Twice now I have seen examples of extreme stupidity on Black Entertainment Television, and I wonder how they are allowed to slip by.
First, in an ‘Entertainment Tonight’-type program the host said that a film was based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Three Musketeers’. The stupidity of this exists on so many levels. For one thing, anyone with basic knowledge of history would know that saying Shakespeare wrote ‘The Three Musketeers’ would be like saying Mark Twain wrote ‘Neuromancer’. Anybody with a high-school education should know that Shakespeare wrote plays and poems, not novels. And most importantly, Alexander Dumas is one of the most famous BLACK authors of all time! This station which is supposed to promote black culture is giving credit for one of their greater literary achievements to a white guy! What’s next, Emily Dickinson’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’?
More recently I saw another example of stupidity, though this is more of an example of serious lack of proofreading than ignorance. BET is heavily advertising the fact they are going to be showing several black-oriented films in coming weeks. There is a commercial that shows clips from a number of these films, with the titles showing up in big white letters and then fading into the distance ala the beginning of Star Wars. Last night I could have sworn I saw the word ‘prayer’ misspelled in ‘Reggie’s Prayer’, but assumed that I had experienced a brain fart or temporary dyslexia. I was watching again tonight and I saw the same commercial twice. In big letters it says ‘Reggie’s Paryer’. TWICE. This was something that should have been noticed early, I’m sure more than a little production time was used in superimposing those words and then having them fade into the distance, it’s not like a misspelling in a news blurb or something like that. That it got broadcast the first time is seriously messed up, that they continue to show this same commercial a couple of times every hour is ridiculous.
Which show was it that got the Musketeers author wrong and which host/personality was it?
I would write them with the correction if I had this information.
I don’t know how BET survives. I have yet to see anything on there worth the button press it would take to get to it. Same thing with Lifetime and pretty much every other niche market channel. I wish I could get rid of them all just because of the time it takes me to scroll past them when I’m looking for something to watch.
I can’t remember the show that had the Shakespeare mixup on it - it was at least a year ago (the movie they were pushing was Richard Pryor’s ‘The Three Muscatels’). The funny thing is I hardly ever watch BET, so the fact I keep seeing these dumb things makes me think that they are extremely common on that network. The only reason I have watched it two nights in a row is my wife likes one of the stand-up comedian shows they run.
I haven’t seen anything on the same scale of stupidity as those other stations…you wouldn’t be saying this because those stations have a lot of shows with black casts on them, would you? That’s about the only thing I see that they have in common with BET (which is mostly music videos and infomercials).
If you have a VCR, or a fairly modern TV, you should be able to get rid of channels you don’t want to watch. My TV’s and VCR’s now scroll right past Spanish language channels, sports channels, religious channels, public access, BET, and the evil that is MSNBC. Check your manual or your programming menu for “Add/Remove Channels”.
But don’t you dare take away my Lifetime – sometimes only a really cheesy movie, or an episode of “Murphy Brown” or “The Golden Girls” can cheer me up. And last weekend I saw a beautiful movie Susan Sarandon/Sam Shepherd movie called “Safe Passage” on Lifetime. But if it’s not your cup of tea, by all means, remove it from your lineup.
Can anyone explain the lack of variety in programming on television stations narrowcasting at a particular ethnic group? From my television viewing experience, the following seems to consist of 95% of all programming on the following stations:
BET (African-American) - music videos, infomercials, awards shows.
I know in the case of Spanish-language television, they probably do that because novellas (Spanish soap operas, different in that most have a limited run and actually have a plot), variety shows, and soccer are all very popular in Mexico and other Latin American countries, and they are hard to find on American TV. These stations aren’t aimed at Hispanics in general - they are for Spanish-speakers who haven’t been totally Americanized yet.
I know nothing of ART or Zee, as we don’t have those channels in our area. I’d probably like the Indian channels, their movies are fun.
When we first got BET it was mostly music videos. Made sense since not much black music was being played in MTV. They have diversified, and I’m not sure what market they are trying to play to.
I have digital cable. I can block channels but when I do a scan of what is on (on screen tv guide sorta’ dealie) those channels still show up. When you consider that I have well over 900 channels (including DMX and PPV) to scroll past and I have to scroll past over 300 that I will never ever watch it can be somewhat time consuming just to scroll from channel 13 (KPDX) to 558 (HBO-W) to see if OZ is a rerun. There are a good 100-200 channels in between those two that I have no interest in. Blocking them just means I need to enter a code to view them with a digital cable box which I have to use to get all my channels. W/o the box all I can get is basic extended cable which in my area does not give me all the HBO options or Sci-Fi or all the Discovery and History channels. I wish we had a “Nerds Package” that only had Hist/Disc/HBO/ACT/Sci-Fi and the Comedy Channel and basic local. I would take that one in a minute.
Well, sorta. There seem to have been a lot of (extremely) short-lived shows (sitcoms, mostly) to have come through those three stations over the past year or two. These shows were generally overhyped. The fact that a lot of them (not all) consisted of mostly a black cast could be coincidental, but it struck me as being that the producers were relying on the presence of “ethnicity” to carry the show, instead of actually trying to be entertaining.
I have nothing against “ethnic diversity”, but if the only selling point a show has is an “ethnic cast”, I find that incredibly stupid. (Note: The key word is “only”).
I do not watch BET!
I feel sorry for my cousins and relatives who watch BET, if “The Three Musketeers” has now been written by Shakespeare.
I hope Viacom spends some money on BET, since it has been proven Bob Johnson (Owner, sold BET to run an airline, dear LORD) wallet cannot be opened without aid of dynamite. What else can explain a network that operates only six days a week (with an excessive assist by mind rotting music videos and long cancelled-short lived sitcoms.)
Much of these mistakes, goofs and what not (I’ve stopped noticing when I turned 10) can probably be explained because they are flat broke. Bob Johnson makes a profit all right, but that’s because he spends the bare minimum required to keep the network on the air. And he poo-poo any compliant that he runs a shitty network.
Goddammit I really really want to start a black network to run this atrocity out of business.
SPOOFE, I think there’s a slight difference between airing crappy sitcoms, and screwing up basic facts and having no one to prevent this.
Anyway the WB and UPN have a whole host of crappy shows starring white people that get cancelled before season end. The same for Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC for that matter. Also they both have good minority cast shows that have lasted for quite a while. Moesha for example (originally pitched to CBS) has aired on UPN since 1996! The Steve Harvey Show has been on the WB since that year too. They rank near the top 10 among black viewers.
I’ve noticed something that’s pretty annoying on BET. On Comedy Showcase (I believe that’s the name of the program), whenever a stand-up comic begins making fun of whites (which is rather frequently) the camera will zoom in on a white audience member to show their reaction. Since the crowd looks to be more than 99% black, I’m pretty sure that they pick out the white guy’s ahead of time so they are ready to zoom in on him when the white jokes start. My wife watches the show a lot, and whenever they start making fun of whites we start counting the seconds until the ‘white guy shot’.
I’m not sure what the motivation for this is. I guess it could be that they are doing it to show that they aren’t really offending white people, because the white guys are usually laughing too (though in one case where the comic was telling a joke revolving around the fact white people don’t know how to pray, the ‘white guy shot’ showed a guy who looked offended), but I have NEVER seen this before when other ethnicities are being made fun of. Last night one comic did this rather long routine which was based on his statement that ‘white people are stupid because you never see a black guy on ‘When Animals Attack’’ and they did about 4 shots of this same white guy, probably the only one in the audience (this same white guy shows up on other episodes a lot, too).
Sterling, what are you trying to prove? That since not ALL of the “primarily black” shows sucked, NONE of them sucked?
I know that there are very excellent shows with a strong cast consisting of talented black people. I never even hinted at that. But the fact remains that there have been a good number of shows that relied on the fact that a lot of the cast members were black. A show with such a weak base for entertainment, in my opinion, sucks.
It’s not a matter of “the actors are black”. It’s a matter of “the show’s poorly written”. If I saw a show which relied on its cast being white, I’d come to the same conclusions (admittedly, I can’t think of any examples at the moment… but it IS 2:30 AM). I like my entertainment to be fucking entertaining, not “ethnically diverse”. A show can include all ethnicities without sacrificing entertainment value (as your own previous examples prove).
Or maybe I just don’t like sitcoms… I find myself as turned off to shows like “Nikki” as I was to “The Steve Harvey Show” (yes, I know both shows are probably relatively popular… I’m not trying to claim as such).
Anyway, I’m going to bed. I’m sure somebody can find a can of worms or two somewhere in that post whilst I slumber.
I liked the following programs with primarily black cast members: Fresh Prince(even after they switched moms), Living Single, The Cosby Show (until the last couple of seasons. I think it started to suck the last two or three seasons), Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and In Living Color (first two seasons). Thats pretty much it for primarily black cast programs that I have enjoyed. It’s funny to me to notice after making this list that all of the shows I could think of were comedy focused. I cannot think of a single “black oriented” progrom outseide of the comedy genre that I have enjoyed.
I think this is a whole signe of niche marketing. Larry Niven once spoke about the “Sci-Fi Ghetto” he had heard mention of when he began writing Speculative Fiction. He said that a lot of writers did not want to have the Sci/Fi label on their books because that nearly automatically prevented them from best seller status and critical acclaim (making note the Harlan Ellison formally abdicated his status as a Sci-Fi writer when he published “Boys from Brazil”). But he also noted that there were few enough sci-fi writers out there that while it would pretty much guaranteed you couldn;t get rich writing the stuff, because there were (at one time) so few Sci-Fi books being published that the people who enjoyed and identified with Science Fiction would buy ANYTHING with a Sci-Fi label on it so even a marginal writer whou would sink in any other writing field could at least earn a living in Sci-Fi (he made note of one writer who had published one book as a western and then pretty much changed all the guns to “ray guns” and carriages to “rocket cars” and changed the name to “space marshal” or something like that and re-published the book in Sci-Fi. His book sold.). My point is that there is, at this time very little programming catering to some niche markets and because of that pretty much any piece of shit on the air will have viewers but, just like in Sci-Fi, this is probably going to change in a generation or so (maybe sooner).
I would tend to agree tha there are more shity black shows out there, just like there are more shitty gay shows and women’s shows and what have you. Niche marketing is almost a sure bet and so all the shity writers are initially going to be attracted to those markets as they open up.
Also take note those og you who think this is a “black thing”: The majority of “black shows” out there don’t only hir black writers, they are forbidden from doing this by the writers union. The people writing this shit are black,white,and everything in-between.
Also note that while I think the majority of nicke programming suchs ass, I also think we can agree that the majority of ALL programming suchs ass as well. It’s just a matter of degrees and if you have 50 “white” shows to choose from with a ass sucking ration of 1 in 5 then chances are you can find ten decent shows to watch but if you only have three “black” shows on with the same ratio or even slightly worse you may have to wait a day before something worth watching comes on your set.
I say you should all watch the History channel and the Discovery channel Physics and thermodynamics are colorblind and Hannibal was black.
I’ve dubbed BET to be BrainDead Entertainment Television. I loathe BET. I hate the fact that there is a BET. Don’t even get me started on BET Starz (aaaargh)!
It seems that whenever I land on BET it’s during a stand-up comedy show. The people I’ve seen have got to be the worst excuses for comics ever! I cringe whenever they start on their 'White people are x because of y. They should all take lessons from Chris Rock. He’s a bright, funny, equal-opportunity comedian!
Shit, I need to find my copy of “Playgrounds of the Mind” by Larry Niven. I was quoting from memory and I’m certain it was Ellison and I know it was a year he won a Hugo award because Niven made a point of mentioning Ellison and his award and his formal announcement that he was “leaving the sci-fi ghetto” and I’m also certain he mentioned Boys from Brazil as well but maybe I have that out of context. I’ll find it and repost today if I can.
Same book has “Man of Steel Woman of Kleenex” which is completely off topic but funny as hell and you can find it online if you do a search for that name.
be back later with the results of my search (I really need to get some damned book cases!)
