Homey Don't Play That! Page 12

  In the late fifties and sixties, NBC’s slogan was “brought to you in living color on NBC,” and Soul opens with a shot of the iconic NBC peacock, followed by one actress promising viewers, “You never saw such living,” and another following her, “And you never saw such color.” The show is almost shockingly progressive for the era. In between dance numbers and musical performances by Lou Rawls, Joe Tex, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, most of the humor is racially charged. There are jokes about police violence against black men, the KKK, and white ignorance of black culture. Most of the jokes are quick interstitials. One actress asks another, “Do you know how many black brothers are fighting for freedom in Vietnam?” Another answers, “Yeah, almost as many as here.” Redd Foxx and Slappy White do a short bit about segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace’s potential presidential bid.

  Foxx: “You think Wallace should run again?”

  White: “Yeah, and the next time I hope they catch him.”

  Foxx: “In Harlem.”

  White: “At night.”

  Foxx: “On a rooftop.”

  White: “With dark glasses on.”

  Foxx: “Eating a pig’s foot.”

  Schlatter says the studio audience’s reaction to the show was huge, but NBC was afraid that if they bought it, “they could never cancel it,” without it being a PR mess. But Soul wasn’t completely lost to history. “I sent a copy to Keenen Wayans,” says Schlatter. This was during the time Keenen and Fox were first developing In Living Color. “Soul,” Schlatter says, “was kind of the prototype.”

  In early 1989, when Keenen was first meeting with Fox, the company’s future was still very iffy. Rupert Murdoch had launched the network in 1986 with a small team of executives that included Barry Diller, Kellner, and Ancier. At the time, the idea of a fourth television network seemed like a moon shot. ABC, NBC, and CBS had monopolized the airwaves for more than a generation. And Fox’s early returns weren’t impressive.

  When the network launched in October 1986, their inaugural program was The Late Show with Joan Rivers, which quickly became a wrenching, expensive, complicated failure. Once Rivers was fired, less than a year after the show debuted, Fox rotated in a series of guest hosts that included Suzanne Somers, Frank Zappa, and Arsenio Hall. Arsenio, then just a middling standup, looked the most promising and was given a thirteen-week contract. Although Arsenio’s tenure saw a spike in ratings, he was just a placeholder. Fox was already in preproduction on a new late-night satirical news magazine, The Wilton North Report, which hijacked the Late Show time slot in December then lasted a grand total of four weeks before being axed.

  In prime time, Fox was only programming two nights a week—Saturday and Sunday—in early 1989. Their quality control wasn’t necessarily that much worse than other networks, but Fox was hampered by the fact that, particularly during its first couple of years, it wasn’t even on the dial in every market. Even when it was, Fox was often slotted deep in recesses of the UHF band, with spotty reception. For ill-conceived projects like Mr. President, Karen’s Song, and The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. But for shows like Married with Children and The Tracey Ullman Show—often regarded now as classics—the struggle to garner respectable ratings felt like fighting with one hand tied behind your back. Meanwhile, the network was bleeding money. Sandy Grushow was VP of creative advertising in Fox’s film division when he was tapped by Diller to lead the Marketing Department at the network in 1988.

  “I remember walking in my first day on the job,” says Grushow. “The day before there was a story on the front page of Variety that said, ‘Fox loses $99 million, News Corp considers shuttering the network.’ It was that into which I walked.”

  Still, there were successes: 21 Jump Street, a slick drama about young cops working undercover at high schools, starring a youthful Johnny Depp, was a hit, particularly among younger viewers; America’s Most Wanted, a proto–reality show made on the cheap, had debuted in 1988 and built surprising buzz. By 1989, Married with Children was consistently drawing more than ten million viewers a show. The outlines of an overall programming strategy were taking shape. If Fox wanted to compete with the “Big Three” networks, they couldn’t simply imitate them. Ancier admits that coming from NBC, he made that mistake. “You can’t put a show on an alternative network like Fox and expect people to come to it,” he says. “Barry Diller actually had this expression which was, in retrospect, absolutely correct. ‘When you’re an alternative network, you have to grab people by the collar and drag them to your station.’ You’re not going to drag them over if the shows you’re making are ABC-lite.”

  Fox executives took note of what was working for them. What Married with Children, Tracey Ullman, 21 Jump Street, and America’s Most Wanted had in common was that they didn’t feel like network television. “A bunch of the shows had this edge that you wouldn’t have seen on the Big Three networks back in those days,” says Kellner. “That’s the thing the audience responded to. It brought us demographics that differentiated us from the Big Three. We were younger and more male. A lot of advertisers were interested in that and obviously we needed money because we were losing a hundred million dollars a year.”

  One event catalyzed this emerging programming strategy. In January of 1989, a suburban Detroit mother named Terry Rakolta stumbled upon an episode of Married with Children and was so appalled by the raunchy “anti-family attitudes” on display that she began a letter-writing campaign and pressed advertisers to boycott the show. Initially, she was successful: Several advertisers pulled commercials, but in doing so, the boycott made the show’s creators—and Fox, by extension—into unlikely First Amendment martyrs. The subsequent media firestorm only focused more attention on the show and on the upstart network in general. This was the “aha!” moment. In time, Fox would begin branding themselves “The Bad Boys of Television.”

  Michael Moye, Married with Children’s co-creator and showrunner, says that although the Rakolta boycott helped his show in the long run, he was initially dismayed at how much fear Rakolta stoked at Fox. “Executives were diving under their desks,” he says. “She had become a bit of a celebrity, doing morning shows, and I always thought there should be some sort of rebuttal. But they were scared.” To Moye, at least initially, the “Bad Boys of Television” concept was as much bluster and marketing as it was actual strategy.

  “That was their motto,” he says. “How much they really believed, how far they were going to go with it, is still a bit of a mystery. Because it seemed, particularly in the early years, their motto should’ve been amended: ‘We’re the Bad Boys of Network Television . . . if you guys are okay with that.’ ”

  The Rakolta incident kicked off right around the time Keenen came in for that first meeting with Ancier, and while it’s certainly debatable how committed Fox was to the idea of edgier programming, what Keenen was proposing definitely fell in line with it. It also fit with some broader changes in television viewership. Cable TV—then still in its infancy—had begun to lure viewers away from the traditional networks. Specifically, it had begun to lure wealthier white viewers. The demographics for network television’s viewing audience were shifting. By the end of the 1980s, African-Americans were watching 44 percent more network TV than other households. NBC was the only network that seemed to have noticed. Their lineup at least nodded toward the existence of African-Americans, with shows like The Cosby Show, A Different World, 227, and Amen.

  After the Wilton North Report had quickly petered out, Fox hoped to revive The Late Show with a permanent host. Arsenio was the obvious choice. He said he asked Fox for an “escalating scale”: He’d take less money up front, but if the show did well, if its ratings went up, his pay would increase along with the ratings.

  “I went in and pitched that,” Arsenio told Neal Brennan and Moshe Kasher during a 2014 podcast. “They were like, ‘Just get the fuck out of here. You’re lucky to even be in a room indoors.’ ” An e
xecutive at Paramount Television named Lucie Salhany caught wind of that meeting and staked out a parking lot outside Eddie Murphy’s office. When Arsenio pulled up in his car, she introduced herself. She wanted to do a late-night syndicated talk show with Arsenio. “She gave me points based on my execution,” Arsenio said. “The better the show did, the better I personally did.”

  The Arsenio Hall Show debuted on January 3, 1989. Coming on the heels of his appearance in Coming to America, the show quickly found its feet, proving popular particularly with young, urban audiences. Fox, no doubt, rued Arsenio as the one that got away. It was not long after his debut that Keenen walked into Garth Ancier’s office for the first time.

  Ancier says the original working title for In Living Color was Blackout, but Ancier himself left Fox in March 1989, and Hirschhorn followed him out the door a few months later. Peter Chernin, who’d previously been at Showtime, came in as Fox’s president of entertainment, but the two executives who’d been most instrumental in bringing Keenen to Fox—Ancier and Hirschhorn—were now gone. The project was suddenly an orphan. The first person to step into the breach was Joe Davola.

  “This project was still being put together so, not knowing any better, I call up the network president and say, ‘I want to run this project,’ ” says Davola. “He said, ‘Okay.’ ”

  Davola was a brash New Yorker who’d recently come to Fox from MTV, where he was a producer. Even though he was an executive now, he still thought of himself as a producer and felt a kinship with the Wayans siblings. “My wife had gone to junior high school with Damon, Keenen, and Diedra. I think she was in Diedra’s class.” At an early meeting, Davola whipped out his wife’s old school yearbook to show to Keenen. “It was a weird connection. He grew up not far from my apartment in New York City, so we had a bond. I wasn’t a suit and tie–wearing executive. All that stuff just gave us a little bit of an ease.”

  Although he got the commitment from the network, Keenen still needed a production studio to underwrite the development of the pilot. At the time, the FCC had placed restrictions on networks producing and owning their own shows, so it wasn’t unusual that Fox’s own studio arm, then called Twentieth Television, passed on producing the pilot themselves. Keenen turned to an old friend, Chris Albrecht, who had become a senior VP at HBO.

  HBO was known then mostly as outlet for second-run theatrical films, but Albrecht’s job was to develop original programs, which at the time mostly meant standup and music specials. Albrecht had been pushing HBO to develop new sitcoms and dramas, but the network’s previous efforts in that direction—occasionally amusing but generally forgettable fare like The Hitchhiker and 1st & Ten—hadn’t generated much enthusiasm. When Keenen came to Albrecht asking if HBO could produce Keenen’s pilot for Fox, Albrecht was in the process of trying to convince HBO chairman Michael Fuchs that HBO could make money packaging and selling shows to other networks. This made a good test case. Carmi Zlotnik, who worked in original programming production at HBO, was one of Albrecht’s like-minded allies within the company.

  “Chris and I bonded on this idea of ‘Let’s own more, let’s do more,’ ” says Zlotnik. He felt like he had the perfect guy in mind to work with Keenen on the pilot. “My biggest contribution was hiring Kevin Bright.”

  Bright was another New Yorker. In fact, he’d graduated from the same high school as Keenen, Seward Park, a few years before him. Bright had been a producer for HBO, and worked on specials for Martin Mull, Harry Shearer, and David Copperfield. At the time he first met with Keenen about possibly working on the pilot, he says, “it was absolutely the worst year of my career. I hadn’t worked in six months and my twin boys were about to be born, so I was pretty desperate.” On the HBO specials he’d done, Bright had been very involved in the creative process. In his meeting with Keenen and Tamara Rawitt, Keenen made clear that’s not what he wanted. “He said, ‘I just want somebody to handle the budget, the hiring, and the line producer stuff.’ He didn’t want me getting involved creatively at all. I would’ve said anything at that point to get the job, so I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

  When Bright came aboard, he recalls the project was going by the title Urban Renewal, which he thought “horrible.” It didn’t last long. Keenen recalls that he wanted to use the name Live in Color, “based on the old NBC [slogan].” But Saturday Night Live already used the word “live.” “So we decided to change it to In Living Color.”

  Bright says it wasn’t quite that simple.

  “The band Living Colour had just come out with their first record right when we were starting to really hire everybody and get the show together,” he says. The funk-rock band’s debut album, Vivid, had come out in mid-1988, but hadn’t begun gaining momentum until later that year, when MTV started playing the single “Cult of Personality.” One of the songs on the album, “What’s Your Favorite Color?” sported a catchy chorus, “What’s your favorite color, baby?/Living Colour!”

  Bright heard the song and brought it to Keenen and Rawitt. “I said, ‘The name of the show should be Living Color and this should be our theme song.’ ”

  “Won’t they sue us?” Keenen asked.

  “No,” Bright answered. “They can’t own the words ‘Living Color.’ And besides they spell it funny with a ‘u’ in it, so they can’t sue us if we don’t spell it that way. If anybody owns the term ‘Living Color,’ it’s NBC because they used the motto, ‘brought to you in living color by NBC.’ ”

  “That’s what I want to call the show,” Keenen said. “In Living Color. I like that.”

  Bright says they tried to license the song “What’s Your Favorite Color?” but the band turned them down. In fact, that’s the song behind the opening credits in the original one-hour pilot. (Once the show was on the air, the band Living Colour did in fact sue over the show’s title and its logo, which the band claimed was similar to the one they’d used on their album. The suit was settled.)

  Zlotnik recalls Bright bringing Living Colour’s CD to him, explaining that the song and the band had the same kind of attitude the show was aiming for. Rawitt similarly remembers Bright suggesting the song but says she was the one who coined the title In Living Color. “I said, ‘You should call the show In Living Color because now finally a show is in living color.”

  12

  “The Running Joke Was If Your Last Name’s Not Wayans, You Didn’t Have a Shot”

  Everyone told Rob Edwards that working on the In Living Color pilot was a bad idea. He’d just come off a stint writing for the successful Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World. If he wasn’t careful, he could get stuck in the sketch world, where writers got paid a fraction of what they did for sitcoms. But when Tamara Rawitt—who’d been tasked with finding writers for the pilot—asked Edwards to come pitch ideas to Keenen, he didn’t hesitate.

  “I think I was the first person Keenen interviewed,” says Edwards. “I’m sitting there with him and Keenen says, ‘Frankly, I have no idea what I’m going to do with this.’ We just start spitballing: We can hit Arsenio, Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, whoever out there in the world hasn’t been made fun of. No sacred cows.” One idea Edwards remembers tossing out was “Great Moments in Black History,” which became a recurring sketch on the show.

  As a young black writer with sitcom experience, Edwards seemed the perfect prototype for the writing staff, but there weren’t many with the same profile. Another early hire looked, superficially, like Edwards’s antithesis: Buddy Sheffield was a baby-faced white guy from rural Mississippi, whose credits included a short-lived Dolly Parton variety series, an attempted revival of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and a syndicated sketch show called Comedy Break, which featured Kevin Pollak and Jan Hooks. Sheffield’s brother David had been one of Eddie Murphy’s favorite writers during his SNL run and had co-written Coming to America.

  “I had an interview with Keenen and Tamara and just pitched some ideas,” Sheffield says. “This was around the time of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I pitc
hed a sketch about a slave ship running aground and causing a big slave spill. It never got written, never aired, but they thought that was funny.”

  Sheffield recommended a writer he knew from The Smothers Brothers named Howard Kuperberg. A black standup named Jeff Joseph and a former Late Night with David Letterman writer named Sandy Frank rounded out the relatively skeletal staff for the pilot.

  It was easy shorthand for Keenen to define his vision for In Living Color as a “black SNL,” and one of the most important people he’d hire for the pilot was director Paul Miller, who’d just spent three years working on SNL. But Keenen also wanted to do things differently than SNL. He wanted shorter, tighter sketches. Because SNL was broadcast live and because it took time to construct and deconstruct the sets, he felt the show was compelled to let sketches run longer than they should. For his show, Keenen didn’t want meandering character studies—he wanted jokes. “A sketch wasn’t gonna be more than four minutes,” he says. “If it was a one-joke premise, it wasn’t gonna be more than two minutes, preferably thirty seconds to a minute.”

  Another thing Keenen noticed: SNL was a writers’ show. Cast members could be filtered in and out, but the writers were the engine that made it all go. The show had been on for almost fifteen years and writers like Jim Downey, Herb Sargent, Al Franken, Tom Davis, Robert Smigel, and Marilyn Suzanne Miller had been there for large swaths of that time. They knew how the show ran, and in some ways dictated to the incoming cast the way it would continue to run. That didn’t always serve the show. “A lot of times,” Keenen says, “people were in sketches that weren’t built for them.”

  Keenen wanted to invert this relationship. He saw the writing staff as being there primarily to service the cast, not the other way around. His show would be built around its cast. Which is to say, it would be built around his family, starting with Damon.

  “Damon was at a point comedically where he was the most brilliant guy on the planet,” Keenen said. “The way he thought, the way his point of view was completely different than mine or anybody else’s. He was really on the edge.”