By By Jesse Cataldo
“Garfield And Friends” successfully made the jump from the funny pages to the television screen, but no other comic characters followed-until now. The television adaption of “The Boondocks,” the social and racial flashpoint created by Aaron McGruder, debuted this fall on UPN.
The transition to TV is difficult because the two media have so little in common. Comic strips are one joke divided over three panels, a calculated bump-set-spike setup that doesn’t require much tweaking. TV shows on the other hand, are alive. They move fast, incorporate lots of jokes and most importantly, they don’t have borders.
For the transition to work, a strip has to break its formula, distill it to a few fine points and then transform these creations of pen and ink into living, breathing characters. Isolating those key facets and making a series out of them can be difficult, but this alone isn’t why “The Boondocks,” the social and racial flashpoint created by Aaron McGruder, stumbles. In the premiere at least, the comic strips unequally controversial humor just doesn’t seem to translate well to TV.
The things that make the comic version of The Boondocks such a hit, are its political conscience, outsider perspective and sheer nerve made it revolutionary in a world where Dagwood Bumstead has been making the same sandwich for 80 and the biggest problems involve The Lockhorns marital woes. But TV has this kind of shocking stuff in spades, so what makes the Boondocks special?
As far as the premiere went, not much. Any relevance the show aimed for quickly collapsed into a dreadful mélange of stock characters and hackneyed racial jokes. All of this plays out in a world inexplicably influenced by Japanese Anime, with bug-eyed characters roaming across flat but colorful backdrops. But is it funny?
Another no. With the n-word thrown around as a cheap comedic buzzword there’s little room for actual humor. The characters alone say it all. A white guy who acts like he’s black and privileged white men who love cheese. How’s that for incisive, cutting edge comedy?
But lo, just as “The Boondocks” appeared destined to sink to UPN worthy levels of neutered “urban humor,” the second episode somehow righted the ship. The characters, painted with the broad strokes of unexamined stereotype in the premiere, finally came into focus as fleshed out, realistic entities. The self-loathing black racist became, well, even more self-loathing, but somehow more of a person than a sputtering faucet for racial expletives. The grandfather, portrayed as a nervous, eager to please Uncle Tom in the premiere, actually defends his African-American culture. Huey, the miniature activist and protagonist, goes from unfocused knee-jerk radicalism (“Ronald Reagan is the devil”) to intelligent social commentary.
Beyond even the growth of the characters, the second episode found McGruder using the stereotypes he’d presented for more than just cheap laughs. Even more importantly, he approaches a controversial subject in a manner that only he could get away with.
Centering on the statutory rape trial of R. Kelly, the show draws laughs and social commentary from a variety of sources. McGruder mocks (while at the same time ruing) the self-destructiveness of the black community, obsession with celebrity and obnoxious abuse of the race card. In the conclusion, Kelly is acquitted despite mountains of evidence and the courtroom dissolves into an impromptu dance party with the singer performing atop a table. Huey, a magnified version of McGruder and the show’s lone (if slightly skewed) voice of reason, tries to talk sense into the crowd, but is shouted down and called a racist.
Just as in the premiere, when his attempts to offend the rich white crowd at a garden party were perceived as the precious ramblings of a child, Huey seems destined to be ignored. If he keeps up the biting humor he gave us in the second episode, McGruder won’t be likely to suffer the same fate.
Premiere: D+
Second Episode: B+