be satirizing what was in the movie.” But there was backlash at ILC. “It was like, ‘We can’t make fun of Maya Angelou and Tupac.’ It was all sacrosanct because this is some big black icon we have to treat reverently. Before, we didn’t treat anything with reverence.”
There was plenty that was, in fact, pretty awful about Season 5. Jamie Foxx’s Wanda character was egregiously overused. After appearing six times in the previous season, Wanda was already feeling played out, but because she was one of the show’s remaining signature bits, the producers doubled down with nine more—including an interminable six-part series about the search for her baby’s father. With some cast members only available part-time, multiple sketches for the show’s favorite characters like Wanda or Fire Marshal Bill were often written and filmed in bunches. While that might be an efficient use of time, the process of having to churn out so many iterations of the same thing could be creatively deadening.
Chris Rock didn’t exactly blossom at ILC either. Almost all his appearances were playing Cheap Pete, his character from I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. “Chris Rock seemed very nice, but at the time he didn’t impress me as very talented,” says Griffin. She and her writing partner, Al Sonja Rice, “wrote some Cheap Pete sketches and it was the same joke over and over. ‘Good Lord! I don’t wanna pay for drinks. I can just take the bar rag and wring it out.’ I thought, This guy’s career has got to be toast.” Somehow, six separate sketches were squeezed from this thin premise. The rumor was Peter Roth, the Twentieth Television president, loved the character.
As with the previous season, Fox insisted on lots of guest stars. The parade of cameos almost felt like a meta–comedy routine itself. Although a few, like Tupac and Marsha Warfield, fit in fine, most felt as if they were plucked at random from a list of reasonably well-known black people: Gary Coleman, Barry Bonds, Johnny Gill, Fred “Rerun” Berry, Biz Markie, Luther Vandross. The main thing all these people had in common was that they’d said yes when asked. In fact, sketches were frequently written with a blank spot for whatever fill-in-the-blank guest star could be confirmed at the last minute.
After a certain point in the season, it felt like some cast members and writers stopped trying. “The Dirty Dozens,” initially a pretty clever adaptation of the classic playground tradition into a game show, gradually devolved upon repeated exposure into a lazy collection of tired “Your mama . . .” jokes. Most of the jokes had been floating around for decades, and in a few cases the same exact jokes were repeated over the course of the six different iterations of the sketch that appeared during the season. Carol Rosenthal thinks the cast was too big. There were “too many people to please, so everything was getting diluted. At a certain point toward the end of the season, I felt like jokes were being recycled.”
For better or worse, the vibe at the show had gotten considerably looser.
“The cast were always trying to make each other laugh and break character,” says Firestein. “With Keenen out of the building, they were more free to fuck with each other. No one was watching over their shoulder. It’s like the parents were gone.”
A divide developed between the new cast members and the veterans. Many of the latter had one foot out the door. Johnson says the place felt “sad,” and for her, quite lonely. It was also a boys’ club, she says, despite there being more female cast members than there had ever been. She had a particular issue with Foxx.
“I didn’t get along with Jamie,” she says. “I think he was used to speaking to women in a particular way. He really tried to push the envelope, push the female button, and I had none of it. We did have words, because I demand a certain level of respect. I think he was trying to test me. I don’t play that game. I wasn’t afraid of hi
m. Now I’m sure he’s changed, but he was young.”
Firestein describes the process of making the show during that fifth season, “without the Wayanses and with the spotty availability of Jim Carrey,” as “arduous.” Criticism became louder as the season progressed. Rosenthal recalls walking back from lunch one day with Veasey and spotting a vulture flying high up in the sky above the studio lot. “I remember saying to Pam, ‘Oh, look, the show is dying,’ We were getting a sense it just wasn’t working.”
As Firestein notes, “There was such a groundswell of It’s not as good. They’re not innovating. The truth is you still had half the cast members, you still had the head writers who’d been there from the beginning. There’s no reason we couldn’t continue to put out as good a show. But there was also a sense that it wasn’t the same because the Wayans’ fingerprints were all over that show.”
To compound matters, that fall, Fox very publicly wooed Chevy Chase to the network to do a late-night talk show. When the show was pronounced dead on arrival, and canceled within six weeks, the network replaced it with—what else?—ILC reruns. Once again, the show was having to compete with an earlier version of itself. Frustration mounted. As Greg Fields put it at the time, “Not that we don’t miss the Wayans and others who left, but Saturday Night Live people come and go. I know if people would give the new cast a chance, they’d see things they’d like.”
Sketch comedy is a notoriously difficult art. Most shows would be thrilled if 35 to 40 percent of their sketches were consistently hitting. Was In Living Color’s gem-to-dud ratio in Season 5 as good as the best moments of the first few seasons? Probably not. But, in spots, it was just as funny. It could certainly hold its own alongside SNL, which, at the time, was going through one of its periodic rebuilding seasons. The bigger problem was that it was becoming more and more indistinguishable from SNL. Umbilical Barry, Candy Cane, David Alan Grier’s Insensitive Therapist all made for good sketches, but nothing about them made them In Living Color sketches. Particularly as that fifth season wore on, ILC was just becoming a pretty good sketch show.
It wasn’t just that the show had lost the Wayans family. It was that the writers, producers, and players who were becoming more dominant—Firestein, Fields, Sheffield, Schiff and Martin, Bakay, T. Sean Shannon, Jay Leggett, Ali Wentworth, and most of all, Carrey—didn’t have the same specific (read: black) perspective. Now, it’s a little unfair to single out a bunch of white people as the reason for the show’s loss of identity, particularly when at least four of them—Firestein, Fields, Sheffield, and Carrey—were a big part of the show at its best. Just as important was that cast members like Grier, Davidson, Keymáh, and Johnson—all of whom were on-screen a lot during Season 5—may have been great comic actors, but weren’t necessarily generating their own material. They could take a sketch and make it better, but they weren’t generally in the writers’ offices putting their own ideas on a blank page. Lost it seemed was a willingness to risk offensiveness, to take shots at everyone, to give voice to a point of view that hadn’t been heard before. By Season 5, those boundaries had been pushed, everyone had already been offended. As Bill Martin puts it, “The show seemed to matter less.” It was a victim of its own success.
It’s hard to know how much to attribute the ratings decline during Season 5 to bad press around the Wayans siblings’ departure, to an actual decline in the show’s quality, or to simply being in an unwinnable time slot on Thursday night. Going head to head with Seinfeld was certainly a tough ask. It’s tempting to look at Fox’s decision to schedule ILC when it did as a vote of no confidence, essentially turning the show into cannon fodder. Fox President Sandy Grushow insists that wasn’t the intention.
“I don’t think we were consciously throwing ILC to the wolves on Thursday, which every network had been known to do on a frequent basis,” he says. It was more about believing the show had a core audience that would stick with it and help deliver some sort of decent rating. “We were probably being very realistic about its performance but confident it was the best we were going to do on a highly competitive but high-revenue night.”
The calculation Fox made wasn’t necessarily incorrect, but it seemed to put a low cap on the show’s potential. By December, ILC was averaging around eleven or twelve million viewers per episode. When Seinfeld is pulling in around thirty million, there simply aren’t many more eyeballs to fight over. Some saw Seinfeld as the whitest show on television, one that few black viewers cared about, and that may have been true, but its inverse was not. ILC had a huge black fan base, but in its prime, it also had a huge white fan base. There were a lot more people like Firestein, whose sense of humor straddled both worlds, than anyone had previously realized. Beyond that, the show had introduced all this black humor and culture to white people who just liked comedy. By scheduling ILC opposite Seinfeld, the network forced all those people to decide what to watch, and most of them chose Seinfeld.
“Any player hate we had toward Seinfeld,” says Firestein, “might be rooted not in direct competition but in the fact that Seinfeld was poorly rated for a few seasons but the execs stayed with it because the show was reflective of the execs’ lives. On the other hand, whenever ILC or any ‘urban’ shows like it hit a speed bump, execs would throw their hands up like parents not understanding rap music.”
Grier admits that by Season 5, mentally and emotionally, he’d checked out. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” he says. “You pray for success. ‘Dear God, I’ve been acting for ten years, give me one hit. I’ll never complain again.’ You get the hit. ‘Dear God, please get me off this shit.’ That’s the actor’s plight.”
Grier’s attitude was indicative of a growing sentiment. “People were done with it,” says Wentworth. “Everybody had other stuff going on. Jamie, Tommy, David, and Jim were all antsy to do the next step of their career.” The feeling seemed to filter down to the crew too. “When Keenen was there, there would be all these perks and gifts coming in, free stuff or a catered dinner. Then, towards the end, people were basically stealing toilet paper.”
As the season drew toward its conclusion, a gallows humor started to take hold. In the penultimate episode, during “Deronda and Pookie Play Party,” Davidson, playing the pre-adolescent Pookie, suggests to his young playmate, “Let’s play ‘Positive Black Role Models on Television’ !” Keymáh’s Deronda enthusiastically agrees and sticks her head inside their cardboard television. “Hello, everybody!” she says, looking out of the box. Pookie quickly drapes a blanket over the television. “Sorry, you’re canceled.”
In the final episode, as a sketch called “Prison Cable Network: Lights Out with Angel” winds down, Carrey, playing a sidekick on a jailhouse late-night television show, offers, “Good news from the warden! We’ve just had our show renewed for another ten years.” The joke wasn’t subtle. In Living Color was hardly a prison, but for some of the show’s old guard it was starting to feel like it. The last segment of the season is a musical performance from a long-forgotten rap trio with a name that, in hindsight, feels like an ironic joke: To Be Continued. As the group takes the stage, they try to hype the audience up: “Ain’t no party like an In Living Color party ’cause an In Living Color party don’t stop!” But this party was about to stop for good: About a minute into their performance, the credits begin to roll, and then a minute after that, without so much as a goodbye from any of the cast members, the screen fades to black.
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“It Was Time to Fold Up the Tent”
Despite low morale and slumping ratings, most people around the show assumed In Living Color would be renewed for a sixth season. After all, Jim Carrey, who’d become a bona fide movie star, was under contract for another season, as were pretty much the entire rest of the cast. Carrey alone would’ve been enough to draw in a respectable audience. That this ostensibly black sketch show hinged largely on the return of what had once been the token white guy seemed either ironic or dispiriting, but still, the idea of canceling the show righ
t as Carrey was becoming such a massive draw was practically inconceivable. “It would’ve been tantamount,” says Les Firestein, “to canceling Saturday Night Live after Eddie Murphy did Beverly Hills Cop.”
There was even a plan in place to address one of the show’s glaring weaknesses. With Keenen’s departure, the show had lost both a singular voice and a symbolic figurehead. In some sense, it had lost its blackness. The solution, according to Firestein, was going to be to turn that visible leadership role over to Chris Rock, who’d been woefully underused in Season 5. Rock would run the show alongside Firestein. (Veasey had already decided to leave the show to transition to working on television dramas, and Fields had taken a gig as a producer on Full House.) “Fox was like, ‘It has to be you and a black person,’ ” says Firestein. “I’d never presume I could do that show on my own.”
That plan never made it past the upfronts in late May. The upfronts are an annual event at which network television executives show advertisers their planned slate of programming for the upcoming season. As they approached that year, word came down that instead of twenty-two new ILC episodes, Fox was only going to order thirteen. A day before the big event in New York, even the thirteen-episode order was starting to look shaky.
Firestein says he’d just been waiting to find out what the budget was going to be for Season 6. “Then at the upfronts, they said at the last minute, ‘Oh, we’re not doing In Living Color.’ ”
Sandy Grushow hardly remembers the thought process at Fox that led to canceling the show. “The decision would’ve been The ratings are down. The show is not remotely what it once was,” he explains. “I don’t think any of us regretted picking up the show [for the fifth season] because frankly we probably needed it. But the original intent of the show no longer existed with Keenen and Damon gone. It was time to fold up the tent.”