Dumb and Dumber

By Jack E. White

The people responsible for The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer--a moronic sitcom scheduled to make its debut on UPN this week unless the network experiences a late and totally unprecedented attack of good taste, common sense and plain old decency--describe it as a "high concept" period comedy. That must mean they were smoking some dynamite stuff when they dreamed it up.

No one, not even in Hollywood, would have ventured out with a show based on the preposterous premise that during the Civil War, an English nobleman of Moorish descent somehow winds up in America, where he maneuvers himself into a position on Abraham Lincoln's kitchen staff, unless he or she were intoxicated. Once they sobered up and checked out the pilot episode--a heavy-handed, totally unfunny spoof of the current White House scandal--they would have asked themselves, "What were we thinking?" and pulled the plug on the series out of sheer embarrassment.

As if some black folks needed another reason to conclude that when it comes to race, some white folks still just don't get it. After a tape of the Pfeiffer pilot got out, it set off yet another overheated racial contretemps in Los Angeles. Like actors following the script of a bad sitcom about political correctness, a coalition of black organizations and politicians pulled out the rhetorical artillery to try to force UPN to cancel Pfeiffer (the P, as what passes for witty dialogue on the show constantly reminds us, isn't silent) before it ever airs. "The show trivializes the suffering and pain of African-American people during the period of slavery. It distorts and exploits history and desecrates the bones of our ancestors!" thundered Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade, a black activist group. Last week he led pickets outside the Paramount studios, where Pfeiffer is shot. "They wouldn't do anything comedic about the Jewish Holocaust, and rightfully so," said Bakewell. The Los Angeles city council unanimously passed a motion introduced by a black member, Mark Ridley-Thomas, requiring a community screening of the pilot and directing the city's human relation commission to report back within 10 days on whether the show is appropriate for broadcast.

Those actions gave UPN president Dean Valentine a pretext for wrapping himself in the banner of artistic freedom, as any savvy television executive would do if one of his shows came under fire. "If I was a creative person in Hollywood, I would be packing up my bags and heading for Nevada," Valentine declared. "In a city that has a host of social problems, including crime and poverty, potholes and a broken-down transit system, one would think the vast power of the city council could be put to better use than analyzing UPN's Monday-night schedule." Still, in an attempt to defuse the flap, the network yanked the pilot and substituted an episode titled "Abe Online," which depicts the Great Emancipator (played by Dann Florek) carrying on an illicit romance via the telegraph.

Pfeiffer's creators, Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, who once wrote for The Golden Girls and who are white, claimed that making light of slavery was the furthest thing from their mind. "We thought there was a way to do an over-the-top satire about the Clinton White House by disguising it as the Lincoln White House," Fanaro explains. "We came up with the idea that there is this English nobleman, and we would show everything through his eyes. Then we thought, 'What if it was a black guy who was an English nobleman, a well-spoken, well-educated man who has his own manservant?'" Don't tell me Fanaro and his partner weren't on something when they conjured up these ideas.

Having now gone way beyond the call of journalistic duty by suffering through tapes of two episodes of Pfeiffer, I think both sides are missing the point. It's a lousy show, but it's too trivial to justify all the umbrage Bakewell and his allies are heaping on it. Although watching it may be an assault on human dignity, Pfeiffer is not about slavery. That subject doesn't even come up except in a couple of lame one-liners. It's more about sex, or at least juvenile double entendres about sex, and potty humor. But the central character--unlike those on the old series Martin on Fox, Def Comedy Jam on HBO and many of the other so-called urban-oriented programs that have drawn large African-American audiences in recent years--is no buffoon. In fact, as played by portly Chi McBride, he's the smartest character on the show.

On the other hand, the decision to air this nonsense reflects a considerable insensitivity on UPN's part. Pfeiffer is ridiculous, even by sitcom standards. The network has enjoyed so much success in attracting black viewers (who last season made up 45% of its prime-time audience) that it may have deluded itself into thinking that African Americans will tolerate whatever it deigns to throw at them, regardless of the quality. There's a good way for black viewers and everyone else to disabuse them of that patronizing notion: emancipate themselves from the TV set the moment Pfeiffer comes on.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles