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in the
challenged them to send over a list of all the black
writers and producers they knew. They didn’t
have any such list, and that was the end of that.
Keenen found the idea of checking his work with
other black people galling. Did Woody Allen need
a thumbs-up from the Anti-Defamation League
before he released a film? Did studios clear every
John Hughes movie with suburban white people?
“At one point, Fox brought this old black
man that they wanted to hire as a consultant to
the show,” says Keenen. “They told me how he’d
marched with Dr. King and had a lump on the
side of his head from when he got beat up. I said,
‘I respect all he has done, but if he ain’t got no
jokes, I don’t need him. He’s no blacker than me.
I don’t need him to validate me.’”
Gold was impressed. “He stood up and said,
‘I’m not doing it that way.’ Can you imagine this?
Where did this guy learn this kind of backbone?”
Fox had reasons to be optimistic about In
Living Color. All around, the seeds planted in
the earlier parts of the decade were beginning
to flower. Arsenio’s talk show was becoming
a cultural phenomenon. The Cosby Show was
the top-rated show on television. Its spinoff, A
Different World, was also a hit. Spike Lee’s Do
the Right Thing had been nominated for the
Palme d’Or at Cannes. Harlem Nights, Eddie
Murphy’s directorial debut, was released in late
1989 to middling reviews but strong box office
returns, eventually earning nearly $100 million.
And in January 1990, Fox spun off a strange little
cartoon family sitcom called The Simpsons from
The Tracey Ullman Show. The early reviews were
glowing.
Still, it wasn’t clear what might prod the
network’s top brass into making a decision about
ILC. Time dragged on. Nearly nine months had
passed since they turned in the pilot and still no
word. Tamara Rawitt tried to force their hand. She
slipped videotape copies of the pilot to everyone
she knew in the industry. The tapes got passed
around. Davola gave out copies, too.
Martha Frankel, a writer for Details magazine,
went to dinner one night in Los Angeles with
Rawitt and another friend. At dinner, Rawitt
bemoaned the situation. She’d helped build
this show from the ground up, they’d made this
amazing pilot, everyone loved it, but Fox wouldn’t
put it on.
Rawitt handed her a videotape, and when
Frankel got back to her hotel, she popped it in
the VCR. “It was truly the funniest thing I’d ever
seen,” Frankel says. The following night, she
invited several friends to her room and showed itto them. “We were screaming with laughter.” She
called Rawitt and asked if she could write a story
about the pilot. Rawitt encouraged her to.
Frankel wrote a page-long rave about the
pilot, asking pointedly why Fox was sitting on it.
When the issue hit newsstands, Rawitt ripped the
article out and sent it to Diller’s office.
“I said, ‘Now, what are you afraid of?’ The next
day we got a pickup for eight episodes.”Changes had to be made before the
first episode aired. An hour of sketch-
es every week was too much. Too
much for the audience and too much
for the creators. ILC was going to work
better as a half-hour show, some-
thing Rawitt says she figured from the
outset. Leave the audience wanting
more.
Much to the chagrin of Chris Albrecht and
Carmi Zlotnik, HBO — which produced the pilot —
didn’t have the stomach to hang in there for the
series. This wasn’t a reflection of the controversies
the show might engender; it was a money issue.
Michael Fuchs, the head of HBO, wasn’t prepared
to deficit-finance ILC — essentially, lose money in
the short run in the hopes of turning a big profit if
and when the series went into syndication.
The project got passed to Fox’s own studio
arm, Twentieth Television. And with Albrecht
and Zlotnik gone, the producer they’d brought
in for the pilot, Kevin Bright, was out, too. He’d
already run afoul of Keenen by creating the initial
rundown for the pilot, and seemed to be straining
against the mandate to keep his nose out of the
creative side of the show. Davola says that there
was also a feeling that he was too close to the
production people on their way out. According to
Gold, though, there was a more personal reason
for his dismissal: He’d had Shawn Wayan’s car
towed.
“Kevin Bright ended up getting fired off the
show for the worst possible reason,” says Gold.
Shawn was working as a production assistant
on the pilot and, by his own admission, had very
little idea how a television production worked.
Among the things he didn’t know was where to
park his car. “I remember not understanding that
I was parking in the producer’s parking spot,”
Shawn says. “I had no idea. I was just looking at
it like, ‘Keenen parks here and Damon parks here,
so I’m gonna park here.’”
But to some, this was a sign of unearned
and unwelcome entitlement on the part of theshow creator’s little brother. It crystalized a lot of
anxieties about Keenen possibly playing favorites
with his family members. At any rate, Bright had
his car towed. The incident was the culmination of
several things that put some distance between
Bright and the show. “It was after a lot of ‘Maybe
Kevin doesn’t get us,’” says Gold.
Bright was disappointed to be out, but
things worked out okay for him. He had already
started developing the show Dream On, with
Marta Kauffman and David Crane, for HBO, which
eventually ran for six seasons. In 1993 he formed
Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, and pro-
duced a sitcom about six young New Yorkers
called Friends, which became one of the most
popular sitcoms in television history.
The ILC writing staff also went through a
shakeup. After the long lag time between pilot
and the pickup, only Sheffield and Frank returned
for the series. Rawitt had to re-staff almost
completely. Her initial haul netted two more ex–
David Letterman writers, Matt Wickline and Joe
Toplyn; the writing team of Mimi Friedman and
Jeanette Collins, who’d never worked in television
before; and two seasoned black standups,
Franklyn Ajaye and Barry “Berry” Douglas.
With the show running at thirty minutes
instead of an hour, the cast needed trimming.
Jeff Joseph left with Bright to work on Dream On.
Toney Riley and Tj McGee were deemed surplus
to requirements.
The Fly Girls underwent personnel changes,
too. A.J. Johnson was offered a part in House
Party, a low-budget film that a pair of brothers,
Reggie and Warrington Hudlin, were making with
rappers Kid ‘n Play. Keenen told her she had to
make a choice: the show or the movie. Johnson
wanted to do both. “I can choreograph a thirty-
second dance number in my sleep,” she told him.
It was a sticky situation made slightly stickier
by the fact that Johnson and Keenen were, in her
words, “kind of dating.” “I remember us arguing
about it,” she says. “Like, ‘Why are you holding me
back from going away to do a movie over a thirty-
second dance bumper?’ We had a hard time in
our friendship over that.”
Ultimately, a choreographer named Carla
Earle was hired. The decision was made to cast
a wider net for dancers, so Earle arranged new
auditions and saw more than 2,000 of them
during a three-day stretch.
Deidre Lang, a dancer from the pilot, says
there was a clear imperative with the new
auditions. On the pilot, she explains, all four
dancers were African-American. “Once the show