Controversial Topics Fuel the Final Cable Day at TCA
Aaron McGruder on the N-word: "You can hear it at 11 o'clock on Adult Swim if you so desire. It will be there for you."
Beverly Hills, CA – The last day of the cable portion of the 2005 Summer Television Critics Association tour began quietly enough, with back to back sessions
for the upcoming TNT drama Wanted and the network's hit summer series The Closer. Critics are especially interested in the latter, not simply because it is well made and a ratings winner, but because
Brenda Johnson, the character portrayed by Kyra Sedgwick, has snack food issues. This is a weakness to which TCA members can relate, especially one week into a
tour, as they continue to fuel themselves with caffeine and sugar.
After TNT there was an Adult Swim panel for its upcoming animated series The Boondocks, based on the occasionally controversial comic
strip about two opinionated African American boys and their grandfather by Aaron McGruder, also an
executive producer of the show. It proved thought provoking, to say the least.
As the session progressed, McGruder was asked about his use of the N-word in the
series. He replied that he also uses it in the strip, though it is sometimes altered in print with asterisks. Newspapers, he said, are "not really thrilled about it, but I
keep trying to push them."
McGruder said using this word "makes the show sincere." The N-word, he added, "is
used so commonly … that it feels fake to write around it and avoid using it."
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When another critic asked if McGruder thinks it's "ridiculous" that people can't even say the N-word out loud, even in an environment like this press
conference, he responded, "Am I allowed to say it? Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga." Once the laughter in the room subsided, McGruder noted, "Well, now that that's out of the
way, I'm not sure exactly how I'm supposed to talk about it."
"I understand that the word offends a lot of people," he continued. "That's what
late night cable is for, I guess. You don't have to hear it at 8 o'clock but you sure can hear it at 11 o'clock
on Adult Swim if you so desire. It will be there for you."
McGruder was asked how he would feel if white kids who watched The Boondocks and
thought it was cool decided to start using the N-word. "I think 15, 16 years after the advent of gangster rap young white kids have heard the word 'nigger' before
and they've maybe said it a few times," he replied. "If they start saying it all of a sudden
on October 3rd [the day after the Boondocks premiere] I refuse to take responsibility."
A short time later, during a luncheon press conference for TV One, panelist Rev. Al Sharpton
was asked for his thoughts about McGruder making the use of the N-word so common.
"We have to be very careful how we sanitize a word that has been racist and derogatory," Sharpton warned. "At one level, there are those who say it's
endearing. But when you empower people that are not using it in that way, I think that comes back to haunt us. A young man was just arrested for a racial beating in Howard Beach, and the only music in his car was from a
gangster rapper that used the N-word. Is he going to use that as his defense?" Sharpton added that he hopes McGruder will watch his new TV One talk series Barbershop, which will be filmed in actual barbershops,
described by Sharpton as always having been "social gathering" spots in the African American community.
Roland Martin, a nationally syndicated columnist who will soon do 60 second commentaries about current events on TV One, declared that it is
never permissible to use the N-word. "There is no context [to make it right]," he asserted, "because if it was used to mutilate the body of Emmitt Till, then I don't think it should be used in music. If it was used to denigrate James
Meredith and Martin Luther King Jr. it should not be used in our music. I refuse to justify it."
As if the day hadn't already given critics enough to think about, they later attended a National Geographic Channel session about the upcoming two-part
documentary Inside 9/11. The panel included recently retired New York City Fire Department battalion chief Richard Picciotto, who was buried alive when the North Tower of the World Trade Center crumbled on September 11, 2001. Critics learned that two National Geographic
employees were on American Airlines Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon that day.
This was a mesmerizing, at times chilling session. Another panelist, former CIA intelligence analyst and author Michael Scheuer, said
that "by March of 1999, [Osama] bin Laden should have been a smoldering memory. None of the
opportunities to make him into that were taken [by the United States government]."
Scheuer said he resigned last November because he thought, "the 9/11 Commission had
disastrously scapegoated the intelligence community for 9/11.
"The agency is the greatest place to work on Earth," Scheuer added. "I had no axe
to grind with the CIA.
"My officers here and abroad afforded this government 10 opportunities to kill
bin Laden in '98 and '99," he continued. "Did we warn people [about imminent attacks]? Excruciatingly, and all of those documents were passed
on to the 9/11 Commission and no one acted on it."
Inside 9/11, which meticulously documents the events that led to 9/11 beginning way
back in 1979, will undoubtedly be one of the most controversial and most newsworthy television programs of the year.
The final cable day of TCA wound down on a much different note, with an E! Networks
panel featuring Hugh Hefner and his three girlfriends, the stars of the upcoming E! reality series The Girls Next Door. This was the first TCA session in the long history of the organization in which a journalist asked a
panelist how he chooses which woman to share his bed each night and if he uses Viagra.
An evening screening of the new FX comedies Starved and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia followed. Surprisingly, many critics,
especially women, responded favorably to Starved, about three thirty-something heterosexual males and one lesbian who suffer from eating disorders. In the pilot Sam, the lead character, convinces a woman to perform
oral sex on him, eats food from a trashcan and weighs his penis on a food scale under a table in a diner (as do his buddies). His friend Adam, a bulimic police officer, accidentally
vomits on a homeless man.
In the second episode, the crude and psychotically self-centered Sam aggravates his
colonic hydro-therapist and suffers messy, humiliating consequences.
Perhaps the press was just too worn out by four days of non-stop cable network
presentations on a dizzying array of topics to properly process this ugly show.
