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love, tougher laughs
Good TV à la 'Archie Bunker', but hard to watch
By Elizabeth White
The comedian Bernie Mac is a tough guy to love.
It is a fact he proudly flaunts in his new sitcom, "The Bernie Mac Show," premiering tonight on Fox in a one-hour special at 8:30.
Unfortunately, it makes "The Bernie Mac Show" a tough sitcom to love as well. Frankly, it's even tough to sit through.
Yes, this is comedy, but it is comedy with messages, and all the messages have an angry edge.
Bernie Mac plays a successful Los Angeles comedian who takes in his drug-addicted sister’s three kids when she goes to jail.
He sets the tone for the show when he addresses the camera in the opening scene, "I’m gonna kill one of them kids. Don’t get me wrong, I love them. . . I know what you’re going to say, ‘Bernie Mac cruel. Bernie Mac beats his kids.’ I don’t care. That’s your opinion."
Thus begins the latest sitcom to launch in the vein of Archie Bunker and "All in the Family."
Like "All in the Family," "Bernie Mac" plays out abrasive and politically incorrect behavior through family relationships and in the setting of a private home.
But here the context is the African-American community.
Moreover, the touchy subject matter is the disintegration of families within that community, be it from drugs, crime, absent fathers, or a simple lack of self-respect.
This is where the angry messages come in. Against a backdrop of occasional laughs, this is a story of one man's effort to both confront and heal all the wounds visited upon his community, and to do so in a manly way.
It’s brutal view of how a dysfunctional family might be made to function again. From Bernie Mac’s perspective, that means employing strict rules, verbal abuse and corporal punishment to teach the values of personal responsibility and self-respect.
What raises so much of the pain is seeing Bernie Mac attempt to instill these values in children whose young lives have already been damaged, perhaps beyond healing.
Bernie Mac threatens to beat one child "until the white meat shows."
When the child calls social services, Bernie Mac squirms under the social worker’s glare as he tries to explain that he’s just trying to teach her how to respect him.
Another child has such deep psychological problems that he continually wets himself. Bernie Mac tries to be sympathetic, but fundamentally he believes that the boy just has to learn how to be a man.
The youngest child timidly wakes him one night to tell him that she’s scared of him. As a viewer you don’t blame her.
"Bernie Mac" is not a sitcom intended to make people feel comfortable. The show would be intolerable to watch if the star didn’t underlie that disciplinary approach with love and occasionally break the tension with humor.
To its credit, Fox is putting on its airways a controversial perspective from the African-American community that has been bubbling at the fringes of mainstream media for a while now.
Aaron McGruder has a comparable take on African-American life and childrearing in his comic strip "The Boondocks," and Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac’s co-star from the movie "The Original Kings of Comedy," espouses similar opinions on his morning radio program in Los Angeles.
But this harsh and bitterly comic view of serious social problems hasn’t made it on network TV until now, precisely because it’s tough for any audience to take.
Two of Bernie Mac’s co-stars from the "Kings of Comedy" have their own sitcoms, Steve Harvey on the WB and D.L. Hughley on UPN, but both of their shows are more typical sitcom fare than the edgy and realistic comedy that "Bernie Mac" aspires to be.
Working in "Bernie Mac’s" favor is its time slot. The show is hammocked between two other tough love sitcoms that have become hits for Fox, "Grounded for Life" and "Titus."
Both of those shows also feature dominating and occasionally cruel fathers, and audiences accustomed to those programs may not find "Bernie Mac" particularly outrageous.
The show is also as true to Bernie Mac’s comedy as the censors would probably allow. That means that "Bernie Mac" will succeed if his comedy resonates with a national audience, a feat "All in the Family" achieved, although no one is quite sure why.
November 14, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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