58 EMMYmix
in the
uncontrollably. The show’s lighting director,
an older white man, turned to Miller, a little
sheepishly.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” he said
about the “Homeboy” sketch. “Is this okay to
say?”
Miller nodded. “Yeah, because Keenen is
saying it. It wouldn’t be okay for you or me to say,
but it’s okay for Keenen.”
The pilot’s tone was consistently cutting
without ever falling into outright nastiness. It had
a clear point of view. Edwards recalls that it took
the crowd a sketch or two to get the rhythm of the
show. Then, he says, the place went nuts.
“Black audiences don’t just laugh at stuff, we
stomp our feet, we high-five,” he says. “People
were literally running up and down the aisles
during the taping, high-fiving each other. One of
the executives turned to me and said, ‘Did you pay
these guys to do that?’”The second show, the next night, went just as
well, if not better.
“I’ve never done a show that felt that way
in front of an audience,” says Bright, who later
became the co-creator of Friends. “At Friends,
I’d never seen a first taping of anything where
the audience was that crazy. They were on fire,
both audiences. It was like the show had been on
forever.”
After the second show, Bright encountered
Keenen backstage. “Keenen wasn’t an emotional
touchy-feely guy, and when we finished the
second show, he physically lifted me up in the air
and gave me this big bear hug. It can’t go better
than that.”
Kim Wayans, who, in addition to her part in
“The Wrath of Farrakhan,” also appeared in “GoOn, Girl” and “Too-Too Ethnic,” says the energy
in the air was palpable. “You could feel something
new, exciting and fresh happening,” she says.
“After the pilot, we all knew we had something
special.”Keenen walked toward the confer-
ence room at Fox’s Executive Office
Building not knowing what to expect.
The pilot had gone great, but since
then he’d heard a lot of nothing from
the network. There was research to
be done. They were testing it. Today’s
meeting was with something called
“The Research Group.” Both Barry
Diller and Peter Chernin were going to
be there, too.
Keenen liked Diller and Chernin, and he
thoughttheylikedtheshow. Yet months had
gone by since the pilot
with no word of whether
it would get ordered
as a series. The cast
members were under
holding deals but had
scattered to the wind.
Damon, Jim and Tommy
were doing standup.
Kim Wayans got a
temp job as a secretary
at an oil company in
downtown Los Angeles,
Coffield and Coles went
to New York. All would
occasionally call Keenen
to check in. He wished he
had more to tell them.
Some began to assume the worst. A recent call
from Coffield was typical.
“I just got offered a play in New York,” she
told him.
“What are you asking?”
“I’m asking if you have any idea if this thing’s
going to get picked up.”
“No idea,” he told her. “Just do the play.”
Keenen hoped this meeting would start
to clear things up, though he wasn’t expecting
much. When he sat down, he saw who The
Research Group was: five stiff-looking white guys
in dark suits and starched shirts. “I felt like I was
sitting with the NSA,” he says. “Not a funny bone
in their bodies.”
They told him about the work they’d been
doing. They’d been showing the pilot to focusgroups and asking people how it made them feel.
“Wow,” Keenen said, a little taken aback.
“That’s deep.”
“Tell me what your vision is for the show,”
said one of the suits.
Keenen told them it was going to be fresh
and new. “It’s going to be revolutionary!” he said
excitedly.
There was silence in the room. Keenen
quickly divined that to these five men in dark
suits, “revolutionary” wasn’t a good thing. It
conjured visions of Black Panthers and Molotov
cocktails. Of Malcolm X’s demand for freedom,
justice, and equality “by any means necessary.”
He tried to assuage their fears.
“No, not take-over-the-world revolutionary.
Revolutionary in terms of funny.”
The room exhaled. The Research Group
seemed satisfied. He’d never seen any of the men
before that day, and once the meeting was over,
he never saw any of them again.
The meeting was a pretty good indicator of
what went on for about nine months following the
making of the pilot. Fox said they wanted edgy
programming, but now that they had it in their
hands, they weren’t sure what to do with it. It’s
not that they didn’t like the show. They just didn’t
know how everyone else would react to it.
“It was really, really funny, but people were
nervous to put the pilot on,” says Joe Davola,
the V.P. of development who oversaw the show.
“You’re talking about a Fox network that’s run by
white executives. Everybody was oversensitive.
We didn’t want to offend too many people.”
Diller, in particular, was very worried about
being perceived as racist. The solution, Diller and
others at Fox thought, was to get buy-in from
prominent African–American groups. The pilot
was screened for members of the NAACP and
the Urban League. Fox reached out to C. Delores
Tucker, a civil rights activist who later became a
prominent crusader against rap music, and Alvin
Poussaint, another activist who was a consultant
on The Cosby Show. Meetings were arranged with
various interest groups. Keenen was appalled and
refused to attend.
“A couple of groups wanted to be brought on
as consultants, which Keenen thought was a bribe,”
says manager Eric Gold. The quid pro quo was un-
stated but understood: if Fox paid a consulting fee,
the groups wouldn’t make a fuss. “Keenen didn’t like
it and wouldn’t even meet with them.”
As one story goes, at one point the NAACP
tried to pressure Keenen by asking how many
black writers and producers he’d hired. HeDamon Wayans and Keenen Ivory Wayans as streetwise
pitchmen in “Homeboy Shopping Network”