David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. "Cavemen" facing extinction?
In the “this-isn’t-really-news” category comes word that ABC’s “Cavemen” really is the steaming pile of merde we knew it to be way back when it was first announced.
You know the drill: reshoots, recasting, new characters, pushing the pilot back to an airdate that may never occur and replacing it with another, less-sucky episode, etc.
Your Mayor was the first to reveal to the world that “Cavemen” would, in fact, be a drama and not a comedy, and how prescient those words were: Having seen the pilot, I can reliably report to you that it must be a drama because it’s certainly not a comedy.
Instead of continuing with the conceit in the auto-insurance commercials that the cavemen must battle the stereotype of being slow-witted, “Cavemen: The Embarrassment” slow-wittedly repositions our Cro-Magnon brethren to serve as an unspoken but unmistakable stand-in for another ethnic minority. They call one another “Maggers” and debate the appropriateness of using such epithets on one another. They are barred entry into a country club and distrusted by wealthy white men. White women, having heard rumors about their sexual prowess, covet them.
And they breakdance. Yes, the climactic comedic scene in the pilot (where it’s really considered a very good idea to bring your A-game, not your running-on-fumes game) features a caveman breakdancing. Would that have even been funny in the ’80s?
“Cavemen’s” pilot dramatically underscores what most people (except, of course, some network executives) were saying all along, that TV commercials really shouldn’t be mistaken for TV shows.
Oh, and the makeup sucks, too. You don’t really have time to notice that in the commercials, but sitting through 21 mesmerizing minutes of soul-punishing “entertainment” provides you with all the time you need to figure that out. You also have plenty of opportunity to ruminate how lucky it is for the actors’ future careers that they’re virtually unrecognizable under all that Latex, to consider whether the color of paint on the walls of the set might work well in your own home and to philosophize whether, after Iraq, Katrina, global warming and now “Cavemen,” God is trying to tell us something or has just abandoned us outright.