10 episodes of The Bernie Mac Show that capture the struggle of building anything fro

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/10-epi...e-build-213757

In Spike Lee’s 2000 film, The Original Kings Of Comedy, Bernie Mac (credited in the introduction to his stand-up for his recurring role in Moesha, as well as his regular status on Def Comedy Jam and his part in the Eddie Murphy/Martin Lawrence film Life) candidly goes on about how—unlike his Kings brothers—he doesn’t have his television show. In this moment, the comedian known for telling it “like it T-I-is,” does exactly that:

It’s an anecdote that comes along in nearly every think piece on The Bernie Mac Show, but it’s still relevant. Bernie then pleads with the “white folks” behind the Hollywood curtain:

The humor in the plea comes from the fact that, back in 2000, the place one would expect a show from any of the Kings Of Comedy would be one of those three, “lesser” networks (USA would begin its “Characters Welcome” rebrand with the introduction of Monk in 2002). Even though DL Hughley’s sitcom, The Hughleys, started off on ABC, it spent its third and fourth seasons on UPN.

Bernie Mac finally got his own television show by the fall of the following year. He even got it on Fox, one of the major networks. Still, Mac was right about the other part of his comment, referring to the television landscape being scared of him. After all, no one expected a family sitcom about an upper-middle class black family to regularly include a line about busting a child’s head “’til the white meat shows” (a line that came from Mac’s Kings Of Comedy set about how he would “**** a kid up”). The Cosby Show and even The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air made sure of that.

Plus, as far as sitcoms premises go, The Bernie Mac Show had a decisively dark one that wouldn’t typically be found in a network television sitcom: After his sister is sent to court-mandated rehab for her crack addiction, Bernie and his wife Wanda (Kellita Smith) take in her kids (two girls and a boy) to keep them out of the foster-care system. As if that’s not enough of a kick to the heart, the show makes it clear that despite two other siblings (played by Niecy Nash and Glynn Turman), Bernie is the only one willing to step up for parenting duties.

In The Original Kings Of Comedy, Bernie tells a joke that inspired the series’ premise, which was actually a mix of situations. After their daughter had grown up and left the house, Bernie and his wife Rhonda took in their 16-year-old niece and her baby. The concept of the three kids came from a friend of Bernie’s who had to take care of her drug-addicted sister’s children.

Characters Bernie and Wanda Mac literally become parents overnight to three kids who have emotional baggage from their less-than-ideal upbringing: 13-year-old Vanessa (Camille Winbush) thinks she’s old enough to know better than Bernie, Wanda, and their rules; 8-year-old Jordan (Jeremy Suarez) is a crying, asthmatic mess; and “Baby Girl” Bryana (Dee Dee Davis) is too wide-eyed and impressionable for her own good. What follows is a battle between old-school and new-school mentality that constantly goes to the extremes in the case of the former “school.” (Though the new school brings up a lot of questions about whether or not Jordan is a sociopath/the anti-Christ over the course of the series.) Bernie Mac’s hard-edged machismo (despite being a Hollywood actor/comedian living in Encino and no longer being in the ’hood) makes him a no-nonsense type of parent. The problem is, these kids know it’s nonsense more often than not, which puts a wrench in Bernie’s plans of “my way or the highway.” In Bernie’s mind and Bernie’s mind alone, the kids are workers in the “Bernie Mac factory, or Mactory, if you will,” and the only parenting book he ever needs is the Bible.

Then again, for all of Bernie Mac’s posturing, Jordan confirms in the fifth and final season (in the episode “For Whom The Belt Tolls”) that Bernie’s never once used a belt on the kids:

Like Black-ish, the latest Larry Wilmore executive-produced sitcom (Wilmore created—not co-created—The Bernie Mac Show) to hit the airwaves, The Bernie Mac Show was instantly favorably compared to The Cosby Show. Clearly, the difference in parenting styles between the the Huxtables and Bernie Mac (Wanda was usually more of an easy-going, “just happy to be here” parent) was like night and day. The Bernie Mac Show was an innovative spin on the newly created nuclear family that didn’t involve marriage (The Brady Bunch, Step By Step) or adding a kid to an existing married-with-children unit (Fresh Prince, also The Brady Bunch). But Bernie and Cosby still had common ground in their depictions of family life, both in the context of black (and upper-middle class) families, and families in general.

The Bernie Mac Show offered not just a new attitude and approach to the family sitcom, but the sitcom overall. Mac braved the treacherous new waters of parenting with the biggest sounding board of all: America. In the first season, Bernie Mac started every episode in his den, talking about parenting to those who chose to tune in. He wasn’t just talking to the camera for the sake of talking to the camera; Bernie Mac was inviting viewers to have a conversation with him (a staple of Larry Wilmore’s particular brand of humor, from his sitcom work to his upcoming late-night program, The Nightly Show). This conversation with America involved parenting, marriage, family, life. It wasn’t the cool-guy-approach-to-life device (Zack Morris, Frank Underwood): Despite how suave the Mac Man always claimed to be, he often employed this technique because he knew he was in over his head. He wanted to know that he was doing parenting right and not going to screw his kids up for good.

The Bernie Mac Show took the premise of the family sitcom—typically a multi-camera, exasperated joke factory with schmaltz on top, even at its best—and made the genre its own. The single-camera comedy stylistically felt more at home on cable (right down to the shaky handheld camera style), even though the subject matter and presentation weren’t necessarily too hot for TV. In its first season (and even later on), the show would often stick with a simple one plot structure, with no B-plots or C-plots to pad the episodes. And throughout the run of the series, the show would have a surprising amount of open-ended episode conclusions, showing just how real the show could be, even at its most sitcom-like: Conflict resolution in a family (or in life) doesn’t always take place in the span of a half-hour, and kids don’t always learn from their mistakes after the first or even fifth time. Back when he wrote for Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker would praise The Bernie Mac Show every chance he got. Tucker called the show the “best new comedy” of fall 2001 and also referred to it as “today’s Cosby.”

The show’s bucking of typical sitcom traditions (whether those traditions belonged to family, black, or star-vehicle sitcoms) led to network interference. The Bernie Mac Show won an Emmy for writing in its first season, but by the middle of its second, Larry Wilmore was fired for creative differences with the network. Fox reportedly clashed with Wilmore over the show not being enough like a typical sitcom, for not making the show (which was fearless in its depiction of the realness of its episodic situations) “funny enough,” and for not having more than one plot in most of its episodes. In the case of the latter, the inclusion of unnecessary subplots led to a B-plot in a season-three episode in which Wanda was obsessed with finding five pool chairs together.

Then came the onslaught of guest cameos, capitalizing on Bernie’s celebrity and who was hot at the time. Matt Damon, Lucy Lawless, Ice Cube, Ellen DeGeneres, Snoop Dogg (not as himself), Flavor Flav, Dr. Phil, Ashton Kutcher, Triple H, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin—the list went on an on, whether the cameos made sense in the context of the show or not. The ratings fell constantly after the second season, when the show began its hop, skip, and jump across the Fox schedule. In the span of just a year, the series had had three different showrunners (Larry Wilmore, Michael Borkow, Peter Aronson), which made for a confusing creative direction and question of what the network really wanted from the show and the people it put at the helm.

Bernie Mac also could get repetitive in a way that made it appear as though no one would ever learn anything. The best example comes in the form of the Vanessa character and her constant lying, sneaking around, and spending her aunt and uncle’s money. Still, the show wasn’t completely tone deaf, even if its characters and the network could be.

Even with the network interference and declining ratings, The Bernie Mac Show never fully lost its heart and soul. It never lost Bernie Mac (both the actor and the spirit of the character). It never lost the built family of Bernie, Wanda, the kids, and America. The show was essentially living a behind-the-scenes struggle to grow while it told the story of a human struggle to grow as well. But even as the show changed over its five-season, 104-episode run, it remained all about that relationship between Bernard “Bernie Mac” McCullough, Wanda, those doggone kids, and the country they lived in.

Here are 10 episodes of The Bernie Mac Show that shone a light on that struggle and journey of building something out of nothing: