The year: 1998. The crime: The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfieffer.
Exactly ten years ago, United Paramount Network (UPN) was still the newest little engine that could, trying to make its way to the top of the Nielsen ratings. It’d only been around three years, its first broadcast having debuted in 1995, and the only semi-popular show the network had managed to air was Star Trek: Voyager. Long before the network started successfully courting Black audiences with shows like Girlfriends, One on One, Everybody Hates Chris, All of Us, and The Game (for those of us who ain’t too high-brow to consider those shows “successes”), UPN trotted out two long-forgotten, but widely criticized sitcoms that garnered serious backlash from Black viewers.
The first was 1996’s Homeboys in Outer Space, starring Flex Alexander (who’d later reappear on two UPN sitcoms: Girlfriends–before being replaced with “the better Darnell,” Khalil Kain–and One on One) and Darryl Bell (best known as Ron from A Different World). If you don’t remember Homeboys in Outer Space, consider yourself lucky. Marketed as a “parody” of sci-fi shows, the program saw its main two characters flying a winged car through the solar system (presumably because they couldn’t be admitted to NASA’s space program and/or because they couldn’t afford a real spacecraft) while taking navigation directions via videoconference from a neck-rolling chick named Loquacia. This was was so bad that the NAACP hopped aboard its protest wagon, lambasting Homeboys until it fizzled due to low ratings, about six episodes in.
You’d think that’d be enough to make UPN reconsider its “humor” marketed toward Black audiences. But just two seasons after the Homeboys debacle, the network trumped itself with The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfieffer (and no, the P wasn’t silent). With Chi McBride in the title role, Diary‘s premise was something straight out of a pitch meeting with Michael Rapaport in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. Desmond, an English butler gets “kicked out of England” due to an accusation that he cheated at cards. As a result, he’s shipped to the U.S. on a slave ship (You read right.), where he serves as a house Negro for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
I don’t have to tell you this was canceled after just one month, right?
But let’s just set aside UPN’s early war crimes against the African American. Let’s ignore Flex and Darryl Bell, mediocre actors at best, and just cut right to the chase: What in blue blazes was Chi McBride doing anywhere near a train wreck like Desmond Pfieffer? Yeah, this was pre-Boston Public, his second-longest paycheck to date with 81 episodes logged before cancellation, and sure, jobs for the Black man who makes Hollywood his home are paltry at best. But the brother had already been in What’s Love Got to Do With It?, Hoodlum, and his absolute longest paycheck-producing show to date, The John Larroquette Show (He logged 84 episodes between 1993-1998). Was he really hurtin’? And if so, how badly? How delirious from hunger or close to eviction do you have to be before affecting a British accent and playing a Civil War slave in a sitcom seems like a good idea?
I don’t know. I was salty with Chi for years (I say, years!) after Desmond was canceled. I’d never forget and I was slow to forgive. I avoided Boston Public altogether so as not to have to see him. When I caught Roll Bounce on cable, I rolled my eyes as he teared up in a dramatic scene with Bow Wow.
Then I was blindsided by last season’s The Nine. Canceled before its time, the ABC serial suspense show charted the individual and collective traumas of nine hostages and two criminals in a 52-hour bank robbery standoff. Chi played the bank manager, Malcolm Jones, a literal and figurative patriarch who couldn’t let go of his unfounded guilt regarding the incident. He tempered the part with such vulnerability, hope, gentleness, rage, frustration, and gravitas that I had to start coming around.
Against my will, I started to consider Chi’s bid for parole from Sellouts’ Purgatory.
Oh, it wasn’t an open and shut case. Not with Let’s Go To Prison and First Sunday on dude’s filmography. But along came Pushing Daisies. If you didn’t catch this show prior to the WGA strike, hit up abc.com and catch on. You won’t get to see the first few episodes, but no matter where you jump in, you’ll witness the awesomeness that is Chi McBride’s wry wit, impeccable comic timing, and spot-on line delivery. And if you peep the last ep to air before the strike, you’ll get a glimpse at how quickly he can go from side-splitting to heartstring-tugging.
The moral of the story: Yes, you can overcome colossal lapses in judgment that offend large segments of the Black community. But only if you’re all kinds of amazing — like Chi McBride.
Stacia L. Brown is an adjunct professor in Grand Rapids, MI. She hates irrefutable black truths.
