Alleged 'Cavemen' racism has producers eating Cro-Magnon

LOS ANGELES - The producers of ABC's new sitcom "Cavemen," based on a series of popular advertisements for the insurance company Geico, were ready to defend themselves against charges of rampant commercialism. But the charge that their show about put-upon Cro-Magnons in the modern world has racist undertones took them by surprise.

"I actually didn't know we would catch so much hell," writer Joe Lawson ruefully told a room full of highly critical critics at a gathering of North American television writers here Wednesday. "That's a pleasant surprise."

"Cavemen," which features shaggy Cro-Magnons trying to make their way through a hostile Homo sapiens world, won't even air until October but is already drenched in its second wave of controversy.

The first came in May when ABC announced that it was converting a handful of 30-second insurance commercials into a half-hour series. The "Cavemen" producers had to endure a seemingly endless round of cracks like the one on the satirical Weekend Update newscast on "Saturday Night Live," which announced NBC would counter with a new drama called "1-800-Mattress."

But as the show's pilot episode began circulating in Hollywood, so did a new round of criticism: that "Cavemen" trafficked in the very racial caricatures it was supposed to be lampooning. By depicting the Cro-Magnons as good dancers, great athletes and grand sexual partners, the show's detractors argued, "Cavemen" was using black stereotypes for cheap racist laughs.

"We finally get to laugh at all the stereotypes in the world directed at cavemen, without feeling guilty," wrote one Hollywood blogger. ABC's decision to reshoot the pilot didn't exactly help.

Wednesday's panel discussion here was the first time "Cavemen" producers have discussed the show in public, and they said people are reading too much into what they called a "fish out of water" story.

"Unfortunately, in our society, if you pick an offensive stereotype of any kind, it's going to bump into some ethnic group," said Mike Schiff, one of the executive producers. "Is the show about race relations? No. Is that a background to the show? Yes, of course."

Lawson, who wrote the original Geico commercials as well as the pilot, said that if the Cro-Magnons are an allegorical stand-in for anybody, it's not black people but outsiders.

"As human beings, we all have that need to fit in," he said. "It's really a show about acclimation more than anything, and that's something that everybody deals with, doesn't matter if you're a minority or not."

Not everybody - in fact, almost nobody - in the room was buying it, partly because some of the "Cavemen" story lines the producers offered as evidence that the show isn't about race (for instance, one of the cavemen concealing the fact that he's dating a Homo sapiens woman, for fear his Cro-Magnon friends won't like it) sounded like race was exactly what they were about.

The cavemen are "known for their athletic prowess, their sexual prowess, their dancing," complained one critic, to which director Josh Gordon deadpanned: "They're Jewish." *