George Lopez Vs. Cavemen
While Friday's announcement that groundbreaking ABC/Geico sitcomfomercial Cavemen made the fall schedule was met with the popping of champagne corks in Defamer HQ and quickly followed by boozy expressions of admiration for the network's rare combination of business savvy and social conscience, not everyone was overjoyed to hear the news. The LAT Show Tracker blog reports that after president Steve McPherson called to break the news that his eponymous sitcom had grown too expensive to renew for a sixth season, George Lopez raged against the pro-Neanderthal programming policies that will deny him a timeslot:
"I get kicked out for a...caveman and shows that I out-performed because I'm not owned by [ABC Television Studios]...So a...Chicano can't be on TV but a...caveman can?" Lopez said.
"And a Chicano with an audience already? You know when you get in this that shows do not last forever, but this was an important show and to go unceremoniously like this hurts. One hundred seventy people lost their jobs." [...]
"TV just became really, really white again," he said.
While Lopez's angry reaction to losing his job is understandable, his knee-jerk dismissal of Cavemen demonstrates that he's probably unaware of the series' noble mandate to deconstruct the absurdity of racial stereotyping through sophisticated allegory. Once he realizes that the hilarious Cro-Magnons aren't his enemy, he'll direct his anger in a more appropriate direction, such as the show about the carpool or the one where Christina Applegate tries to regain her identity after getting bonked on the head.