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Funeral For A Blerd: The End of Totally Biased

Wednesday last week, I felt a great disturbance in the Blerd Force, as if millions of black nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I feared something terrible had happened.

It was true. Totally Biased, the spunky brainchild of comedian W. Kamau Bell, was canceled. The final show aired the following night.

Woe is me. Woe is television. Woe is all of us. But, perhaps most importantly, woe is diversity.

Totally Biased, from the man who runs a standup comedy act titled “How To End Racism In About An Hour,” fit Bell’s vision exactly. Nerdy, bleeding-heart liberal, with pointed sarcasm clothed in bonhomie as he and his staff – populated with male and female, queer, Latino, black and Asian comedians and writers – took a comedy-wrapped wrecking ball to every kind of -ism you could think of.

In a world of lily-white late-night TV, Totally Biased was needed. Totally Biased was vital.

I watched with glee as Bell eviscerated stop-and-frisk policing that targeted black and Latino neighborhoods. I loved when he paired Unlocking the Truth, a band of three black tween boys, with Living Colour’s Vernon Reid. I snapped in agreement as he took mainstream media to task for being unable to drop its ignorance in the wake of the Sikh temple shooting in August 2012.

When you live as a minority – especially in terms of race or sexual orientation – you spend so much of your time living in a world that the majority doesn’t see or doesn’t think exists. Your experience, and the reactions that result from it, may be deemed unnecessary, irrational, bad-mannered. I remember that point when Janine Brito, a butch lesbian Latina on Totally Biased, jokingly chided the straight world for heaping praise on an active NBA player coming out, when lesbian athletes had been coming out for decades already.

And being a minority in a subculture? Some days, it’s a struggle. (It’s why this column even exists.)

That blerd pain, of being an outsider among outsiders, shined through in Indian-American Hari Kondabolu’s sojourn into the Steampunk World’s Fair. It can be tough to want to live in a reimagined history when there’s no time better for you racially than right-effing-now. Even five minutes from now is better for me as a black person. An Indian man praising a reborn Victorian age? Shyeah, right.

Talk about fresh and 21st century, eh? And it worked out pretty well in the show’s first season, on FX. 

Then, I guess the leaders at Fox Entertainment Group needed to throw some hurdles in the way.

Sure, after one moderately successful season, let’s turn a fresh show from weekly to four nights a week. Let’s move it to a new network that no one can find and everyone’s confused about, with no original programming around it, in a cutthroat time slot where the 18-34 demographic is totally split.

And let’s give the show two months to sink or swim.

Yep. Sounds exactly like something that gets done to the black guy. Sure, we’ll give you a shot, under the worst circumstances ever. Now catch up!

Seriously, Fox Entertainment, this was your plan?

Adding insult to injury, news of Totally Biased‘s cancellation came on the same day that reports emerged that Maya Rudolph, the last black female cast member on Saturday Night Live, was getting her own variety show on NBC.

All that said, there’s some hope among the vitriol, some inspiration amid the invective. It’s been interesting to see The Daily Show ramp up its on-air diversity in the past year to be more female and brown. Even they’re getting with the times.

Too bad that Fox Entertainment Group no longer felt like setting that new standard of 21st century America. Should’ve known that Totally Biased didn’t stand a chance. Shouldn’t have fallen for the okey-doke.

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